Thank you, Chair, and welcome to our witnesses today. It's great to have you here with all your experience and knowledge on some of the topics we're discussing in terms of competition.
Professor Moore, you talked about how Canada is a large country with a large geography where we have terrible weather at times and it impacts airlines. We saw some of that a couple of winters ago.
The biggest piece that I see flying from Newfoundland and Labrador to Ottawa on a regular basis is the challenge of getting into rural and remote areas, and not exactly totally remote, but very rural like Atlantic Canada, for instance. Most of the flights for me for the past couple of years have been in three segments: Ottawa to Montreal or Toronto, then to Halifax, then to Gander. So it's basically a full day of travel by the time you arrive.
The problem with that is that only one airline is going in there and that's Air Canada, that is now subletting to provincial airlines. There's no WestJet. There's no Porter. There's no Sunwing, except on a seasonal basis, charter flights or something along those lines.
There used to be a time when you could get into Gander at two or three or four different times a day, but not anymore. Have you seen a competition trend for regional airlines at smaller airports in Canada over the past few years, or even a few decades? Has that declined? Is it very different than what it used to be?