If you look at NATO flying training in Canada, which is the existing military flying training program, when it was crafted, it was created within the context of international contribution and international involvement from the get-go. Right now it's partly due to try to generate revenue to subsidize the cost of operating the training centre. The training centre is expensive because you're now operating military aircraft that have a different price point from what you would see on the civil aviation side.
Certainly I think the approach of building tailored flight training programs is what we need to be targeting because the idea of saying you're going to have a fixed cost base that you need to operate to be able to deliver a training service.... If I can build that fixed cost base that has variable capacity, then the ability to inject participation by other students, whether or not that's civilian or from foreign nations, absolutely goes a long way in being able to amortize that cost.
Certainly I think the mindset we need to have as Canadians—and we certainly see this within our company—and the success we've had globally is that the solution to these problems involves a global mindset. If we look at anything in isolation from the complete ecosystem of pilot training, then you're only looking at one piece of the problem and the solution is much larger than that.
Even the conversation about are foreign students in Canada creating problems or is it possible to bring in foreign instructors to supplement Canadian instructors, think about it in the inverse. The demand we see for pilot production and pilot training requirements is so high globally that it is creating a draw on Canadian capacity.
I go back to what the others have said and suggest we need to focus on a few things. One is building tailored competency-based training programs, and two, really focusing on and emphasizing the ability to recruit active students.