Madam Speaker, I am happy to be here tonight to talk about transportation and tourism. These sectors are very important not just in my riding, but across the country. As for the estimates, since I do not have a lot of time, I will be pretty succinct.
First of all, I will talk about what is needed and then what is in the estimates and the budget. We know that because of the pandemic, all of the airlines and a number of transportation businesses have had to lay off workers and they are in a tough spot. The government needed to come up with some kind of aid package. That said, it picked winners and losers. It decided Air Canada and Air Transat were going to get bailouts, but not WestJet. Why is that? That is just not fair. We need all of them to continue.
Greyhound has gone out of business. This is a critical service, especially for lower-income individuals and people across the country in rural and remote places. Something is needed there and there is nothing coming forward.
One of the groups that is very concerned is travel agents. A lot of times they have consulting fees and they have not been able to take advantage of a lot of the government's programs. Something needs to be done for them.
We need to get a border opening plan, not just with our neighbour to the south, but across the provinces, accelerating the vaccine rollout, working with the provinces and territories to open up and providing an incentive for Canadians to travel in this country. That is a huge $30-billion opportunity, a way of restoring life to the tourism sector that has been very hard hit. The $1 billion in the budget is not going to do it, so we need an additional incentive on top of that. In addition, as I have said, we need to put back in place all of the smaller routes and work on that plan.
When it comes to the tourism sector, a lot of the festivals and fairs were very hard hit. In my riding, there is the Brigden Fair and the Plympton-Wyoming Fair. There are fall fairs all over the place and everybody wants to get back to them, but without some kind of government infusion, they will not be able to survive. We need to do something for them. Let us get back to normal.