That would be very helpful. It would be extremely helpful to the CTA, which is not actively engaged in arbitrating consumer complaints.
I want to move now to Mr. French.
Woody, I remember your being extremely vocal and very proud that the Government of Canada, the Conservative Party and its members, embraced my motion, M-465, calling on the government to bring forward binding, robust, enhanced consumer protection for airline passengers. I said that this legislation should be modelled on U.S. legislation before the Congress and as well on legislation passed by the Parliament of the European Union. This European legislation is currently in force for every flight—including Air Canada, WestJet, and Air Transat—that enters the European Union's air space and lands at European aerodromes.
In the last 48 hours, we learned that your enthusiasm for the government's support for my motion was, quite frankly, very insincere. We learned that the former Minister of Transport, Lawrence Cannon, while he was professing to support the motion, was actively engaging lobbyists to undermine, to thwart, that very effort.
Mr. French, just turn around for a second and look around you. Do you see most of those people there? Some are journalists, some are from the Department of Transport, but a lot of them are lobbyists. They're here to make sure that what you and I and others set out to do—protect airline passengers—doesn't happen.
How does that make you feel when you consider that you put this forward as an idea, joined by many people? You have the Federation of Canadian Municipalities on board. You have parliamentarians on board. You have a number of different consumer groups actively engaged in this.
The Minister of Transport, himself, e-mailed lobbyists telling them he was going to pretend to support this, but asking them to do everything in their power, making use of the airlines' resources, to ensure that this gets killed. And yet the minister voted for it anyway. Apparently he voted for bad public policy.
And now airline companies are coming to us and asking us not to vote for a bad public policy.
What would happen if we simply followed the minister's own lead?