Mr. Speaker, you will appreciate that I am the critic for the coalition on transport so on speaking to this bill I will be dealing mainly with the airport security fee that has been instituted with this piece of legislation.
As we have heard from many others, this security fee is not well thought out. The committee on transport spent three months investigating airline and airport security and how to deal with it. The minister always told us that the security at Canadian airports was far superior to that of the American airports at the time of September 11, and I do not disagree with him. Canada needed it because it was home to a terrorist attack in 1985. The Canadian government and the Canadian airports had to increase the security.
One wonders, when we are already starting from a position of strength where our security apparatus is much greater than that of the Americans, why we felt it necessary to charge so much. Where the Americans are charging $2.50 one way, we are charging $12 one way. Canada and Canadian airports already have a lot of the equipment while the Americans are having to buy more equipment and to increase their participation in security to a much greater degree than Canadian airports. Why is the amount of money so much greater here in Canada when we are already starting ahead of the Americans?
There is some concern with the manner in which this whole airport security fee has been put on the table. The transport committee investigating this whole issue recommended to the government that it be a shared responsibility, shared with the industry, shared with the taxpayers and shared with the travelling public. The reason was that there were more people who were not flying in airplanes, who did not go through an airport security screening process, who ended up dying on September 11.
This does not just affect people who happen to get themselves into airplanes. This affects everyone who is in an arena, at an event, in a place where people gather and even on the receiving end of water distribution systems. This affects all Canadians, so it seems somewhat unfair that only the Canadian travelling public ends up picking up the costs of a terrorist activity or the potential for a terrorist activity.
The fact is that the government did not look at the variety of airports and the variety of security that is required. The hijackers did not look at a small twin engine airplane that was going from Edmonton to Calgary or even from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. They looked at large transcontinental aircraft that were full of fuel because they would make an impact. A little airplane with a single engine prop is not going to destroy anything except itself if it goes into a building. There is a variety of needs for security and not all airports have the potential or the facilities to provide that kind of security, but that was not part of the plan. There was no impact study done to see what the impact would be on smaller airports, on rural airports, on airports that just have perhaps float planes flying in and out or at a maximum a small twin engine plane, a Dash 8 or Dash 7.
No impact study was done to see what kind of an impact this kind of security fee would have on them or on the airlines that fly those smaller planes. For the Hawkairs of British Columbia or their people to have to get involved in an airline security fee does not make sense. They only fly Dash 8s and Dash 7s from small communities into Vancouver. There should have been an impact study done. There should have been some consideration of the security requirements that vary from larger airlines to smaller airlines and certainly there should have been more of an impact study done on what it will mean to the travelling public.
I would argue with the government that this is what will happen when we have a WestJet flight between Edmonton and Calgary that costs $100. With this fee they will pay $89 of taxes on top of that $100. That is $189. In essence what it will do is take people out of the airplanes and put them in the congestion of our highways. I do not have to tell the House about the numbers of accidents that happen when more people in cars and trucks use our highways. I suggest that more people die per year in highway accidents on the North American continent than died flying in the aircraft used as weapons on September 11.
It really does make a person wonder whether the government is looking at this security airport fee in the truest sense of it being used for security purposes or if the government had some other reason for it. When we look at $2.2 billion being set aside from the budget for this security fee, we see $1 billion for equipment.
The government gave the equipment now in airports to a non-profit company that is a spinoff of the airline association. The government gave that to this association, so the question is this: Will the government get back at no cost all this equipment it gave away or will it be paying this not for profit company for that equipment it gave to the company in the first place?
Is this $1 billion to be written off all in one year? It is an ordinary Canadian company. It has to amortize the cost of capital expenditures over a period of time. Many transportation companies, particularly rail, have argued that they should be able to amortize that over shorter periods of time because the equipment wears out, but they are not allowed to do that.
Here we have the government putting $1 billion into equipment, writing it all off in one year and collecting this supposed airport security tax of $24 per return fare to pay for that equipment, but what we are hearing is that potentially this fee will create such hardship for small companies that they will lose travelling public and it may shut them down. From others we are hearing that the large number of passengers will lead to the accumulation of so much money that it will be far more than $2.2 billion and will create this huge pot of money. This is where I get back to the purpose of this tax and the government's real agenda.
I would suggest that it is possible the government saw an opportunity to make some money to use for projects other than airport security. I use the example of the employment insurance pot. The people who know how these things work said that $15 billion would be more than adequate as a rainy day slush fund in order to handle heavier unemployment in the future. They said that $15 billion was more than enough. The government across the way has now accumulated almost $40 billion in that fund. Is it used for employment insurance? No.
Time will tell if this fund grows and this money is used for purposes other than airport security. If that happens it is a fraud to the travelling public who have been asked to pay for the cost of providing for airport security.
The government has said that it will be reviewing this airport security fee in six months to see whether or not it is meeting the needs. That is interesting, because earlier today we were also told that the government is already going to start to collect this but that the equipment will not be in place until probably six months down the road. How will the government know whether or not the money it collects will meet the needs of this whole new program if it is not up and running by the time it makes its assessment?
The government has not done an impact study. It has no idea whether it is going to work. It is picking on the travelling public and not sharing the cost among all Canadians who would benefit from this security. This just shows that it was very poorly thought out and should probably be reviewed within the next couple of months rather than in six months. It should probably be set aside if changes are not made to make it more fair to smaller companies and the travelling public.