Transport minister tried to kill passenger rights bill despite publicly supporting it

This story reflects, perhaps, a reality of politics. Sometimes Ministers have to be publicly support policy that privately they disagree with. As a reality that is as reality but when the duplicity is revealed it looks awful:

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/story.html?id=2229584

Transport minister tried to kill passenger rights bill despite publicly supporting it
Sarah Schmidt, Canwest News Service


OTTAWA -- The federal transport minister's office privately pleaded with Canada's big airlines to step up their lobby campaign to kill a proposed passenger bill of rights even as the minister publicly rallied behind the popular initiative, according to internal documents obtained by Canwest News Service.

The motion by Newfoundland Liberal MP Gerry Byrne, calling on the government to bring forward a bill to entrench a passenger bill of rights into law, passed in the House of Commons unanimously last year, but only after a high-ranking political operative in then-transport minister Lawrence Cannon's office tried to scuttle the whole thing.

The effort to kill the motion is revealed in correspondence sent from the minister's office to top executives and lobbyists at Air Canada, WestJet Airlines and Air Transat. The government intended the block the release of these passages and others in response to an Access to Information request, but the full, uncensored documents were sent to Canwest News Service -- apparently by mistake.

"Gentleman, you're going to have to do some lobbying to stop this motion in its tracks," the minister's senior policy adviser at the time, Paul Fitzgerald, told officials at Canada's largest airlines in March 2008.

"If you don't lobby the Grits and the Block (sic), we're going to find ourselves in a position where we are outvoted by the opposition parties."

Mr. Fitzgerald added, "I don't want us to be forced into regulating passenger protection issues."

A few months later, Mr. Cannon and John Baird, the current transport minister, were among Conservative cabinet ministers and MPs who voted for the motion.

...

At the time of the June 2008 vote, opposition MPs were skeptical the Conservative government would carry through on the motion calling for legislation to strengthen the rights of airline passengers.