Hon. Omar Alghabra, P.C., M.P., Minister of Transport: Thank you, senator, for that question. The situation at our airports during the summer was unacceptable. The hours of delay, flight cancellations, shortage of labour and stories of people sleeping at airports were unacceptable.

Canadians saw that, because of the pandemic, there were significant layoffs in the aviation sector — not only in Canada but around the world. With the surge back in demand, labour shortages caused a significant impact on that operation. However, we didn’t hesitate, as a government, to step in and take action. We quickly worked with airports and airlines to identify some bottlenecks that we could immediately address. We have carried out several measures, including expediting the hiring of Canadian Air Transport Security Authority employees; working with NAV CANADA, the air traffic controllers, on identifying efficiencies; automatically renewing expired security access cards to airport workers; and working on other bottlenecks.

Today I’m happy to say that the performance is much better. It does compare to pre-pandemic levels, but we should never let these lessons learned go by without taking action. Soon I will be inviting stakeholders from airports to airlines to a summit where we will discuss lessons learned from this episode and find out what else we can do as an industry and as government to address these things so that we are much better prepared, much more efficient and much more competitive for Canadian travellers.