Mr. Chairman, I'm a little disappointed that if we were to choose that option.... I'll tell you that we presented a couple of amendments for the purposes of clarifying what we think is the intent of the bill. They go to some of the concerns that have been expressed by members, by stakeholders, and others.
It is our view that the legislation already addresses something in the legal environment with which we are seized as a country. We operate in the same airspace and in the same markets as the European Union and North America. It is clear that there is already a body of law that addresses the issues we are asked to address in this legislation. Those laws are ones that our carriers must abide by when they travel beyond our own domestic market.
It seems rather strange to us that we would hold the carriers to a standard that is clearly higher than the one they have to follow in the domestic environment. Nonetheless, to address some of the concerns—because we did not receive any specific documentation from the carriers in respect of this law—we proposed amendments that, in our estimation, are not inconsistent with some of the others that are put forward.
They go as follows, Mr. Chairman. They go to define a little more clearly and more specifically the extraordinary circumstances. In fact, they go so far as to replicate the language preferred by KLM and Delta Air LInes when they went to courts to present what they meant by extraordinary circumstances. Second, they address the issues of the amount of liability, in order to get away from the red herring of suggesting that people can actually turn this into a business enterprise by booking a $99 ticket and then reaping $500 in benefits, hoping that some things will go wrong. It's an interesting kind of focus on how to buy lottery tickets.
Our amendments address those two issues: to put fines into a particular context of reasonableness, and to place Bill C-310 in a jurisprudence that is already existent.
For us to consider that we not report this to the House or even allow the House to reflect on this once more would seem a bit excessive. So we wouldn't support that motion.