44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 25, 2023 02:00PM
- Oct/25/23 6:21:58 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, why go through a motion when this is really a regulatory process that the member could see the minister about? That would be the quickest way to get an effect, especially when they have their own caucus.
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- Oct/25/23 6:40:30 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today on motion M-96. It is a motion that the House recognize that an assessment of the International Association of Fire Fighters concluded significant regulatory shortfalls.
Basically, the shortfalls are failing to specify rescue as a required function of airport firefighters and requiring only that firefighters must reach the midpoint of the furthest runway in three minutes, rather than all points of operational runways within that time period. Another part of the motion seeks to give firefighters at major Canadian airports the mandate and resources that are necessary and specify that the required function of firefighters must be rescuing passengers.
I do not want to go through the whole motion here. I want to talk a bit about process and how it relates to our airports and the holes we have in the services there. I know that the Speaker is flying tomorrow, and we do have a very good record in aviation, but we still have some improvements that need to be made. Sadly, this problem has been around this place longer than I have. I find interesting that it is a regulatory change that any minister can do at any point in time, so there really is not the requirement for this to go through as a motion.
A motion is not binding. It would not mean that the government has to follow the motion that is passed. That is one of the reasons we might want to look at regulation through the minister as a quicker more direct process, or we could have legislation that would bind the government once it passes this chamber and the Senate.
I think the motion is good for public awareness. I commend the member for bringing this forward, but the government, if it wanted to, could act on this really quickly. There is not really much of an obstacle, because it has the support of the rest of this chamber here. It is good that the member brought this through to discuss it, because maybe his government and the minister will listen to what is taking place here today and act on it even before the motion takes place. Perhaps, in the best scenario, the minister would actually act on the regulations and let the member have a victory lap.
That would be awesome, because the intent of the motion, in terms of fire safety at airports, is critically important, and he needs to be clear that there is support in the chamber for that.
I do want to also acknowledge that our critic on this, who has done a lot of work, is the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley. He is our transport critic, but he is also a former mayor. We look at airports in municipalities. I was on the City of Windsor city council when things were offloaded to municipalities. Local taxpayers had to pick up, basically, from deregulation, which we have seen Conservatives and Liberals do on a number of different things, including airline safety. They tried to get a safety management system employed there. We were able to stop that.
We face a number of things that have been deregulated. This was downloading onto the municipalities, so municipalities like Windsor and others have had to pick up the slack for fire safety.
There are some really good things here in this motion, as discussed. A good one one is regarding persons with disabilities. In the case of accidents, there is very little direction about how we would help get passengers, especially those who are disabled, off planes.
The government was very lackluster when it came to Nav Canada, which was responsible for airport towers. It was looking at closing several across this country and studying them, and they included the Windsor one in that, despite the fact that we have five air zones in the Windsor district area.
We are on the border, so our air zones are not just domestic, but they are international, and they overlap. I was fortunate to be invited by Mr. Chris Kenney, the central regional vice-president who requested a meeting with CATCA with regard to touring my airport tower just recently. I want to thank everybody who was there for the education they also gave me, which confirmed that saving our airport tower was important.
When Nav Canada was looking at this, they basically wanted to close it down so they would not have people in the airport tower. If members can imagine it, we not only have domestic flights, but we also have other services like coast guard and the U.S. air services and so forth that overlap in our region. That would have been detrimental. Losing that, especially as we are growing the airline industry, would have been wrong.
The first response from the government on this, by our local Liberal MP, was that it could not do anything about. It was Nav Canada, so it could study this. All heck broke loose.
I started working with a number of different people, because it came to me. I want to thank the flight instructors at that time: Dante Albano, Ryan Lee, Patrick Li and Craig Borowski. They are international airport pilots and are involved in the issue with the Windsor Flying Club. I also thank Karan D'Souza, Mayor Dilkens and Rakesh Naidu from the Windsor chamber of commerce.
We pushed back at the fact that Nav Canada was doing this, and it became a significant incident. We went from the government saying originally that it could not do anything about it to it saying the minister does not have the legal authority for it to get done. What I did was drafted legislation for the minister and tabled it here in this chamber so he could act. The heavens opened up and the light was on this issue after the government said it could not act. We prepared and tabled the way the minister could do it. Thank goodness that at that time, soon after we tabled the legislation for the minister, the issue was resolved. Nav Canada backed off, and we saved the airport tower.
It was a good story to tell in the sense of activism, but it also showed the vulnerabilities of municipalities in the deregulation that can take place. I mentioned the safety management systems with regard to the airport issue, because in the past, it has been the NDP that stopped the safety management systems from being in the airline industry. That is a system members might have heard about in the rail systems. The rail systems have safety management systems in place.
People are wondering what the heck a safety management system is. Basically, at the end of the day, an employee is supposed to report any of the problems they have on a daily basis about safety to their employer. Imagine that. The employee has to be a whistle-blower in their job to prevent some things from taking place. We saw Lac-Mégantic and other types of rail problems.
A rail study done independently talked about CP and CN having a culture of fear and intimidation over their workers. We were expecting, and we still expect, the workers to report those problems to the people who employ them and control their futures as employees. That system has failed quite significantly, and it does not empower workers. We have seen other whistle-blower problems in this chamber, even more recently in some of the departments.
I point back to this because it is why we have to make sure the government never brings in that system for the airline industry. That has been attempted in the past, but we used what was called a “hoist motion” to end debate at the time, creating a stalling tactic. Another election took place in between, and no government has come back since that point in time to bring in that legislation.
To come back to this motion again, I think there has been a lot of work going on. In fact, our critic, the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley, rightly pointed to Senate and other types of studies in the past about this issue, going back to the 1990s. That is important. He has done his due diligence, and we do think there is a lot of value in this.
I always encourage there to be discussions among government members that could get the minister to move right away, especially if we can get this in the chamber and have some consensus. With unanimous consent, we could get that regulatory process going.
In all sincerity, I want to again thank the member for bringing this up, because it is an important issue. We will support it, but we do not want to see that be a reason not to do it now with the regulatory changes that could be done. It should also come with resources for municipalities. Local taxpayers should not be paying for federal responsibilities. One would think that fire and other safety issues would be under a federally regulated industry that is required to have different types of security and support systems.
We will see where this goes. The time in this place is always shorter than we think. That is why I am hoping this regulatory process will come into effect sooner rather than later.
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