I'm going to make a couple of comments. We have some very passionate witnesses here today, and so I want to get a couple of things on the record and get some responses to them.
First of all, I represent a riding in Calgary. Our riding is a good half an hour's drive from the airport. Yet, within the last three years, because they have put in a new runway in Calgary, my area is now in a corridor that never used to be there. I get complaints similar to what many of you are registering today. This is something I'm very familiar with, not your particular situations, but a similar situation in Calgary.
The difficulty we have, however, is that as elected officials, we have to trust those with the expertise, and I would hope that's what Nav Canada has. We have a very safe environment for our aircraft. That isn't to say that we can't question them, and we have.
The reality also is that we're a bit of a victim of our own success in Canada. In my particular case in Calgary, the number of flights has literally tripled in the last few years. People want to fly. They want to fly with convenient schedules.
The second thing is that we've become a society that no longer goes to shopping malls. We like to shop online. We want those goods the next morning. These are all the things I think we have to take into account when we're doing this study.
The final comment I will make, which our first witness talked about, is on pilot training. We are told that in Canada today, we have a shortage of some 3,000 pilots. The airline industries are that short of pilots. If they are able to fill those roles, there is going to be a lot more training required, and I guess you have to do it where there's a take-off and landing strip.
With all of the comments I've made, I don't think any of us should be under the illusion that this is a problem that's going to go away in the very near future.
I wanted to make some of those comments to see if anybody had any response to them.
