That's an excellent question, and it was one that we struggled with as a panel.
One of the elements I should note in this is that if foreign ownership increases to 49%, it doesn't necessarily mean increased foreign airline competition in Canada. It merely allows carriers, or airlines, or air services companies to access a greater pool of capital, which, unfortunately, in a country of this size isn't as large as a lot of these start-ups would like it to be.
We struggled with this, but in the current context where we've seen significant improvements in the financial performance of the Canadian air carriers, going up to 49% wouldn't be something that would create a dramatic change in the playing field. We noted that some of the carriers had at one point or another advocated increases in foreign ownership to 49%, but have subsequently changed their positions on this. In the Canada EU open skies agreement there are in fact provisions already to increase foreign ownership to 49%. So idea that increasing foreign ownership to 49% would have a direct impact on the competitive positions of income and carriers was definitely considered, but we felt that going to 49% wouldn't have a dramatic impact.
In terms of the 100% for speciality carriers, we were primarily looking at air cargo. In a country like ours, with a landmass like ours, we have not been able to generate a lot of activity in the air cargo business by Canadian carriers. We do have Canadian air cargo operators that operate primarily domestically, but from Canada to the rest of the world, based on the input we heard from shippers, a lot of those goods tend to be trucked to the United States and then shipped outside Canada through U.S. airports.
We felt that given the limited Canadian activity in that space, there should be not a huge impact by increasing it to 100%, which arguably is more radical than 49%. It would help stimulate investment activity in a sector that Canada doesn't participate in a huge way.