Thank you.
My personal involvement as a pilot started 39 years ago and has continued in general aviation. The Hadfield family spans over 60 years in aviation, with three generations and four captains at Air Canada and with backgrounds as flying instructors, flying surveys up in the Arctic, and flying with an indigenous-owned northern Ontario commuter, Wasaya Airways, operating into the isolated reserves. It gives one a very unique perspective on my brother-in-law, who was commander on the space station.
In my background and with my family, our daily discussions centre around aviation. They've given me a very broad understanding of many of the issues facing the aviation sector.
While the motion has to do with flying schools and I do not have an in-depth background on that, within general aviation I certainly know the problems that we're hitting. What I wanted to do today was to deal with where we see problems. The Ninety-Nines is the largest and oldest organization of women pilots in the world, with over 6,000 members in pretty much every continent now.
This is not just an issue in Canada; it's an issue everywhere. I want to go through what we see as the problem and then, very quickly, what I see as the solution. We can deal with it further with questions if you want to.
The first problem is the very high cost of flight training, as you've heard in your meetings to date. Realistically, it costs $80,000 to $90,000 for a student to go from private pilot to the commercial licence with a multi-engine instrument rating. These high costs pose a special barrier, especially for students coming from households with a low income.
A solution is to make student loans that don't require collateral and co-signing available at the flying schools that are offering a diploma program, just as we have with other colleges and universities. Right now, those flying schools that do offer college programs are taken away from colleges and universities and classified as private colleges, so student loans and OSAP do not apply for them. It's creating quite a hindrance.
A precedent does exist for funding beyond loans. As you heard just the other day from, I believe, one of the pilots here—or it could have been Stephen Fuhr—back in the fifties, when you got your pilot's licence, they actually gave you a rebate once you reached a commercial licence, in order to help with those costs. A student loan forgiveness program could work the same way.
We don't have enough flying instructors. The instructors working at flight schools traditionally make a starvation wage. One of the solutions is to forgive the student loan if, for example, a graduate stays and works for two years as an instructor. Perhaps they could get a 40% rebate on what their student loan forgiveness would be, and if they stayed for four years, it would increase. In the same way that we do this for doctors, nurses and teachers that go up into the north, the same type of program could apply for flight students.
One of the other issues is that there are not enough young people considering it as a career. To me, making aviation a high school credit course would make a lot of sense. I've talked to our Ministry of Education in Ontario. As a past school board trustee, I'm aware of what's going on in the high schools, and they're really missing the mark. They are clueless when it comes to aviation. While there is a program in Ontario that has aviation and aerospace, they focus completely on items that are outside of aviation itself.
There aren't enough females. That's simple. Again, we can facilitate this by raising awareness in high schools, raising the profiles of successful females as role models, having material in packages for the guidance departments and teachers—including examples of female pilots who have successful careers—and having career days that have female professional pilots present at them. Organizations such as the Ninety-Nines already facilitate this with our current programs, working in conjunction with provincial ministers and creating new programs such as our “Let's Fly Now!” program.
Using that model in Manitoba, the Manitoba chapter of the Ninety-Nines has an airplane and works with the University of Manitoba and the St. Andrews flight school. They bought a simulator. It cost $15,000. It's free for girls to come in and use for learning procedures. Within two years, they have had over 20 women receive their pilot's licence, which is more than most of the Ontario flight schools combined in terms of female pilots.
There are not enough indigenous. We need to encourage flight schools into remote areas, such as Yellowknife, Thompson, or Senneterre. Although good flying weather is vital for a flight school, we have to go where they are; they're not coming down where we are.
We don't have enough flying schools. There are insufficient facilities for potentially new flight students. We can improve the business case for expansion because we are looking at enormous global shortages of pilots. A good business case exists to offer economic incentives to expand. Low-interest loans could help with the high capital cost for expansion in such areas as hangars and training aircraft.
There are a high number of foreign students who are taking up spaces in our flight schools. I believe the number right now is that 56% of all the students in the flying schools are from other countries. The country subsidizes the students to come here. The flight schools charge almost double the amount of tuition for them, so there's no incentive for our flight schools to not take them. The foreign students are good for our economy and they're good for the local areas where they come in. However, we have to recognize that these students leave immediately after they get their licence.