Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to begin by saying that we co-signed the letter calling for this urgent meeting of the transport committee because, like so many other MPs, we were receiving communications from constituents who were stuck in incredibly difficult and stressful situations over the holidays.
I thought I would set the stage for my remarks by reading a brief excerpt from one of the emails I received from the mother of a constituent whose son was stuck in Mexico and unable to get home. She writes to me that, “He is getting no reliable information from Sunwing as to how long this may last. Every day he has to check out of the hotel and wait in the lobby to see if he is included in the passenger list that will be provided a room for the next night. He is frantic. From my end, I have made countless phone calls to Sunwing and have not been able to talk to anyone. There is no reliable information and no communication from Sunwing representatives. He cannot afford to book a return flight with another airline and then fight with Sunwing to get his money back. I know there are certain rights he has, but they seem to be difficult to access and our government does not seem interested in their constituents' dilemmas. He is not alone, there are hundreds of Canadians in the same situation. Something has to be done for these people. I am a senior on pensions that are very limited. I cannot afford to fly him home either. Please, please help.”
This person ended up having to fly her son home on another airline at huge personal expense, and this is one of many stories that I believe this committee needs to get to the bottom of. We obviously need to hear from the airlines and from the different parties in the transportation system that failed to uphold even the most basic level of customer care that Canadians deserve. Most important, we need to hear from the Minister of Transport, the person who is charged with overseeing Canada's transportation system and upholding the rights of Canadian passengers.
We know from the work of the transport committee—and I'll note that the committee is currently studying the issue of air passenger rights—that Canada's approach to air passenger rights is deeply flawed and that from the very beginning it has fallen short of the model set by the European Union and others around the world. This needs to change.
We now have an admission from the minister that the system isn't working. We have a backlog of over 33,000 complaints in front of the CTA, and we have thousands of passengers across Canada who, since the beginning of the pandemic, have faced delays and cancellations that have upended their lives and cost them money and convenience.
We need to situate this discussion not only in the context of the travel chaos that happened over the holidays and get answers about when the minister intervened, what actions he took and how the airlines allowed this to get so bad and failed to deliver basic customer care. We need to address the larger context as well, and that context is the fact that we have a failed system in Canada for dealing with passenger rights.
We have a clear road map for making changes to the legislation and the regulations, which would allow us to catch up with the example set by the European Union, and we need to know from the minister when he plans to act, when he plans to table those changes. After all, we are just a few months after the last revisions to air passenger protections in this country, and now we're facing another delay in getting the change that Canadians so rightly deserve.
Mr. Chair, I very much look forward to Thursday's meeting. I look forward to holding this government accountable. I look forward to getting answers on behalf of the hundreds of Canadians who were stuck in such difficult situations over the holidays. I hope, through the work of this committee, that we can improve Canada's air passenger protections once and for all so that no one has to face these kinds of experiences again.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.