Thank you very much.
It's a pleasure to be here in Ottawa. People from Montreal generally don't say that, but it's the centre of the world for the Canadian Parliament and system, so it's part of the experience economy to be here.
My background is that I grew up in Toronto. I taught at Oxford for many years, and, about 27 or 28 years ago, I started working with British Airways and with Lufthansa. I have done many courses with IATA, which is the International Air Transport Association headquartered in Geneva and in Montreal. I have done a lot of work with foreign airlines, so I bring that perspective, which I know my colleagues have as well.
Canada is a different place; it is unusual in a couple of different ways. It's a different place in terms of the size of the country, a small population and winter. You are Canadian parliamentarians, so this is not a surprise. We have winter here in Ottawa. These factors make huge differences.
You might say that Australia and Chile have big countries with small populations. We have it harder than they do. One of the things we really do have a problem with is government taxes and regulations. We will get back to that in a minute.
We have three big cities—Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver—from a population viewpoint. My brother's family in Calgary may forgive me; I apologize to them. In Vancouver, it is not only the size, but connecting us with Asia. These are huge issues we have to wrestle with. We're different.
We also have a lot of foreign airlines that fly to Canada. From Europe, you think of British Airways. Lufthansa flies to Montreal, Toronto and other places across the country. We have the U.S. airlines, including Delta Air Lines. Its international parts division is run by Alain Bellemare, a McGill grad, a Canadian who used to run Bombardier. A huge number of flights come into our major cities from the U.S., so we have much competition, more than we might realize on the surface.
COVID happened. It was the worst time in aviation history, which seems like an overstatement, but that history really only started with the Wright brothers flying, so it's not going back to the Roman Empire. COVID was the worst time. We did not support airlines very well in Canada compared to the U.S. and Europe.
I remember visiting WestJet. I don't know if it's still true, but they had six plaques of airlines that have gone bankrupt in Canada. They did that to keep WestJet employees aware of the history here in Canada. It's terrible for airlines. Some of that goes to Air Canada's dominance and now WestJet's, but we also have Porter with fairly deep pockets and a lot of interesting new planes. They had the great asset of the island airport. I flew there last week because I wanted to be in the heart of Toronto. You're at the island. You take a moving sidewalk. You take a free shuttle, and you're there. It's great, but they are now flying out of Pearson because the planes are too big for the island airport.
The biggest problem here is taxes. I took 48 McGill students to Morocco and Cairo in March. I'm getting prices right now to go to Kenya next year. I saw that $1,458 plus taxes made it $2,340. It went from we could afford it to we could not because of hundreds of dollars of taxes.
I have a radio show; I interview CEOs. I have interviewed the last four CEOs of WestJet, the last four CEOs of Air Canada, the CEO of Air France twice, KLM and so on. I have talked to many executives in the industry. There's little support for airports in Canada. This is the government's, Ottawa's, fault—or “approach” if I want to back off a little bit—and the government can improve this dramatically.
I have three key takeaways.
We have geography that's different from the rest of the world. We have to be aware of that, which we are; we're Canadians. We have huge taxes and fees. One of my neighbours works for IATA, and I have done a lot of work with them. We could not find a country of any any size in the world that has the kind of burden we have. We may have missed one, but when we looked at the U.S., the EU countries, Australia and other places, they are not remotely at the same level.
We need low-cost carriers, LCCs, but how do they survive with all the fees the government places on them? Do we need more competition? Yes. What we need less of are burdensome taxes, airport fees, etc. from broadly speaking—not to blame you—the government.
I end with five seconds left. I feel excessively proud of myself.