Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I'd like to start by complimenting the committee for taking on this extremely important study. At NATA, we're gratified that parliamentarians are going to dig into such complex issues, and we wish you success.
NATA is certainly not the largest aviation organization you'll hear from, but we're probably the most colourful. I was reflecting on this last week during our safety forum in Yellowknife, when one of our members described the rather detailed requirements to report to Transport Canada when an aircraft collides with a caribou. I do not think you will hear this from any other association.
Our members fly over forbidding and spectacular landscapes in conditions that most Canadian aviators will never face, serving communities with no other means of transportation.
I'd like to address the issue of red tape in the terms of reference. For us, that's regulation—mostly safety regulation—but as you parliamentarians know very well, there needs to be balance.
While every safety issue is critical to our industry, every year you vote on a national budget that divides the government spending among hundreds of very important priorities, and I'm sure you'd often like to give more money to every one of them, but you have to prioritize. In recent years, the aviation sector has been wrestling with regulatory organizations that seem to have forgotten how to do that.
Notwithstanding the terrible impact of COVID on our industry and employees, we face a cascade of new regulatory measures all imposed at once. Quite often, these rules result in diminished system safety. Let me give you a couple of examples.
Revised rules for flight and duty times will reduce a pilot's duty day by one hour. This may seem like a good idea, except it means that a flight from Yellowknife to Eureka and return cannot be done in one day as it has been done daily for years safely. This means that crews will have to overnight in Resolute Bay, with minimum facilities both for aircraft and for crew, and a huge increase in costs.
Another example is TP 312, part five, which lists the rules for aerodromes and runway standards. Many northern airports in Canada were built in the 1970s and no longer meet the revised standards that are referenced in the international standards. While supposedly performance-based, these new rules restrict safety improvements on any form of performance-based alternate means of compliance because of the very rigid prescriptive-based standards.
I've spent my entire career in aviation and I've never seen operators so distressed. At last week's NATA 45, the northern and remote aviation conference, 200 industry stakeholders identified a severe workforce shortage, yet red tape is preventing operators from attracting and training northerners for flight crew as well as maintenance personnel.
We recognize that politicians have to be very careful when they comment on highly technical matters, especially when public safety is involved. You might be inclined to turn away, but we need you, as the elected representatives, to reaffirm the need for bureaucratic judgment and balance. Not all safety issues are equally important, and not all can be solved at once. This cascade of regulatory impositions needs to be moderated. I hope this committee will forcefully remind the public service of that need for balance.
I will now comment on costs to passengers. Air travel is very price sensitive, so we all have a motivation to control passenger costs. There are some factors that you are familiar with, such as rising inflation and increases in insurance premiums caused by the Ukrainian war, and the cost of fuel has effectively doubled in a few months. These are not new to you, and perhaps there isn't much you can suggest to fight these factors. I will point to two issues where the Canadian government might be able to help control costs.
The first is the very large amount of debt that was assumed during the pandemic as air carriers, airports and Nav Canada maintained services despite disastrous declines in traffic. We urge this committee to look into this. The levels of debt will drive prices for years to come and, with rising interest rates, the impact may be significant.
However, the other issue I want to emphasize, a huge, urgent issue, is worker shortages across airports and aircraft operators. We realize that every industry is suffering from this problem, but in the north we will soon be grounding aircraft and depriving communities of service, as we can't find more qualified personnel. This has happened in the States and has happened in places in Canada already.
We have a double frustration because we're often the training ground for pilots and maintenance specialists, who are recruited away to work for the larger airlines in the south after we have spent money and time training them. Federal employment funding programs or sector council support does not apply to northern and remote Canada in most cases. The problem will drive prices and services in wrong directions.
We need to engage with the government on a northern aviation skills strategy, and we urge this committee to add your voices in support of this critical priority.
Thank you.