The "don't you know who I am,"
routine Helena Guergis recently pulled at the Charlottetown airport
worked beautifully. We all now know who she is. Unfortunately for
the minister of state for the Status of Women, it's not a pretty
picture. Much has been written about this incident and I don't
believe there's a need to add more comments about her poor
behaviour. It might not be a matter of firing Guergis on the spot,
but still I believe Prime Minister Stephen Harper shouldn't forget
"who she is" in the next Cabinet shuffle.
The facts are painfully known.
Guergis, arrived on Feb. 19 at the
Charlottetown Airport on Prince Edward Island to board an Air Canada
Jazz plane to Montreal. She arrived reportedly only five minutes
before takeoff and started screaming at airport security people
because they were taking too long and she was going to miss the
plane. It seems that the flight had to be delayed to accommodate her
late arrival at the airport.
In an anonymous complaint sent to
Prince Edward Island Liberal MP Wayne Easter, she yelled at the
staff because, according to media reports which have not been denied
by Guergis, they were "wasting her time" and she had to get home to
her husband because it was her "fucking" birthday.
But I don't want to talk about
Guergis' boorish behaviour. I want to spend a few words on the
people handling our security at airports. This is serious business
for two reasons. First, the lives of many Canadians depend on these
airport security jobs. Second, flying is no longer a luxury but part
of our social and economic lives. Security personnel not fulfilling
one of their duties will have serious impacts on our lives and not
to mention the huge economic impact.
Unfortunately, most of the people
assigned to perform these important duties are not up to the job.
Arriving at security checkpoints at most Canadian airports you feel
provoked more than protected. I'm not saying it's easy to recognize
terrorists because they wear T-shirts and wrist bands, but if
they're not able to see the difference between an 80-year-old lady
and a terrorist, we have a problem. I'm not saying that ministers
should have a fast-track security check-in gate, but if they can't
see the difference between a Cabinet minister and Osama bin Laden,
our airports will become a nightmare.
I'm not blaming airport security
staff for this nonsense. We can't expect to fight terrorism with
people who are not properly trained and paid minimum wage and then
criticize them when they don't act like secret agents.
Furthermore, the smaller the
airports are in remote parts of the countries, the more the security
checks become obsessive as well as useless. I've heard horror
stories about what a group of students coming back to Toronto from a
brief holiday in another Canadian province had to go through at this
small airport.
Guergis, like many other Canadians,
is actually right to be outraged by what's going on at Canadian
airports, but she's wrong for raising her voice at underpaid and
under-trained people hired by her government. If authorities tell
Canadians to arrive three hours early at the airport to go through
an annoying as well as useless security check, she shouldn't
complain to the front-line workers. Guergis should first humble
herself and comply with what the Canadian government tells all
Canadians to do, and then she should go back to Ottawa and do
something to correct it.
Unless she expects all Canadians to
go through three hours of nonsense and move aside to let her go
through security only 5 minutes before takeoff, Guergis would do
well to take her frustration to Ottawa instead of unloading it on
the underpaid and under-trained front line employees tasked with
keeping our skies
safe.
