Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for having us today.
A lot of what I'm going to say is really going to echo Mr. Priestley and Mr. Sparling, as they are also airline operators.
Pascan is a regional airline out of Quebec. We serve 11 destinations, a bit remote in the province of Quebec. Canada is a big, vast territory, the populations are very small and the distances are very vast.
The problems that we've been seeing a lot lately are really towards the fees. Airport fees in Quebec have been spiralling out of control over the last years. Right now, landing fees, terminal fees, airport improvement fees and security fees are things we see increasing all the time and the passengers aren't willing to pick up the bill. For de-icing, for example, at a lot of the airports we find ourselves paying the same amount monthly as the bigger operators flying 737s. We fly small turboprop aircraft and we end up paying the same monthly bill to be a part of the consortium. These are things that are really unbalancing regional aviation compared to the bigger national carriers, and something needs to be done to help level that playing field.
For landing and terminal fees, if you get, for example, a small turboprop under 40 seats, we're paying $240, versus a jet carrying over 100 passengers at $306. It's really hard to allocate that extra cost over so few seats, which is driving the ticket up quite a bit. The Nav Canada fees are pretty much the same thing. We operate small, regional aircraft, and basically we pay per seat quite a bit more than a jet flying in other parts of Canada. These are things that we would really like to have looked at to try to be more competitive as a regional carrier versus the mainline transporters.
A lot of the red tape we're faced with today is with the airport security exemptions. We're a carrier that provides a lot of critical cargo to a lot of remote regions in Quebec and we had different exemptions over the years. During the pandemic, Transport Canada took the decision to take away a lot of these exemptions, and we cannot get a real, clear reason as to why. Critical cargo that we were flying to the regions previously is now very difficult to do. We've had to put infrastructure in place and additional personnel. Time-sensitive cargo is something that we're dealing with and it's affecting the regions directly. It's not affecting the big city centres, but people living in the remote areas are really suffering due to this.
In the same token on the exemptions, we used to have a security exemption allowing us to fly passengers who were flying out of non-designated airports to designated airports, and now those passengers have to get off a plane each time they arrive in a designated airport, pass through security and pick up their bags just to take the same flight to their final destination, making things really difficult and costly for people in the regions to fly.
Again, like Mr. Priestley and Mr. Sparling spoke about, the flight and duty regulations for us are catastrophic. We've had to increase our pilots by 30% in the last year since the new flight and duty regulations came out. The problem we're facing is that there aren't 30% more pilots. There are almost no pilots, and we don't see this situation improving anywhere in the short term. The flight and duty requirements are going to be added to the 703 and 704 licences as of December 17, 2022, adding an additional pressure to the industry. We require more and more pilots, and there are fewer and fewer pilots out there. We're already having to reduce some of our flying going forward to certain regions of Quebec because we can't find the staff to do the flights.
Again, there's the fuel. As everybody says, it's coming as no surprise. One day last week, we had an increase of 50¢ per litre, which is representing about $30 per ticket, not counting the 60¢ that we had the weeks prior. We really need to do something to take control of the fuel prices, as they're adding directly to the tickets. We would have a normal round-trip ticket to the regions at about $300 one-way, and today we would have to charge $450 just to cover the fuel.
That's pretty much it. It's very technical, but that's what we're dealing with.