Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our witnesses.
During this pandemic, Canadians have been hurt financially in so many ways. I hear from constituents all the time who've lost their income, who are in financial distress and having trouble paying their bills. Now, a relatively modest number of Canadians were in a very specific situation where they bought airplane tickets, some of these very expensive in the thousands of dollars, from airlines that up until the pandemic were doing very well.
The airlines are huge corporations that in 2019 were celebrating billions of dollars in profits, and had access to billions of dollars in liquidity. We're being told by the government that these Canadians, who purchased these airfares, are not able to get a refund, because the government is concerned that the airline corporations are going to go bankrupt.
You're putting citizens in a situation where they're essentially involuntary or unwilling creditors to these huge corporations. To either Mr. Streiner or Mr. Hanson, how could you possibly construe this as a fair situation?