Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you, members of the committee, and thank you to my fellow witness colleagues.
My name is Gary Ogden—Gary Douglas Ogden, if my mom's watching—and I'd like to speak to a higher level. My colleague Mike Rocha, who is an executive from our flight school, will be speaking to this committee on the 19th. I'd like to touch on some of the elements of our business and offer analysis of a possible root cause showing why we're in the situation we're in right now.
My background aligns itself with airports, airlines and ground service providers in the aviation industry. I rode my bike to the airport in 1979 and haven't been home since. I started as a security guard and I became a CEO. The business and the industry holds much for us all, and it offers opportunity.
I'm concerned with the fact that I have five major clients, all of whom—including Aura Airlink, which will be doing business as Central North Flying Club—are struggling to find and keep people. We face the enemy of attrition and turnover in aviation.
I have worked overseas at airports in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, in the States, and pretty much everywhere. I choose to work in Canada because I'm proud of our aviation, and as my colleague points out, we have a vast history of training. We are world-renowned for the training we offer. Part of the reason I wanted to be involved with Aura and CNFC in a flying school in Canada is that we have this reputation and should be able to attract domestic students, and we should be very successful at attracting international students as well.
We do this business for two reasons, one a holistic reason. These do still exist. I listened to my colleagues here speak about this earlier. There are holistic reasons for doing this work. We see a shortage and we want to fill it. We want to accommodate the view stated by ICAO, IATA and ATAC, and all of the industry pundits who say that there is growth in their business. We want to accommodate that growth. We want to facilitate regional access. We don't want to lose regional access by having no air service. We want also to serve our remote communities and our indigenous people to the level to which they deserve to be served. We want to build bridges and we want to fly over obstacles. We want to do so holistically, but then the economic reality sets in: The math doesn't work. Airlines and the industry itself are burdened with a number of challenges. The price of a ticket today is probably as low as or maybe less than it was in 1980, yet our costs are a lot higher.
Central North Flying Club plans to start up in Sudbury. A regional airport has to struggle to get the attention of government. I salute Mr. Fuhr and the efforts of the current sitting and previous governments as we work towards alleviating some of this problem. The problem with general aviation, GA, at regional airports is that they don't generate revenue. They generally don't pay for themselves. At best, they are revenue neutral. We don't have duty free. We don't have parking. We don't have non-aeronautical revenues to support the airport.
Kelly, who I believe is gone for now, brought up the ACAP. We need to do more for regional airports at which flying schools are located to ensure that the flying school is not burdened with the infrastructure of that airport. We have to see the flight schools, the medevac, the charters, and the public flying and learning as critical, as providing a benefit in the pipeline of our aviation industry.
In a hockey sense, think of it as your farm team. If you don't have a farm team, if you don't reproduce for the future, you are doomed not to successfully live it. We must support the farm team, must support flying schools, and must support regional aviation to the best of our abilities.
I thank all of you, because there are a number of initiatives with loans, student work programs and LMIAs. We have a number of initiatives. As for what I would like to see—I was talking to my friend MP Sikand about this—maybe we have to get our information out there better. Maybe there are programs, but maybe they're not consolidated and maybe they're not accessible, so for somebody who struggles...and God bless our friend who started a flight school after it looked like it was closing.
Maybe access to information is something that we can do, perhaps even as low-hanging fruit. Give people access to the information that they can use in order to access those funds that you have there. As well, let's grow the funding, and let's grow the initiatives to further those funds.