Madam Speaker, when my colleague make a blanket statement that Air Canada is not abiding by the Official Languages Act, I do not think that statement in its totality is quite true.
Air Canada receives the most complaints about not complying with the Official Languages Act ,certainly in his home province of New Brunswick and in parts of Quebec, principally because 65% of all flights in this country are Air Canada flights. Whenever we hear a plane flying overhead, no matter where we are in this country, odds are that two out of three of those flights are Air Canada. Because of the volume of all air traffic in this country that is constituted by Air Canada traffic, of course it will have the most complaints, more than any other carrier, but that does not mean it is not abiding by the Official Languages Act.
Abiding by the Official Languages Act right now is costing Air Canada anywhere between $10 million to $12 million a year in terms of compliance. I have heard the complaints raised by members of the Bloc and by the member and, most important, the complaints raised by the Canadian people through the Official Languages Commissioner about Air Canada not abiding by the Official Languages Act.
However I do not think the problem is with Air Canada. I think the problem is that the Liberal government is not enforcing the regulations that it set out. This happens over and over again in all sorts of areas that we see in aviation policy and so on.
It goes too far to say that Air Canada is not abiding by the Official Languages Act. It may make mistakes and may not be doing its due diligence in certain circumstances but should it be held accountable to the standards imposed on it by law? That is certainly the case.
If he believes, as I do, that Canada is a country where two official languages co-exist, and that the House of Commons and the government ought to respect those two languages, the question that ought to be asked is this: why is there a standard for official languages for Air Canada when there is none for CanJet, for example? CanJet works out of Montreal and is not subjected to the standard on official languages. The same goes for WestJet, which operates daily in Quebec and in his province of New Brunswick. These airlines are not required to provide services in French. Only Air Canada is.
If we really believe in the official language policies of this country, we should be holding everyone to the same standard. The Conservative Party believes in the official bilingualism reality of this country and we support the Official Languages Act. We support Bill C-47 but we also support a government that applies regulations equally across the air industry and that is not what we are seeing from the government.