Thanks so much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses for contributing to this study.
It's really interesting to hear that the circumstances facing residents of Newfoundland and Labrador are very similar to the circumstances facing rural and remote communities on the other side of the country. Certainly, communities in northwest B.C. face the same pressures that our witnesses have described.
I think over the course of this study we've been grappling with some of these different policy approaches to get at this issue of cost and lack of competition in small communities. I'm especially interested in these programs that have been implemented in Quebec and in the United States that directly subsidize air service for people in more remote or rural areas.
I was noting that in 2015 there was a report by the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut on protecting rural air transit, and that idea of direct subsidy programs got panned pretty thoroughly, both by airlines themselves and by others, as being overly expensive and open to abuse, misuse and often serving political ambitions. There were some pretty strong words given when it came to those kinds of direct subsidies, favouring the approach of investing in infrastructure and driving down costs for airlines.
I guess the question we've been wrestling with is that if you drive down costs for airlines, it's difficult to ensure that those savings are passed on to the passengers themselves. I wonder if all of our witnesses could just talk about this tension between directly subsidizing the passengers to ensure that they get the best possible price and affordable air service, and making it less expensive for airlines to operate in the hope that that will reduce barriers to entry for new airlines. What's the right mix of those kinds of policies?
Maybe we can start with Mayor Andrews, and then we'll go around the virtual table.