Public Safety committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for the opportunity to be here today to present on this important piece of legislation, Bill C-23, the preclearance act. My name is Daniel-Robert Gooch. I'm the president of the Canadian Airports Council. I'll be sharing my time today with Janik

Public Safety committee  Maybe I can answer. One thing it does is it allows airports to work a little bit more flexibly with CBP in terms of the allocation of resources. In some airports, particularly if the hours of service are not really right for a flight—for instance, if a flight comes outside of

Public Safety committee  I would add that the situation will vary a lot from airport to airport, but we have seen that the lines in Canada can sometimes be shorter than in the U.S. The other thing is that Canadian travellers don't necessarily go through as robust a process. Fingerprints are taken from

Public Safety committee  In very broad terms, it's a competitiveness factor. The ability for travellers to arrive in the U.S. as domestic travellers and just step outside and get into their taxi within 15 or 20 minutes is a tremendous advantage relative to travellers from other countries. It's part of a

Public Safety committee  I'll just add that, coincidentally, a couple of weeks ago, a colleague of mine, Jennifer Sullivan, from Greater Toronto Airports Authority, and I presented at the transport committee on a series of questions about the screening of airport workers, where we were into a fair bit of

Public Safety committee  I think that gets out of our area of expertise, but I would say that there is no Canada pre-clearance in the U.S. right now, so it's a bit of a one-sided arrangement in terms of how there is pre-clearance in Canada. We do not have it in the U.S., although that is something that i

Transport committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the invitation to appear before you as part of this committee's study of Bill C-49. My name is Daniel-Robert Gooch, and I am the president of the Canadian Airports Council. The CAC has 51 members, operating more than

Transport committee  Yes. CATSA Plus is a different process that incorporates technological elements. There's a centralized screening, and then as you actually approach the lane, there are four parallel divest stations, so it gets travellers going through the lane a lot more quickly, and it's a much

Transport committee  Thank you for that question. I heard what was said at a meeting with Air Transat last week. Clearly, the situation is really complex. After two days of discussion, I never managed to find out who was responsible for that situation. I think it's fair to say that the passenger do

Transport committee  I'm not as familiar with the technical details, but it would be something that would be created by the airport authority in conjunction with the air carrier partners in that airport. Airports vary quite significantly from one part of the country to another in terms of complexity.

Transport committee  As I said earlier, the interaction at an airport is quite complex. There are many different parties involved, and it's not always visible where the issue is. The ramp employee you spoke about actually is usually an airline employee. There's a lot of misunderstanding about who doe

Transport committee  Yes. That's an ongoing thing. That happens all the time. When there are major incidents, everybody gets together and asks what they did wrong here, how they dropped the ball, and how they could do this better. And it happens not just—

Transport committee  That's what I'm talking about as well.

Transport committee  There are. Each airport is set up differently, but there are situation rooms. Some of these things happen very quickly, and when situations like this occur, it's a mess and everybody is just trying to do their best job. They're trying to get the travellers to where they're going

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for this invitation to appear before you today as part of your pre-budget consultations. My name is Daniel-Robert Gooch, and I am President of the Canadian Airports Council. Let me start by thanking you for supporting the CAC's 2017 bu