Thank you for that great question.
Airports are never able to hire CATSA staff, but they are able to invest in CATSA to increase their staff complement at their airport. In the past, Pearson has done this when it wasn't able to get the number of screeners needed at its airport in order to meet their traffic volumes, as CATSA did not have the budget to deliver on those service volumes.
Pearson has taken on a billion dollars in debt to get through the pandemic. It's an extraordinary amount. They're in a challenging position right now in that they cannot invest in increasing the number of CATSA employees at the airport. Nor does CATSA have the ability. They're trying to “staff up”, so I think they're trying to meet demand on their own. We're not in a position where we would need to make that additional investment in CATSA resources right now.
The first week in May, passenger traffic peaked at 70%, so it got back to the 70% level for that first week in May. We're expecting seat capacity in July to be back to 90% in Canada. That's seat capacity.
A big ramp-up needs to happen here, and I think we need to look at how we adequately fund and staff CATSA and move forward to support our airports and the growth that we're seeing.