The six small airports that I've identified, including Charlottetown, Fredericton, and Prince George, are in smaller communities and have lower traffic volumes. These are all airports that handle fewer than 600,000 passengers a year. Even when the national airports policy was being written, it was recognized that airports with these lower traffic volumes would face challenges paying for infrastructure.
These are the gateways to the community. In the case of Prince George, which is located in northern British Columbia, I believe it takes about seven or eight hours to drive to Vancouver. We don't always think of these communities as having international business, but they do. If you go to Prince George, there is a college there that attracts students from all over the world, so the infrastructure components are critical, but they don't have the volumes of traffic that even the airports in Winnipeg or Halifax have. They are not large enough in the grand scheme of things, in terms of the volume of traffic, to get the revenue required through normal business practices to be able to cover the cost of infrastructure and their ongoing operating costs on a regular basis.
Air transportation is a highly capital-intensive industry. It's an expensive industry to operate in, and in the small communities, the economies of scale are just not there.