Mr. Speaker, it was enjoyable hearing the hon. member give us his thoughts on the Liberal policies on the national airport program.
No doubt the hon. member has heard the word skimming before and is well acquainted with the meaning of the word skimming, to take something off the top. With regard to the national airport program, the program he says is doing so well with these 26 national airports, is he aware that some of those national airports are already financially insolvent? They are financially insolvent because of the fee the federal government collects from them. That fee structure is based on deemed revenues and deemed profits, not what they really make. The government said: "We will calculate it based on this projection and that projection, you will bring in this much money and it will in turn give you this much profit and we want it".
At least two of the airports, Calgary and I believe Edmonton, are already financially insolvent. The hon. member mentioned Halifax. Halifax is well aware of this and has hired the same financial consultants because they know that this is an absolutely unworkable formula.
With regional airports, which the hon. member also mentioned, there is another form of skimming. I will use my province of British Columbia as an example but this problem exists in every province. My home airport, Castlegar, feeds six flights a day to Vancouver and two flights a day to Calgary. The same thing happens throughout my region, at Cranbrook, Penticton, Kamloops, Williams Lake and all those other airports. The big airport that is part of this national airport plan, Vancouver airport, relies on these small airports.
In the case of Castlegar the federal government used to spend $800,000 a year to operate Castlegar bringing in only $300,000 in revenues. The government says: "We still need the flights coming from Castlegar because that is what makes our national airports work, but we are not going to give it any funding. We will help it if it needs to rebuild a runway or a taxiway, but in the general day to day operation of the airport, even though it was costing us 100 per cent more than the revenues, we will not give any money. We will phase it out and make it stand on its own".
That is not turning it over to local decision making; that is turning over financial burdens. The government should have allowed a larger portion of the profits coming from the national airports that make huge profits to be put into the regional airports on which the national airports rely to supply them with passengers. Likewise the federal government has to redo its formula to ensure fairness for the national airports so that they can survive and grow so that we will have as good a system as the hon. member would like to think we now have.