Thank you, Madam Chair.
I want to make a general point because I've been hearing this on this panel and on the previous panel, too, and that's about the high cost of air travel in Canada. The government's airport rents and the fees are always blamed for that as if it's exclusively the only problem, but the reality is that it's not the major area for why there's a cost differential.
There's a Conference Board report from 2012 that did an analysis of why airline tickets are more expensive in Canada than in the United States. It found that we do, indeed, pay about 30% more for air travel in this country than they do south of the border, but that only 40% of that cost is Nav Canada fees and airport fees, and that 60% of that cost is attributable to utilization rates, labour costs, fuel costs, and other things that have nothing to do with airport landing fees and other fees that are charged in the system. I want to put that on the record because, while 40% is a significant component of the 30% price differential, it's not the only thing that's causing that price differential.
I have a question about joint ventures. In the 2011 case where Air Canada proposed the joint venture with United Airlines, the competition bureau disallowed 14 transborder routes from that agreement. Did Air Transat do a cost analysis of what would have happened had the competition bureau not imposed those conditions on that agreement?