Transport Committee on Oct. 3rd, 2022

[Patrick Charbonneau]

Absolutely.

The pandemic showed that vacant buildable lots are getting rarer and rarer. We still have many lots that are connected to the utilities that could be built on. We want to curtail urban sprawl and limit development to the zone where it is authorized. However, the servitude takes that possibility away from us and, once again, the agricultural zone will pay the price.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mayor Charbonneau and Mr. Garon.

Next, we have Mr. Bachrach.

Mr. Bachrach, the floor is yours. You have two and a half minutes.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Lawford, in your opening remarks, you spoke of an alternative model for adjudicating APPR claims. I wonder if you could expand on that a bit. Thinking back to the pandemic experience, which created the bulk of the backlog currently before the CTA, if there was a different adjudication model, how would things have rolled out?

[John Lawford]

There would still have been a bulge in complaints, given all the uncertainty around refunds when COVID first came and, more recently, around baggage loss and other delays this summer.

However, the model I'm referring to is largely done in telecommunications, where a consumer makes a complaint directly to the CCTS. The agent can take the consumer complaint, contact the telecom and get an answer back. It has to be done within a month, so the timeline is short and the resolution is informal. If the telco wants to make the offer and the customer is happy with it, it's done, and there's no need for a formal decision of any kind. The trouble with the CTA is that they still have their tribunal hat on and that's unnecessary for most of these claims—the amounts are too small.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

With the tribunal hat on, what does the process look like for the 24,000 or so people who are on this backlog?

[John Lawford]

As I said, they do have mediation and conciliation-type streams. The folks I've spoken to claim that they have a less formal process, which works something like the method for CCTS. But it still gets a formal CTA number and the airline can object, as we've seen, to what looks like a routine case and drive it through to adjudication, which it cannot do in telecom. That just means that everything has to be litigated over and over at CTA.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

I have a similar question for Mr. Gradek.

I imagine my time is almost up, but the chair's not looking, so I'll keep going.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Gradek, by the government's own admission, it dramatically underestimated the rebound in travel demand. With the benefit of hindsight, going back, if that had been predicted and you were the transport minister, what actions would you have taken to help avoid the situation that we saw?

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Bachrach, for that wonderful question. I appreciate it very much.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

You can think about it until the next round.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Next, we have Mr. Dowdall.

Mr. Dowdall, I very much look forward to your line of questioning.

The floor is yours.

[Terry Dowdall, Conservative, Simcoe—Grey, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank all the presenters who are here today. This report we could look at for a long period of time. We could also break it apart, when we talk about urban and rural airports and the challenges that each faces.

In my prior life, I was fortunate enough to sit on a board of directors in the municipal world for one of the regional airports there. There were two things that came out of it that I learned from.

One was how important that airport really was in the grand scheme of things—which I really wouldn't have looked at without being on that board—for local businesses, people going to different places and how important it was. It was Lake Simcoe Regional Airport, which got purchased by the county.

The other thing I realized was how hard it was to find funding to keep that airport going. In fact, the big day of the year was usually when we had Base Borden and we had the air show. The price on the fuel and how much fuel we sold was considered a windfall. It just shows you how important it is to get those dollars that are out there. As I said, it's so hard, even for the restaurants that are there. They have restaurants that are renting spots for food at all the airports that we have there.

Just the increased cost of inflation and even the carbon tax, for instance, that's going to be placed on this fuel.... What is it going to mean for a lot of these airports—all airports certainly, but a lot of these small ones? There's another one that I have, for instance, that has flying schools that go out of it so we have future pilots.

What is it going to mean? Is that something that you're hearing concern about?

[John Gradek]

I am concerned. What we see happening at small airports across Canada.... There are different grades of airports. There are regional airports. There are community airports. I think we're going to start seeing more of the smaller airports fall by the wayside and shut down. They are not going to be able to survive the lack of investment that's going to be required in order for them to sustain their operations.

We'll see a reduction in air services to smaller communities unless we have a different funding model. Unless we come up with a new model that looks at having support coming from different levels of government or from the private industry to keep these airports sustainable and keep them in operation, they will shut down.

[Terry Dowdall, Conservative, Simcoe—Grey, ON]

I have a follow-up to that. When you're talking about the funding model, should we break it apart into types of airports a little bit differently?

I know for us and even Taylor.... I heard earlier about the airports he has in his area and the importance they have. I think sometimes.... Certainly when I sat on the board, we almost felt that we weren't heard as a small airport and there was a whole lot of frustration.

Do you think that as part of the model they need to look at that, perhaps, the importance to each community, and not just the dollars and cents, as we say?

[John Gradek]

As I mentioned earlier, air transportation is a fundamental right in this country. If we value our fundamental rights, we have to value air transportation as being part of those fundamental rights. I think it's important that we have a policy of making sure that the infrastructure is in place to support that fundamental right and that we do have the investment required to make those airports fully functional.

Where the money comes from is a debate. We'll have that debate at a certain point in time, whether it's coming from government, from the private sector or from the operators. What I know right now is that the system is broken for small airports. We need to do something quickly.

[Terry Dowdall, Conservative, Simcoe—Grey, ON]

To your point, the time frame is extremely important for a lot of these places across Canada right now.

[John Gradek]

It's not going to be decades. I think we're going to start seeing that smaller airports tend to shutter down. The user-pay model for these small airports.... As much as the federal government has put in the capital allocation program for small airports, it is nowhere near enough.

[Terry Dowdall, Conservative, Simcoe—Grey, ON]

What could they do immediately now, though, for these small airports to make sure they can continue? A lot of times we seem to help after the fact. A lot of things come to light when it's too late, we find.

What can we do now to ensure the longevity of these airports?

[John Gradek]

It's a good question. I don't have the answer to that.

I think it's important that we really have a good understanding of what the needs are first. I'd like to be able to take a few days, weeks, months or whatever it takes to basically just take an inventory of what the needs are for these airports in terms of getting them up to scale. We don't want them to have category III landing systems at small airports like Prince George or Bonavista. I think we're looking at what the minimum level of service is that we should be offering to these smaller communities and the airport infrastructure to support them.

[Terry Dowdall, Conservative, Simcoe—Grey, ON]

Also, there should probably be no increase in any fees at this particular moment in time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Dowdall and thank you very much, Mr. Gradek.

Last up for the first hour we have Mr. Rogers.

The floor is yours. You have five minutes.

[Churence Rogers, Liberal, Bonavista—Burin—Trinity, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thanks to all three of our guests for being here today.

I've listened with great interest to Mr. Gradek's commentary today on many of the questions that were asked. I'm not sure where I want to go with this, but there are a couple of questions I'd like to put to you.

Of course, we know about the shutdown of the industry, the opening up again, and the nightly news items about long lines at airports and lost baggage pileups in airports—not only in Canada, but around the world. It was quite a mess.

I have to get on the record, though, that our government provided some tremendous support to the airline industry, to the tune of a billion dollars in different forms through CERB, wage subsidies, bailouts to airlines and so on. Let's not have a misconception about that.

On the regional airports, I fly into one in Gander, Newfoundland. We're pretty pleased with our government and how they responded to the concerns and issues of trying to survive. There were a lot of good stories, but there were a lot of problems. There still are some problems, quite frankly.

I must say, you characterized it very well. I share many of the views that you've presented here today.

With all the mass of problems with travel and the long lines and all these things, there's been a lot of finger-pointing all around. There are conspiracy theories about why the problems occurred.

My question for you is this: Was the federal government deliberately being targeted by PR campaigns as being the main cause of these delays so other players in the system could avoid responsibility? If so, how much do we know about these PR strategies?

[John Gradek]

I'm not going to make the simplified assumption that it's a PR strategy. My comment will be to try to understand the finger-pointing that was going on and try to understand the root cause of the problem. I got a little bit concerned in listening to the debate going on in terms of people trying to figure out who's taking responsibility and who should take accountability for these issues that we're facing.

I think it may not be a structured PR campaign, but significant off-loading of responsibility was taking place by the airline industry in terms of pointing fingers.

I sympathize with the Minister of Transport, when he basically made the statement that it was not his responsibility, and that he had no intention of telling the airline industry how much capacity to put in the marketplace. That was a very bold statement on the part of the minister to say that, which says to me that there has to be a process and a system in place for some adjudication in terms of how we decide how much capacity and how much service we actually have to be able to support the system.

That's where we need another model in place to basically say that we'll keep it out of the hands of the minister. However, we need something to replace that in order to make the decision as to how much capacity and demand we put into the system. It wasn't working this year.

[Churence Rogers, Liberal, Bonavista—Burin—Trinity, NL]

We saw other countries retain and rehire employees by increasing salaries quickly over the summer. Did something similar happen in Canada with the airlines and airports, or can poor wage growth be partly to blame for the lack of rapid hiring?