The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
To the Editor, The reaction of the Minister of Transport to the collapse of Jetsgo is emblematic of the way this government deals with most problems: dither in response, blame the system and leave town so that the Parliamentary Secretary can field media calls. It's difficult to look at the failure of Jetsgo as being due to anything less than the legacy of deregulation and the way this government has handled the airlines system. All you need to do to start an airline these days is to lease some old planes, contract out the operations and start selling tickets on the Internet. No need to prove that you have any cash on hand, or that you are viable. Eight airlines in nine years have gone under in Canada. This will only get worse with Jean Lapierre's proposal for asymmetrical "open skies", which seems to have been written by the CEO of Air Canada. When the Minister says that he has the "support of the industry" he really means Robert Milton's support. It is my view that to continue believing that competition is the prescription to the air industry's problems is to continue to falsely diagnose the problem. If competition was the answer then Canadian and Air Canada's competition battle that left one destroyed and the other severely weakened should have fixed the problem. The reality is that Canada is a relatively sparsely populated country with a huge geographic challenge. The devolution of government responsibility for transportation and security services has added to this challenge with airline passengers picking up the tab. If we are to strengthen our air industry we need to regulate domestic capacity as we do on international routes. We must also insure that feeds paid to the federal government for transportation costs go back into transportation services and not into general revenue. But to be sure, as long as Minister Lapierre is around, we won't be seeing any improvement in the travelling conditions of Canadians. - Bev Desjarlais, MP for the Churchill Riding and Transport Critic for the Federal New Democratic Party
