Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you for inviting us to this committee to speak about Premier Aviation and Bill C-10.
My name is Ron Di Bartolo and I am the president and CEO of Premier Aviation. I'm joined by my colleague Jean-Pierre Bastien, vice-president of operations of Premier Aviation in Quebec City.
To start, I would like to provide you with some background on Premier Aviation. We are a wholly owned Canadian business that provides primary airframe maintenance to the aviation industry. In addition to doing airframe maintenance, we also have facilities and capabilities to do paint work and other maintenance on aircraft.
We currently have four facilities, located in Trois-Rivières, Quebec; Quebec City; Windsor, Ontario; and Rome, New York. Our Canadian facilities employ 550 people, while our facility in the U.S. employs 170 individuals.
Our company facilities provide service to a number of airlines and different aircraft types. In Trois Rivières we service Air Canada and its fleet of Embraers and its partner Sky Regional and its fleet of Embraers also. We also provide paintwork for WestJet.
In Windsor we service WestJet's fleet and currently service First Air, Canadian North, and Sunwing. This facility handles Boeing 737s, ATR 42s, Embraer 190s, and other aircraft types.
In Quebec City we service American, Caribbean, and European operators, including Piedmont Airlines, Peninsula Airways, Corvus, LATAM, Air Guyane, LIAT, and several lessors of aircraft.
In Rome, New York, we service a variety of aircraft for Republic Airlines, Atlas Air Cargo, and GECAS.
Our ability to service so many aircraft types for different clients has come from years of investment in our workforce. Clients seek Premier Aviation because of our hard-earned reputation for excellent quality of work, quick turnaround times, and flexibility to schedule maintenance, all while being cost competitive. This is what it takes to be competitive in this industry. Our ability to also do paintwork and other maintenance provides us a significant advantage over our competitors and makes us value-added to our clients.
With respect to our work with Air Canada, we were first contracted to do paint and maintenance in 2009. Following the closure of Aveos in 2012, the scope of our work for the airline expanded to include heavy maintenance of some of its Embraer aircraft. Due to the positive results of this maintenance, Air Canada soon contracted Premier to do all maintenance on its Embraer fleet. Previously this work had been done by Aveos and Embraer facilities in Nashville, Tennessee.
Today, because of the advantage we can provide to Air Canada, all of its work is done in Trois-Rivières and supports the 354 employees presently there. In addition, this growing work has required us to expand our facilities throughout Québec at different times. As a competitive MRO facility in Canada catering to not only Canadian but international companies, we know we have what it takes to compete in this industry. We are competitive. Bill C-10 and its amendments to the Air Canada Public Participation Act would not restrict the location of the work we do for Air Canada and would provide flexibility for us to keep growing our business with the airline.
Over time we have shown that we can compete for Canadian business as well as for international business, and it is our hope that we will continue to grow and create maintenance jobs in Canada. With our highly skilled workforce and our expertise, flexibility, and low cost structure, we are well positioned to do so.
Thank you.