Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses for being here and engaging with us on this topic.
I want to take it in a bit of a different direction. We're talking about competition in the air sector. Ostensibly, part of the conversation is how to resolve this issue of new entrants to the market having trouble competing with the big airlines. We've heard about taxes and fees, yet I think Mr. Roy made the good point that if you lower the bar for everyone, you're not creating a competitive advantage for smaller airlines; you're just making air travel cheaper and, of course, someone is going to have to pick up those costs.
Certainly, we hear the idea being floated that Canada should be subsidizing airports publicly in a greater way. What I want to ask about is the larger public policy objective when it comes to passenger transportation, because what we're talking about isn't how to make flying cheaper, but how to move people. I think it's a very worthy policy objective that we need to think about more broadly.
Only about half of Canadians fly regularly, or at least those were the last numbers I saw. They may be from several years ago. Perhaps more people are flying now. However, there's a significant portion of the population that doesn't fly. We're in a country that has no bus system. One of the least expensive ways to move people around a big country is by bus, yet we have virtually nothing connecting our country since Greyhound pulled out. Our passenger rail system is a shadow of what other countries are capable of having.
When we talk about scarce public finances, where do we invest those finances in the way that has the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people when it comes to transportation?
Is investing public subsidies in airports the direction we should be looking in, so that we can get more people flying more cheaply? Is that the primary public policy objective that we should be considering in this conversation?
I'm happy to direct that to whoever wants to answer it. Perhaps we'll start with Mr. Gradek and then we can go to Mr. Moore here in person.