Madam Chair and members of the committee, good morning.
I am very pleased to be here today, on behalf of Airbus Canada. You'll be hearing from colleagues of mine later.
My remarks will focus on the A220 program and related operations.
I'm going to start with a bit of background on Airbus.
Airbus has a 35-year-plus history in Canada in helicopter manufacturing. Today, we are the fourth-largest employer in Canada's aerospace sector, with some 4,000 employees. Our operations cover the A220 program, STELIA Aerospace's aerostructure activities and the work of Airbus Helicopters, in Fort Erie.
Airbus's presence has grown significantly since we launched the A220 program, the former C Series. Today, we own 75% of the program, which is based in Mirabel and employs some 2,500 people at two assembly sites—one in Mirabel and one in Mobile, Alabama, to serve the American market after the U.S. imposed tariffs.
The A220 program has received approximately 630 orders to date, 300 since July 2018, when Airbus launched the program, and over 140 aircraft have been delivered on four continents.
Even though the in-service fleet has performed remarkably well since the pandemic began, attesting to the high quality of the aircraft, the A220 program has been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
If you look at the employment, you see that when you go back to July 2018 there were about 2,000 employees in Mirabel on the program. We were, pre-COVID, about 2,800 employees and ramping up to get to 3,000 people. We had to run that down, actually, and now, today, we have 2,500 people.
We were producing four aircraft per month before COVID hit us and were preparing to ramp up to five aircraft per month at Mirabel. We are now producing three aircraft per month at Mirabel, and we expect to slowly ramp back up in 2021.
We delivered 48 aircraft in 2019, all from Mirabel. In 2020, 32 aircraft were delivered from Mirabel and six from Mobile, Alabama. This means that basically we can say that for the A220 program, the crisis has put us back roughly two years, with a significant impact as well on the commercial momentum.
How can Canada help the industry beyond just Airbus Canada? The first thing is that Canada needs to support the airlines. The airlines are the pillar of the industry. It all starts with the airlines, and for one year they have been at the forefront of the crisis. With the border restrictions preventing all international traffic from coming back up, today they are at about 20% of the 2019 levels on international travel. Airlines are suffering tremendously in terms of cash, operations, head counts and massive layoffs.
Other countries are supporting their airlines, and Canadian airlines are at risk of being disadvantaged compared to international airlines trying to fly back to Canada, which would have benefited from government aid.
The second thing is to support, obviously, the overall aerospace industry. It is important to understand that aerospace is a global industry that competes and partners across the world. It goes from a few large OEMs to some very large tier one suppliers, and then down to a myriad of tier two, tier three and tier four suppliers which can be small and fragile. The investments are very heavy and the lead times are very long.
If you look specifically at Canada, you see the aerospace sector is the third exporting sector in Canada. About 70% to 80% of the aerospace production in Canada is exported. As for the countries to which aerospace is exported by Canada, the U.S.A. is number one, and Germany and France are numbers two and three. You then find, for instance, Latvia as the fourth and Egypt as the sixth. Basically it's companies to which the A220 is delivered.
What you need to do to help is to ensure, first, that exportation remains available through EDC, and that EDC remains active in supporting the aerospace sector. The next is to provide urgent and short-term relief to our industry. Postpone some of the reimbursement of repayable loans granted to industry across various federal programs. Implement government guarantees to give oxygen to the more fragile companies. Set up development and consolidation funds.
We also need to have a more comprehensive strategy that is looking beyond the very short-term and urgent support to longer-term issues to support the R and D, to support the projects that are already ongoing to help enhance the competitiveness of the product—