44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 19, 2022 10:00AM
- May/19/22 11:57:19 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the member's speech on populism was very interesting, but I want to talk about what was happening, for example, this weekend in Montreal and at the airport. It is hard for constituents to understand. When they go to the airport and realize they need a mask, they have to go back to get a mask, and then they go through all these checks that they do not normally have to go through. How does the member explain to his constituents why, when they are outside of the airport, they do not need a mask, because the Quebec government says it is safe, but inside the airport they do?
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- May/19/22 12:43:03 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am curious. As the member goes into the summer tourism season, and as we see U.S. border protections being reduced by 20%, and as we see a lack of Canadian customs officials in place at this point in time, and as we see the lineups that keep getting longer at every border as travel increases, how is that going to impact his tourism sector and his riding in general?
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- May/19/22 12:57:21 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member talked about a pregnant lady going to the airport with her kids. I came across an experience in Montreal where four ladies came to the gate and just missed their plane. One was a diabetic and she was in tears. She was begging to be let on the plane. She could see it. The reason she could not get on the plane is she spent three-and-a-half to four hours going through security.
What can we do to alleviate some of those concerns?
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- May/19/22 1:16:13 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, she “owns” me? I find that very offensive.
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- May/19/22 1:16:45 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I think I have to pursue this, because she is trying to regenerate a different dialogue. What she said was, “We own him.” If we could please check the Hansard—
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- May/19/22 1:17:14 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, between that and “just inflation”—
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- May/19/22 1:44:12 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, every province has now lifted its mandates, and we are in a situation where they are not even wearing masks in Quebec. Is that enough science to maybe justify what we are doing?
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- May/19/22 2:43:53 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Canada is the fifth-largest agri-food exporter in the world. In fact, we ship healthy food all over the globe. However, increasingly in Europe non-tariff trade barriers are restricting our access. Can the minister assure the producers in the agri-food industry that these tariffs will be eliminated or will not be applicable in the upcoming Canada-U.K. agreement?
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- May/19/22 3:35:04 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I really want to wish the member and his family all the best as they move forward. He has had a great career here and is going to have a great career going forward.
I know this is going to be his last question period, so I thought I would ask him a question just so he would have a chance to answer. What does he think of the lineups at airports?
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- May/19/22 3:52:27 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, who I know has a very important speech to give after me.
This is a very timely motion, considering what is going on in our airports across Canada and the fact that many have had the privilege to pair off with a minister to the U.S. I could draw some comparisons to how the U.S. is doing things in light of post-COVID, or endemic COVID, versus how we do it here in Canada.
To be travelling here in Canada, people have to be vaccinated. Let us make that point very clear. Let us look at the way people go through the process. In Saskatoon, I get to the airport and walk into the airport, but I do not have a mask. I have been out and about in the community all weekend without a mask. I do not have one in my pocket and have to run back to my truck to find one in the glove box, because I need one at the airport. I do not need it anywhere else in Saskatchewan, but I need it at the airport.
I find an old mask, dust it off and away I go through security. I show my NEXUS card. In Saskatoon, a NEXUS card does not get people into their own lane. It actually just gets them to the front of the line. That must make the people who have been waiting in line for an hour and a half really happy to watch me walk by them to go to the front of the line—
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- May/19/22 3:53:54 p.m.
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That is a good point, but not when you do not have enough time. If you get to my point, Mark, and listen to me, you might get some ideas on how you can improve things—
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- May/19/22 3:54:16 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I do apologize for that mistake.
I guess what I am saying is that when people are in a rush to catch their flight, they use their NEXUS card and go through security, but they go through the exact same security process as everybody else. In the U.S., people have a preferred traveller status, so when they go to the U.S. and they have their NEXUS card or a global entry card, they get into a separate line. They put their luggage on the rack, put their jacket on the rack, although they do not necessarily have to take their jacket off, it gets pushed through and away they go.
People do not have to take their liquids out of their one-litre Ziploc bag and put them into a Toronto-approved Ziploc bag. They do not have to take their shoes off. They do not have to take their belt off. They do not have to take their computer out. They do not have to do any of those things, because they have already gone through the security screening process up front. They are not viewed as a threat. It is just like every time people apply for a NEXUS card, which is also a global entry card in the U.S.
Here is an example of what the government could do right now with labour shortages. It could have a specific line for those members, because they are not a risk. They are zero threat. Why would we not take the best practices out of the U.S. and apply them here in Canada to speed up the line? If we speed up that line, we could give more resources to the other lines that are lacking resources at this point in time.
In Saskatoon, as I said, when people go through the screening, first of all, they take their jacket off, they take their belt off, they take everything out of their pockets, they take their computer out, they take the liquids out and put them into the one-litre bag they have to use, and then they go through the screening. Then, they get to the secondary screening. There is one thing we are noticing in the airports. For example, in Toronto, with the new system, I call it the scatter system. People go into a line, right next to four other people, and they put their stuff into their bucket. The bucket goes, and then another person's bucket goes, and another. There is actually four to five times more secondary screening in that process because of how it is going through the system. More people are waiting for their bags at the other end, and they are all scattered.
How is this becoming more efficient and faster? How can this work when people are bumping into each other and going around each other trying to figure out where their luggage is, where their bags are, where their shoes are, where their belt is and trying to keep their pants up while they are doing it? It is craziness at its greatest. We see that here in the Ottawa airport over and over again. There are some little things that could be changed to make this a lot smoother and a lot more efficient, if the Liberals wanted to.
I mentioned the NEXUS card. I go to the gate. I go to board the plane, and I show my NEXUS card. The Air Canada agent says, “Wait a minute, that is an expired NEXUS card.” Yes, I know it has expired. I was told I could use an expired NEXUS card. The agent says I cannot use it for ID. I say that is fair enough and go to apply to renew my NEXUS card. I did it two years ago, and I am still waiting for that interview. I have been online checking to see where I could get an interview done in Canada. I cannot. I live in the Prairies, just north of Saskatoon. Before COVID, I had to go to Calgary or Winnipeg, and now, after COVID, they are saying I would have to go to Buffalo or New York in order to get the interview to get my NEXUS card renewed. Does that make sense? Is that proper planning, knowing that we are going to come out of the pandemic at some point in time? Why is it that way?
Coming through the airport, I have seen lots of things, looking at the way things have been operating. I saw one of the more horrific scenes when I was coming in through Montreal. I walked through Montreal airport and looked at the lineups, and they were outside the door, not a line straight outside the door, but weaving back and forth, going around the counters and out the door, to get through security. I asked the security guard what was going on and why it was that way. He said that some of the workers were unvaccinated so they got fired and could not work, some of the workers were laid off and have not been rehired, and the workers who were there were getting so stressed that they were not showing up for work. They are being overworked. He said they are finding it frustrating. They are tired of people yelling at them, because people are at their wits' end by the time they get to the security screening process. I can understand why they are frustrated and why it is a problem.
People get through that process, and then they get through secondary screening. I was at the gate at 9:30 at night, waiting for my flight at 10:30, and I saw these four ladies running to beat the devil. They were sweating and they were upset, because they had just found out their flight had gone without them. The door had just closed. In fact, they were looking out the window at that plane. They were trying to get back to Toronto to their family on a Sunday night. They could not spend the night. One lady said out loud that she was a diabetic and she did not have any more insulin with her for the evening. They had spent four hours in the lineup. They took it out on that poor agent. They were mad, and rightly so. They were yelling and screaming and demanding action. What could he do? The plane had left.
The reality is that the fault lies with the government. It lies right at the Liberals' feet and it lies at their feet in so many aspects of what is going on right now. The government cannot be proactive on anything. It will not react until the crisis hits such a level that it is forced to react. We knew this was coming. We knew that Canadians were going to start travelling again. There is no question about that. The airlines knew that. If the airlines had been given a bankable schedule, they could have scaled up accordingly. They are doing the best they can to accommodate the number of people who want to travel again. Now the bottleneck is our airports, our airport security and the processes that we have to go through in order to board that plane.
The Liberals could have preplanned that. For example, on passports, the Liberals could have said, “We have a lot of people who have 10-year passports coming up for renewal. Maybe we should start approving and processing passports.” They could have said that a year ago. Maybe they should have had things in place so they would not get bottle-jammed right until now and try to do it all at once.
When I hear people tell me that they get faster service if they go through their Liberal MP's office than they do through a Conservative MP's office, I get very concerned because that should not happen. I have heard of two instances of that happening now.
When I look at that, I think that if they had planned properly, they could have avoided that. If they had properly planned for NEXUS cards being renewed, they could have avoided people not having interviews and waiting and waiting for their interviews. If they had properly planned for bringing the airports back into service, we would not have seen the lineups we have in place today. CBSA would have been able to start hiring and training people sooner if the Liberals had a proper plan. These people do not plan. When they do not plan, what do they get? They get failure, and that is what the government has produced time after time.
What can the Liberals do now? They say they are protecting Canadians and they are following the science. They say it is very important to follow the science, and they think they are doing everything right to protect Canadians, which is fair enough. The Saskatchewan public health officer does the same thing. It is the same with the person in Quebec, in Alberta, in Ontario and in B.C. They are following the science, and they are actually being transparent with the science. They are saying that based on the science they can do this and they are allowed to open it up to this level or that level. We have seen that just lately in Quebec, where they made decisions based on what their needs were to reopen their economy accordingly. It was transparent. People knew what was going on, when it was going to happen and why it was going to happen.
The government will not give us a plan. Not only that, it will not give us the dataset or the points it is using to make the decisions it is making. Then the Liberals wonder why people are suspicious. They wonder why people do not trust them. All they need to do is show some transparency, which the Prime Minister, in 2015, said he would show an abundance of.
With this issue, when it is health-related, why would the government not have transparency? What is the reason the Liberals want to hold back the dataset they are using to make their decisions? There should be no reason. They should be able to do that without any type of qualms. If they showed the dataset and said, “Here is the justification. This is why we have to do what we are doing today”, and showed the science to back that, we probably would not be having this debate today, but they are not. The hypocrisy is that the Liberals are saying that the science says we need to do all this stuff, yet they are letting everything go back to normal and they are not following with it.
Yes, we needed to have lockdowns. I can remember being in the Toronto airport in November of last year, I think, and looking down the hallways. I could have said my name and it would have been echoing through the hallways because there was nobody there. There was nobody travelling. Let us also keep in mind what we did not have then. We did not have any therapeutic treatments. We did not have vaccinations. We did not know what we know today.
There are lots of things the government can do. I will end it there and I look forward to the questions.
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- May/19/22 4:04:24 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am not surprised the member is confused, but what I was actually saying is that there are best practices in other areas of the world that the Liberals could adopt here to have a more efficient screening process. If people have already gone through the NEXUS process and done their pre-screening beforehand, the chance that they are a risk is very small, so why are we worried about the containers, the shoes, the belts, the jackets or the computers? If somebody had thought through that process, yes, they go through the full screening.
This is the system that is being used in the U.S. The U.S. went through worse terrorist attacks by airplanes than any other country in the world, so if it is good enough for the U.S., should we not at least consider it?
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- May/19/22 4:05:49 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, Dr. Tam had some suggestions. What I have to square off with those suggestions is how they square with every province moving forward with the removal of restrictions. How does that square off? If her suggestions are what we should be following, then why is every other province not doing that? Provinces manage our health care system, by the way. It is not the federal government; it is the provinces that manage health care. If they are saying that it is good enough for them and that they are willing to move forward and live with the risks that are associated with COVID, then maybe the national adviser needs to get with them, too.
That is something the public health people need to settle, but I will say that we should look at what is going on in the provinces. We cannot say the provinces are not following the science, because they are.
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- May/19/22 4:07:23 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, everybody could see this coming. Everybody understood that 10-year passports were going to come up for renewal this year for the first time. We could have anticipated a lot of the problems we are facing now six months ago, and we could have prepared properly for it, but the government does not prepare unless it is in a crisis. It does not act until it is in crisis mode.
Let us take the Canada Revenue Agency. This is another example where people cannot get through to talk to somebody in person. We are talking about four- or five-hour wait on telephone lines. Then there is Passport Canada. We are going to have four passport clinics in my riding next week, just to help people out. We know they want to travel, so we are going to do what we can to accommodate them. I wish the government would do the same.
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