Mr. Speaker, I think my hon. colleague must have misunderstood. The airline industry is a classic example of the attitude that competition always works and with deregulation it will work, but it does not work in all cases.
At some point some carriers can say that they will charge a ridiculously low price. I am not suggesting any particular carrier is doing that right now but in order for some carriers to provide lower prices I think they cut services. That is not always the case and I do not believe that to be the case of air carriers, specifically the one in Canada right now that is providing a very low cost rate. There has been nothing to indicate that.
However, competition is not always the only answer but certainly competition generally can bring prices down.
During the competition between Canadian Airlines and Air Canada, they were at each other's throats the whole time. They wanted all the people on a given route and flew back to back with each other. It ended up that one carrier was put out of business and the other carrier became a greater monopoly and more of a problem.
Competition was not the only answer in that case. We needed some regulations in place.
I was happy to hear the transport minister actually allude to this a little bit last week in some news reports. He said that maybe we needed to regulate domestic capacity in order to provide the service. Maybe we need to recognize that to provide service to some far reaching and rural areas of Canada some support systems need to be in place from the Government of Canada, and the people of Canada, so that we support each other knowing that it might be a little more costly to provide service up here. It should not be strictly on the backs of the airlines. It should be on us as a country to provide support and assist people throughout the country. That is the balance I would like to see within industry.