Thank you, Chair.
First of all, welcome to all of our witnesses today. There have been very interesting suggestions and testimony for sure. I can understand some of the perspectives.
Flying back and forth between Newfoundland and Labrador and Ottawa is not an easy task, as you're never guaranteed to arrive as scheduled. You often encounter storms between Halifax and Ottawa, and there is no direct flight. Many of my fellow Newfoundlanders were stranded in Toronto at Pearson, having flown from western Canada with WestJet. Those from the south and warmer temperatures who were heading home for Christmas were stranded. In fact, I was getting emails from a couple hundred people who were trying to get back home for Christmas, who were told on December 21, 22 and 23 that there would be no flights going into Newfoundland until Boxing Day. We spent a lot of time dealing with these issues. Eventually most of them found a way through other airlines, Air Canada and others.
One astounding thing that happened during that period was that WestJet flew into St. John's. A good friend of mine sent me pictures of how he got on that flight to St. John's, travelling back to my riding, and he counted 64 empty seats. There were 200-plus Newfoundlanders stranded at the Toronto airport, yet the flight flew out of Toronto to St. John's. I was astounded at how these kinds of things happened. To me, there was certainly a flagrant disregard for passengers. Many of them also talked about their air passenger bill of rights and they weren't very well versed in terms of what their rights were.
The question I have is about how we can better educate and inform Canadian air travellers about their rights. They know they're there, but how do we help them?