Mr. Speaker, the parliamentary secretary simply ducked and escaped my question about what efforts the government made with the Americans to look for reciprocity.
The fact of the matter is, there are far more American flights flying over Canadian airspace. A sensible negotiating approach would have been to ask the Americans to provide us with the same information we are providing them. Clearly, if they have some security concerns about airplanes going over their airspace, surely we, who share the continent with them, would have similar concerns and would want to be able to process their information.
Had the government done this, we might have been looking at getting an exemption because of all the blowback the Americans would have received from their airlines and American passengers, because there are 2,000 flights flying over Canada versus only 100 over the United States. I just think that reciprocity would have been something the government would have asked for, if it were negotiating properly.
The parliamentary secretary says that we could not afford to process the information. How he knows this, I do not know, but it will cost the Americans half a billion dollars in computer systems to handle all of this information that we will be giving them. By extension, we could not afford the computer system to process their information because there would be so much of it. That was his answer.
In direct response to my question, he did not answer it at all. He simply attacked the air passenger bill of rights and misrepresented it. He could not even remember what was in that bill when misrepresenting that part of it and not answering the question.
Maybe the hon. member could fill in some of the missing answers the parliamentary secretary could not give.