Thank you for that question.
I heard what was said at a meeting with Air Transat last week. Clearly, the situation is really complex. After two days of discussion, I never managed to find out who was responsible for that situation.
I think it's fair to say that the passenger doesn't really want to see a lot of finger pointing, that the passenger wants people to take responsibility.
My sense is that our members from coast to coast strive to positively influence and control the experience of passengers—to the best ability that they can—travelling through their airports, even though they don't necessarily have direct control or influence over a lot of those areas. Certainly what happened was out of the ordinary.
I think it's fair to expect airports to have plans. Major airports do have plans on how they handle irregular operations. I think it's also fair to expect that everybody will communicate and coordinate with each other and strive to do better on an ongoing basis.
I'm not going to speak for the Ottawa airport—I'll let them speak for themselves—but I heard my colleagues there speak to what they had in terms of the buses, the water bottles, and the snacks that were available. A lot of that came from learning from previous experiences.
With airports, airlines, Nav Canada, ground handlers, refuellers, we don't need government to tell us to talk to each other to work better. We do that all the time. When there's an incident like this, everybody gets together and asks, what happened here, where did we drop the ball, and how can we do it better next time?
It was a very unfortunate incident. Certainly aviation is very complex. There are a lot of players involved.