Evidence of meeting #46 for International Trade in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was airport.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Ailish Campbell  Vice-President, Policy, International and Fiscal Issues, Canadian Council of Chief Executives
Jayson Myers  President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters
Howard Eng  President and Chief Executive Officer, Greater Toronto Airports Authority

4:50 p.m.

President and Chief Executive Officer, Greater Toronto Airports Authority

Howard Eng

At this point, Pearson itself is not a slot-constrained airport. Obviously it does have some issues at the very peak hours but otherwise we have capacity. I think there is capacity at other airports. Taking China as an example, Beijing has a current airport that is handling 85 million passengers. They are going to grow to over 100 million. They have already put in place the building of a second airport to handle more, which will be completed in five years. You hear about Dubai, which is building a new airport that can handle up to 120 million passengers. I think most countries that we trade with do have plans in place to enhance their infrastructure to provide more capacity.

4:50 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Randy Hoback

We're going to have to end it there, I'm afraid. His seven minutes are up.

Ms. Freeland.

4:50 p.m.

Liberal

Chrystia Freeland Liberal Toronto Centre, ON

Okay, well thank you very much, Mr. Eng and Ms. McKee, for joining us. I'm the MP for Toronto Centre, so you are incredibly important to my constituents.

Mr. Eng, I hope you're feeling comfortable speaking before this committee because, as it turns out—although neither of us represents Edmonton—your two vice-chairs today both have Edmonton roots.

4:50 p.m.

President and Chief Executive Officer, Greater Toronto Airports Authority

Howard Eng

Oh, okay.

4:50 p.m.

Liberal

Chrystia Freeland Liberal Toronto Centre, ON

So, we all have that in common.

I thought your presentation was terrific and I really was delighted to hear both your ambitions about Pearson being the premier North American airport and the global context in which you see those ambitions. That is terrific, and it's our responsibility to do everything we can to help you.

4:50 p.m.

President and Chief Executive Officer, Greater Toronto Airports Authority

Howard Eng

Thank you.

4:50 p.m.

Liberal

Chrystia Freeland Liberal Toronto Centre, ON

I'd like to start with a very specific question. We heard from Calgary airport some concerns about CATSA and real concerns that the airport was building up the infrastructure to move, in a hassle-free and quick way, lots of business travellers, but that CATSA staffing was simply not up to it. We heard real concerns about underfunding of CATSA and, in particular, that we're going to hit a bottleneck in the summer. Does that ring true to your experience?

4:55 p.m.

President and Chief Executive Officer, Greater Toronto Airports Authority

Howard Eng

Yes, I think I can say that there are lineups in CATSA. To me, as I said earlier, hassle-free is the flow through the whole airport. One departure bottleneck is certainly the security screening process. Another one is certainly in the arrival process. Sometimes we also have immigration and, similarly, the U.S. pre-clearance. So again, to be a transfer hub especially, we need to ensure that all these processes are running as smoothly as possible.

It's even more important for connecting passengers because for connecting passengers, again, normally when they are sold their product by the travel agency, most people necessarily want minimum time for their connection. The whole computer system is set up to display it that way. Especially if you take the example of international travel transferring to a domestic or U.S. airport, if through that process they have a long wait coming into Canada, a long wait going through security or going through U.S. pre-clearance and security, then all of a sudden what they call minimum connect time becomes longer and longer. The longer that becomes, the less competitive that particular route is when it's displayed. So yes, that is a concern.

I think there is in some way a resource or staffing issue with CATSA. But again, we as a group are working with government and the ministry to look at both efficiency and other means in order to try to speed up the process. For example, we're working with them to ensure the effective redeployment of the CATSA staff from international screening to domestic screening, from terminal 1 to terminal 3. We look at all those efficiency ways in order to try to enhance the capacity. We understand the issue that you don't want to have a lot of staff sitting around doing nothing. Again, we're working with them to best redeploy; we're getting information for our airlines on the load coming in and where they are going, so that we can redeploy staff as effectively as possible.

4:55 p.m.

Liberal

Chrystia Freeland Liberal Toronto Centre, ON

Of these bottlenecks that you've referred to, which is the biggest problem for you? What should we be focusing on to try to help fix this for you?

4:55 p.m.

President and Chief Executive Officer, Greater Toronto Airports Authority

Howard Eng

I think as one of my key customers in travel; all of you probably travel through my airport quite a bit. I think certainly the most common point where people encounter an issue is obviously security screening. That's the first point. That's harder to resolve than other areas.

4:55 p.m.

Liberal

Chrystia Freeland Liberal Toronto Centre, ON

We have 30 seconds, so a quick question. Given your Hong Kong experience, what can we do to improve especially business connections with China?

4:55 p.m.

President and Chief Executive Officer, Greater Toronto Airports Authority

Howard Eng

I think the best way is more direct flights and more connections to more destinations. I think the market there is huge. The propensity to travel there in five years' time is going to go from 0.5 to 1. That's 1.2 billion trips, of which 200 million will be going outside China. The total number of trips in Canada is at 100 million. If we can even capture a portion of that.... In order to make sure we capture that, let's make sure our infrastructure and our flights are there to bring people in a very easy, hassle-free manner to Canada.

4:55 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Randy Hoback

Thank you, Mr. Eng.

Ms. Freeland, thank you very much.

Colleagues, we have about four minutes left before we're done and we do have some committee business, so I think I'm going to go in camera here. I will suspend the meeting at this point in time just to allow the room to clear. Then we will go in camera and finalize what we're going to do next week.

I want to thank the witnesses for their testimony and we appreciate their time here today.

[Proceedings continue in camera]