My name is David Rheault. I'm the senior director of government relations for Air Canada.
In our brief, we have expressed concern about the precedent that this change opens. In the current system, passengers already pay a fee for security, charged when they purchase a ticket. Right now, the amount collected from passengers exceeds the budget of CATSA. In the past year, the number of passengers has significantly increased, the amount collected from passengers has increased, yet CATSA's budget remains relatively stable. The consequence of that is that you have more traffic and fewer resources to screen the traffic, which causes delays and waiting times, which ultimately causes Canadian hubs to be less competitive than foreign hubs. This is an opening for CATSA to have an agreement with airports to buy more services.
The concern we raise in that respect is that passengers already pay for that, so you open the door to a system that is user-pay plus. Passengers pay when they buy their tickets, airports will charge airlines, and ultimately this will have an impact on the cost of travel. We say, if you want to open a door to the possibility of buying extra screening for extra service, you must set a service level standard that would be guaranteed by the actual funding from passengers. If airports want to do more, they could buy from CATSA, but at least the public floor should be clear and standards should be set.
Does that answer your question?