Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank all the witnesses for coming to committee today and for their presentations.
I was particularly interested in the presentations by Mr. Norejko and Ms. Gervais. I want to thank you for that. It made me think back 20 years to when I got my pilot's licence and the time and costs involved in doing that.
I was thinking about this just two weeks ago, when I read an article in The Globe and Mail about the RCAF considering hiring foreign pilots because of the pilot shortage here in Canada. I know that getting a pilot's licence is not cheap. An employee of mine received his pilot's licence about a week and a half ago. It cost him about $10,000, and that was using his father's airplane. Instructor time is not cheap. The cost of entry to become a pilot is high. Once you get your pilot's licence, you spend a lot of time on the ramp at a minimum wage job, hoping to be hired on as a bush pilot—flying into the north—or for some contractor or tourist operator.
If these flight schools suddenly had to start paying an additional 10% to buy their aircraft, how is that going to impact education for people interested in becoming pilots?