Thank you.
Madam Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today, as well as for your ongoing support in our efforts to improve the experience at airport screening.
My name is Daniel-Robert Gooch. I am the President of the Canadian Airports Council, which represents 54 airport operators.
My remarks for this afternoon have been split into two, with Steve Hankinson of the Vancouver Airport Authority continuing with the second part.
The Canadian Air Transport Security Authority is led by a hard-working team of professionals, but the organization's structure and funding as a Crown corporation is simply not responsive to the demands of a fast-growing air transport sector and the millions of additional travellers we're seeing at Canada's airports each year. This should not be seen as a negative reflection on CATSA's staff or screening officers, who remain committed to keeping air travel safe.
This is an essential service for commercial aviation today, but while Canada's airports have confidence in the security value delivered by CATSA screeners, the reliance on an annual political process to fund a service that travellers are already paying for through user fees simply doesn't work in a fast-growing, volume-based business centred on the care and comfort of real human beings.
Moreover, this reliance on tight annual funding decisions hampers the organization's ability to plan long term or invest in innovations that can deliver improvements in both security outcomes and faster processing times. The organization has not been able to deliver service levels that are acceptable to the industry or our air travellers, nor does it have the prospect of being able to do so as long as it is structured the way it is today. This has frustrated travellers, industry and government alike, which is why Canada's airports have worked with our air carrier partners for several years through an industry-led screening working group in a bid to improve the service for travellers.
These efforts culminated in a December 2015 submission to government on the need for internationally competitive service-level standards for screening, a letter that was signed by the CAC and Canada's two largest air carriers. We recommended a service standard of 95% of passengers being processed through high-volume checkpoints in under 10 minutes and no passenger waiting more than 20 minutes.
Having worked for years to convince government of the need to reform CATSA, Canada's airports are pleased to see the commitments made in budget 2019 to transition CATSA to a not-for-profit entity, using the non-share capital corporate model developed to similarly transfer Nav Canada and 21 privately operated national airports system airports in the 1990s.
We are pleased with the direction that government has chosen with this corporate model—which has been a success—but this effort is different, given that CATSA is traveller-facing and there is a lot to get right in the governance.