Transport Committee on May 7th, 2019

[Nancy Fitchett]

Sure. The ATSC is collected by the Government of Canada and does not flow to CATSA. As you mentioned, CATSA comes for parliamentary appropriations. The total amount of the ATSC, if that were to flow to CATSA, would certainly enable us to have a higher budget and deliver a higher wait-time service level, among other things. I would not say that this would necessarily increase the nimbleness of...the fact that we are a Crown corporation.

[Robert Aubin, NDP, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Thank you.

I have a question for Mr. McKenna now.

Earlier, you said that with this new approach, even security fees could vary from one airport to another. I understand the idea and I must admit that it worries me a little. Maybe you don't have that expertise, but I'm still asking you the question.

If each airport begins to determine its own security costs, can we develop regional airports such as those in Trois-Rivières, Sherbrooke or elsewhere that are designed to allow business people to reach major national airports or to host low-cost airlines? It will become virtually impossible for small regional airports to develop.

Is my view the right one or am I on the wrong track?

[John McKenna]

I think you're on the wrong track. I said that one of the models considered would allow airports to have different prices. There was no discussion about the possibility of having different prices at different airports. This may be part of the negotiations, I don't know, but it's not the case at the moment.

What the legislation would allow CATSA to do is to provide services on demand at some small regional airports. If this were the case, these services would be billed according to a method to be determined. In any case, this could be too expensive for small airports, given their customer volumes.

Unless I'm mistaken.

[Robert Aubin, NDP, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Okay. That's basically the situation—

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

You have only 10 seconds left.

[Robert Aubin, NDP, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Okay. Sorry.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Mr. Hardie.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Gee whiz, I should have downed a Red Bull or something to get all the questions in.

Mr. Wilson, it would appear very clearly that your experience is being used as something of a template as we move forward on this issue. Talk to us about the dispute resolution system. Inevitably there are going to be rubs between users and the organization, particularly over costs but perhaps over service levels, etc. When we're talking about security screening, that's often the focus of some angst on the part of the paying customers. The dispute resolution system, the conflict resolution system that you've employed, has that worked well? Can it be looked to as an example for CATSA?

[Neil Wilson]

That's a very good question.

There are two areas in which you want to have dispute resolution. One is with respect to the fees or charges. The other, as you noted, is with respect to the level of service.

With respect to charges and fees, for Nav Canada we must implement our charges or change our charges in line with certain charging principles that are contained in the legislation, in CANSCA. They are very, very similar to the charging principles that are in the bill before you. There are, as I say, a few differences, but they are very similar.

The dispute resolution mechanism is an appeal by the customers or by anyone affected to the Canadian Transportation Agency. In the course of our history, since 1996, there have been two appeals. We've been successful on them. We've been very successful, as Ms. Wiebe noted as well, in not raising our charges. In fact, we haven't raised our charges since 2004. We've lowered them four or five times since then, so there hasn't been much of a reason to have appeals.

On level of service changes, there are regulations around that. We give notice of changes in level of service. There are regulations around safety. Transport Canada is involved to make sure that anything we're proposing to do is done in a safe manner. If it's done that way, it's up to the business to decide how best to provide the service to our various customers and stakeholders.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Great. Thank you.

I want to talk about the pilotage changes. I was relieved to see that the study recommendation to amalgamate all of the pilotage authorities into one body wasn't followed. There's an effort to amalgamate the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, but it's very clear that operating conditions and safety necessities vary depending on where you are in the country.

At the same time, though, we see the regulatory powers being centralized. I'm just concerned as to how much of a one-size-fits-all regulatory regime is going to emerge out of this and how well that will reflect the different conditions that we have coast to coast to coast.

[Colin Stacey]

This is also enabling legislation. As a result of this legislation, there will be considerable work afterwards on the development of a regulatory framework that will bring together a single coherent set of regulations. In doing so, we recognize the absolute importance of regional, local factors in pilotage. We would expect that local stakeholders and the pilotage authorities themselves would play a very important role in terms of consultation in the development of that regulatory approach.

We certainly recognize the importance of local conditions, the importance of regional specificity in the pilotage system. We'll make sure that's taken into consideration.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

There is a concern, though, that in the contracts between a pilotage authority and, say, a pilot corporation, conditions could enter into those contracts that might paddle against the flow of where the national regulations are going to go. How are you going to manage that?

[Colin Stacey]

Very specifically, one provision in the bill is to ensure that issues that should be dealt with in regulation are not included as part of service contracts between the pilotage authorities and private pilot corporations.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

All right.

I'll turn the rest of my time over to Mr. Badawey.

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Hardie.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

You have 30 seconds.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Don't blow it all in one place, Vance.

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

You know what? Take it. Go ahead.

Gee, thanks, Ken.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Okay. Thank you very much.

Mr. Sikand.

[Gagan Sikand, Liberal, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

I'll share a lot of time with you, Vance.

Sara, in your opening statements you mentioned that, during implementation, a lot of models in the world were considered. Can you describe or tell us what models those were?

[Sara Wiebe]

When we were preparing to consult with industry, we looked at the different models around the world, as I mentioned. We looked at, for example, the transportation security agency in the United States. They have a model whereby they have the regulatory instrument and the operations in the same organization.

We didn't think that was something that works for Canada. I think we talked a little bit earlier about the Nav Canada experience. We felt it would be better for us to have the regulator separate from the operations.

We also took a look at different experiences in the United Kingdom and in Australia, for example. I'm just going to look at Dave to make sure I'm saying this correctly.

In the United Kingdom, the airports run the operations of the security screening and it's the airport that then gathers the fees and includes it in their other fees they collect, such as landing fees.

We also looked at the models that Australia has, where the airports run it, but the government collects the fees.

We were aware of the different experiences around the world and looked at how we could apply them to the Canadian experience. You've heard us say repeatedly that Canada is unique. Canada is such a large country with different regions. We have a very dense population along the U.S. border and a very sparse population in the north and some other regions. We have airports across the country. If you look at a model whereby the airports would run it, our concern was that this could create an inconsistency in terms of how all of these different airports in Canada would run airport security screenings.

Taking a look at the different experiences, we came back and again looked at the experience that we had with Nav Canada. We came back to the recommendation currently in Bill C-97, which is that we take the recipe created by the creation Nav Canada.

[Gagan Sikand, Liberal, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

I guess my next question would be for Lisa or Nancy. In assessing CATSA, what are your success indicators? How do you measure how successfully it operates?

[Nancy Fitchett]

Our corporate dashboard includes a number of metrics for a variety of areas at CATSA. The top priority of course, as was mentioned before, is security effectiveness and providing the highest level of security possible for the travelling public. There are also a variety of measures around wait times, customer satisfaction and technology availability, etc.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much. I'm afraid our time is up.

We need to use that last couple of minutes for some committee business prior to Ms. Block having to leave us.

I will suspend for a moment. Could the witnesses and the members of the viewing public exit quickly?

Thank you.

[Proceedings continue in camera]

[Public proceedings resume]

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

We're in open session.

What's the intent of the committee with regard to the letter to the finance committee?