This Duplicity Cannot Stand, Man.

SellingCanadiansDownTheirOwnPrivate
CrazyRiverVille


From the Big Willbowski:

The story starts in 2008. Liberal MP Gerry Byrne prepared a motion calling on the government to introduce an airline passenger’s bill of rights. Travellers would be guaranteed remedies for lost bags, unreasonable delays or overbooked flights. The model was similar to protection in Europe...

{snippety-doo-dah}

...MPs from all parties professed to support the idea, including then transport minister Lawrence Cannon.

But behind the scenes, his office was pleading with the airlines to launch a lobby campaign to defeat the motion, according to documents obtained by Canwest News Service.

While Cannon was promising to bring in a travellers’ bill of rights, a key political staffer in his office was telling the airlines the Conservatives really wanted it killed.

Lobby the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois, Paul Fitzgerald e-mailed the airlines. “I don’t want us to be forced into regulating passenger protection issues.”

It’s creepily dishonest. The minister is pretending to stand up for passengers while his staff is rallying the industry to kill protection.....

Creepily dishonest?

You bet.

But worse is the name that was scrawled in lipstick on the pig that became the bill that was apparently in large part written by the airline industry itself:

'Flight Rights Canada'

So.

When they set up their 20 thousand league columns of five billion watt blast furnaces in the Beaufort Sea in a concerted effort to finally open up that pesky Northwest Passage year round, will John Baird announce that it is to be called the "Sea-Ice Restoration Project"?


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The Willbowski can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the story was broken by Sarah Schmidt of CanWest who did some FOI digging and came up with an amazingly unredacted document that really got the bowling ball rolling.

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