Evidence of meeting #22 for Transport, Infrastructure and Communities in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was airports.
A recording is available from Parliament.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Airports Council
Canada's airports have invested, since 1992, $9.5 billion across Canada.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Airports Council
Toronto is the largest chunk of that. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of $6.2 billion or $6.3 billion would probably be in the Quebec City-Montreal-Toronto corridor.
There is expansion going on all the time. Quebec City just expanded and built a new air terminal building. Montreal has ongoing expansion plans.
NDP
Dennis Bevington NDP Western Arctic, NT
Are you anticipating a greater frequency of air traffic in the future and a continued expansion of these airport facilities?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Airports Council
The best projections we have in 2009, right now, show us getting passenger travel back in Canada to where it was before the recession hit--and it has hit hard--somewhere in the neighbourhood of 2011. And there is continued growth. The airports are in a situation where the way they're operated and managed today is drastically different from what it was before. And they're constantly looking ahead because they have been given a mandate by Her Majesty as managers of the facilities, to grow, and to grow with the communities.
So yes, there will be future growth. That's dependent upon each airport's growth expectations.
NDP
Dennis Bevington NDP Western Arctic, NT
Yes. So if we're looking at taking 40% of your customers away and putting them on fast rail in that corridor, you'd likely not continue with a growth scenario. You would have to adjust that, and there would be considerable capital savings in the years to come in terms of what you have to spend on the airports to match up to the growth.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Airports Council
Not having done the comparison between investments in high-speed rail versus the existing expansion of current airports, it's difficult to say one way or the other.
NDP
Dennis Bevington NDP Western Arctic, NT
The last study didn't give any value to reducing capital expenditures in any other transportation field. I'm trying to find the match that means we have a full understanding of what it means to drop high-speed rail into this region.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Airports Council
As are we. We share your search for the knowledge.
NDP
Dennis Bevington NDP Western Arctic, NT
Okay. Well, hopefully we can continue that.
There's another thing I'd like to ask you. You understand the nature of air transportation probably pretty well. Most of the greenhouse gas emissions are with regional carriers. Is that right? The difference between international and regional carriers is pretty marked, according to the numbers I've seen.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Airports Council
When you look at aviation's contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, you will find that it is largely with the carriers, with the aircraft, and that takes place either on the ground but predominantly up in the air. There's a very small percentage of it that actually takes place on the ground at an airport facility itself.
NDP
Dennis Bevington NDP Western Arctic, NT
No, I was trying to get to the difference between international or large-scale travel and regional travel, because I don't think we're going to replace travelling across the country in an airplane with high-speed rail. We're only going to do it in the corridors, so the traffic that will be curtailed at your airports will be regional carriers in that corridor.
What percentage of the business of your corridor is regional carriers?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Airports Council
Right now, if memory serves me right, if you look at Air Canada, because their regional feed is provided by Air Canada Jazz, I believe Air Canada Jazz has about 55% of the regional market. I can't recall what WestJet's is, so perhaps you may be impacting the regional feed between Quebec City and Toronto on a flight, or Quebec City and Halifax--anywhere else, I don't know.
I think the important thing to look at is not that route in terms of origin and destination but in terms of how it fits into a larger picture. So if you take a passenger from Quebec City into Toronto on high-speed rail.... Let's take that scenario for a minute--and it could be the reverse, getting into Quebec City. If you're going into Toronto, you want to make sure that the high-speed rail connectivity meshes with a larger plan, perhaps, for aviation in the GTA or elsewhere. It's not only about origin and destination point to point; it has to fit into something that makes some sense. That's why we say that at this time it's hard for us to take a stand either for or against it. We're not against it right now, but we need more information and we're asking you to look at this, as Mr. Volpe pointed out, in a larger context going forward.
We appreciate that you don't have a lot of answers either.
Conservative
Colin Mayes Conservative Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
As a member of Parliament from British Columbia, I appreciate the airlines. I wouldn't want to be racing across the country every second weekend, doing 3,300 miles on a fast-speed train across this country.
One of the things this committee heard from one of the witnesses was that the population densities in the corridor between Montreal and Toronto are actually equal to or more than those densities in corridors in some of the fast-speed rail lines in Europe. Are you aware of that, Mr. Facette?
Conservative
Colin Mayes Conservative Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Mr. Chair, we should have that information confirmed, simply for us to know, because we've heard two different stories here and I'd like to know if that is a true statement.
Liberal
Joe Volpe Liberal Eglinton—Lawrence, ON
He only said he's not aware of it, because he didn't hear me giving out the stories before.
Conservative
Colin Mayes Conservative Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Oh, okay.
What would be interesting to me is the number of people who would use high-speed rail, what I would call commuters rather than travellers, those who were flying from one destination to another. That, I think, would be an interesting statistic, to really discern whether or not those who would use that high-speed rail would be maybe going to work or to shop in Toronto from 100 or 200 kilometres out.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Airports Council
It would be.
I think a lot of the air travel in Canada continues to be domestically based. We have seen, as a result of the economy obviously, a significant drop in transborder travel between Canada and the United States, and international travel has come down in many parts of the country. So yes, there's a large domestic component and that will continue for some time to come, we expect, although I would caution you in looking at numbers too much. The current recession has, I think, shed a light on what can happen to projections, so you want to be careful.
Conservative
Colin Mayes Conservative Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Thank you.
As far as optimum seat utilization by the airline goes, do you see where there will be some challenges regarding air traffic and capacity within existing airports to really handle increasing volume in the future?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Airports Council
The short answer is no. The investment of $9.5 billion has been made by the Canadian Airports Council members with the idea in mind that they can handle growth. Toronto can handle about 10 million more passengers--that may be stretching it a little. I know that some airports try to be careful about building out too much. Parking is a challenge.
We have the capacity to handle continued growth in Canada going forward. We don't have the same challenges they do in the United States, where they are really under some serious capacity constraints going forward.
Conservative
Colin Mayes Conservative Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
You mentioned earlier that the airlines pay user fees for airport improvement and that type of thing. I guess they are reflective of the number of flights taken in at an airport.
I know the challenges, because in the Vancouver area the cruise ship lines have told us that they are losing half of their cruise ship passengers to Seattle simply because a passenger can fly to Seattle for $300 less than flying into Vancouver.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Airports Council
That's absolutely correct. We lose 1.7 million passengers to Buffalo. It's an awful lot of people.
Conservative
Colin Mayes Conservative Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
That's probably a good topic for study in the future.
To Mr. McSweeney, one of the challenges we had about three years ago in British Columbia was all the activity in the shipments of cement to Asia. There was a lack of supply. Lafarge has a plant in Kamloops. I talked with the operations president of that facility, and he said they just couldn't keep up with domestic needs.
Do you see that as a challenge as we roll out our infrastructure and possibly take on something as large as this project?
