Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
We are here today because the opposition has demanded that this meeting be conducted urgently, that we urgently consider the matter of the travel that occurred over the holiday break, when we saw people sleeping on the floor of airports, when we saw people being shuttled around, in foreign countries, from hotel lobby to hotel lobby, when we saw people trapped on trains, etc. This followed, of course, the disastrous summer travel season, when people were also separated from their baggage, when they were sleeping on airport floors, when the system completely failed. We were promised, quite frankly, by the Liberal minister, that these matters were addressed, that he had it under control, that the broken system had been fixed.
Clearly it has not been fixed. There are still massive problems. Quite frankly, I think we in the Conservative Party are tired of hearing Liberal ministers say that things are unacceptable when they have the power to make change.
That's what we want to get out of this meeting here today. We want the minister to appear before us, to answer questions about how he allowed the system to stay broken, how he allowed airports to fail to serve their customers, how airlines failed to communicate with their customers, how once again we had the same failures, in many cases, with baggage delivery, etc., and communications nightmares in which passengers were an afterthought, quite frankly.
We need this committee to do some serious work and to hold people accountable, starting with the minister. That's why we believe, as was said in the letter that we sent to the chair to demand this meeting, that the minister should appear for two hours to discuss what he has done and what he hasn't done. Quite frankly, whatever he has done has not gotten the job done. We need to get to the bottom of this here at this committee. We are the body that is charged with holding the department, the minister, accountable on behalf of all parliamentarians and on behalf of all Canadians.
We intend to take that work seriously. These hearings we have proposed should be conducted seriously. They should be conducted thoroughly. We should make sure that we don't simply scratch the surface here but that we once and for all get to the bottom of why this has happened now for two travel seasons in a row and what can be done to prevent it from happening in the future.
Quite frankly, Canadians deserve better. It's up to this group to make sure we get the answers we deserve. That, again, starts with the minister coming to answer for his department and to answer for his actions. That will be the focus we want to see going forward.
In addition, we want to hear from not just the airlines. They do have to answer, but so does every other part of the federally regulated system. We need to hear from airports. We need to hear from the Canadian Transportation Agency, which currently has a 30,000-person backlog. It takes 18 months to have a complaint heard from passengers who are experiencing problems with airlines. We need to talk to VIA Rail and CN Rail about how they are going to address the concerns that were raised with respect to the delays that happened with those entities. This isn't just about airline passenger protection; we need to talk about other modes of transportation that were impacted as well.
We don't intend to allow the buck to be passed, to have more tweets about how things are unacceptable. We need to make change. We need to demand change. We need to demand accountability. That's what we're here to demand today.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.