Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
If the bill were in place and the passengers were diverted to the airport here in Ottawa, they would be receiving compensation for the length of time they were held on that airplane beyond one hour. So the theory would be that the airport and the airline would get the people off the plane within the hour so they wouldn't be paying compensation.
Let me just explain something. Maybe this will answer Mr. Laframboise's previous question.
In the insurance business we have a principle known as subrogation, and the bottom line here is that if a car driver drives into your fence at your house, your insurance company pays the claim. They're happy to do it. But a few months later, what they do is they subrogate against the guilty party. They find out who ran into your fence and they go after the insurance company that represents the car driver.
All I'm saying should have happened in Vancouver last year, as an example, is that the airline should have simply paid the bills, whatever was necessary, as WestJet did, to take care of those customers and to get them on their way, and then worry about who's going to pay afterward. An insurance company would simply subrogate against who they saw as the guilty party, which would be the airport that didn't clean the runway, right? When the airline was asked about that, this is what the airline council said: we don't want to hamper our great relations with the airport, so we're prepared to let the passengers suffer and let them try to find hotels in the middle of a snowstorm, because we don't want to hamper our good relationship with the airport that forgot to plow the right runway.
I'm saying that you take care of your passengers first and then you subrogate after that and chase the responsible parties. That's how it works in the insurance business and that's how it could work here too.