I want to welcome Ms. Lantsman back to this committee.
There is so much in her remarks that deserves to be unpacked. I understand the political interest in conflating what happened last summer with what happened this Christmas. I think Canadians understand that they are two separate situations.
Having said that, our government and I personally have been very proactive since the summer. She talked about the summit I held, which was not the only thing done from the summer until now. She talked about communications with Sunwing. I can assure her and all my colleagues that, first of all, I have been briefed regularly and daily—in fact, sometimes hourly— on what's happening. My officials and my office have been in touch with Sunwing daily, and sometimes more than once a day, to ensure that we get updated and that we remind Sunwing of their obligations towards their customers and to Canadians.
Mr. Chair, when I was here on December 5, just over a month ago, committee members were asking me what lessons we had learned from the summer. I was glad to share our work plan. I did talk about the plan to improve the passenger bill of rights. I talked about the plan to modernize security screening. I talked about our plan to improve the authorities that airports have, and I talked about improving the authorities and the tools that the Canadian Transportation Agency needs. This is ongoing work. It is extremely serious, and we've been proactive.
I wish that when the Conservatives were in power, they had implemented a passenger bill of rights, because today we would have been in a much better position to improve and enhance the rules. We are where we are. As I said in my opening remarks, the government accepts its responsibility and is working to ensure that lessons learned will be benefited from and passengers' rights protected. However, it's important to remind Canadians that we have rights for passengers. In fact, Sunwing violated those rights, so the issue is not only that we didn't have rules.