Members of the committee, thank you for extending the invitation to the Canadian Union of Public Employees to speak to you today on the Competition Act and air travel in northern, rural and remote communities in Canada.
CUPE is Canada's largest union, representing 740,000 workers, including more than 18,500 flight attendants among other workers in air transportation in Canada.
Canada's air transportation strategy and system have been built around two major market-oriented ideas. First is the need to increase competition between airlines, with the expectation that it will create more air travel options and put downward pressures on the price paid by travellers. Second is that the cost for air travelling should be absorbed by the users of air transportation.
After more than 35 years of this market-oriented experiment, evidence shows that the race to the bottom between airlines did not deliver the expected outcomes for air travellers and communities or for workers in airlines in Canada.
Airlines are businesses. They are going to fly where the money is, and they will do all they can to maximize profit, including cutting costs and services. Their goal is not to increase competition in air travel; it is to make profit. This race for more profits via low- and extra-low-fare carriers has major impacts on services across Canada. Airlines, small and big, are merging to continue to grow and increase their control over some markets. For instance, airlines in the north, like First Air and Canadian North, merged to maintain services, while others are leaving or decreasing services in northern, rural and remote areas for more profitable domestic or international flights from or to large urban areas.
Furthermore, airlines are continuing to force their employees to work unpaid hours to make more profit, and the federal government is complicit in it. Meanwhile, the existing competitive laws or policies will not appropriately investigate the impact of all this turbulence in air travel on airline workers, especially when mergers occur.
To deal with all this turbulence we see in air travel in Canada, some will call for more competition and more deregulation. They will call for more of the same approach that has left us where we are today, as if the call for across-the-board reductions of taxes and fees and across-the-board abolition of existing barriers to competition would be the magic solution to increasing access to air transportation in the north and in rural and remote areas. More needs to be done.
CUPE believes that access to air transportation in these areas is not a luxury. It is essential for the economic development of all parts of Canada, for the tourism industry as well as for the health of many people living in Canada who are forced to travel south or to larger communities to get specialized health care.
What we need is not more deregulation. We need to move toward a demarketization of air transportation, especially in the north and in rural and remote communities across Canada.
CUPE recommends three propositions to make air transportation more accessible, more affordable and more frequent in those areas.
The first is mandatory and price-controlled services to remote areas as a means to maintain an air carrier licence in Canada, a solution somewhat in line with what has been recommended by this committee in the past.
The second is maintaining and expanding public and/or not-for-profit ownership of airlines and airports and/or subsidizing airports to reduce costs to passengers if needed.
Third is directly subsidizing travellers using not-for-profits and publicly-owned airlines going to those areas as a means to compensate for the high costs and high user fees paid by travellers and airlines in these areas.
Strategies to de-marketize may vary based on locations and needs, but they all have in common more government interventions when market-oriented strategies are failing. Across the board, deregulation and cuts in fees and taxes would only limit different levels of governments' ability to intervene in these areas to broaden access to air travel in those parts of the country.
Thank you.