International Trade committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Members of the committee, I am Bruce Christie, Canada's chief air negotiator, and I am from the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development. I am grateful for this opportunity today to appear before the committee to discuss Canada's air t

International Trade committee  Basically an open skies agreement is akin to a free trade agreement, where we remove any restrictions between our national carriers to be able to fly into each other's markets, the number of destinations they can fly to, the frequency of flights per week, and the amount of cargo

International Trade committee  Under this blue sky policy that I outlined in my opening remarks, if it's in Canada's interest right off the start to negotiate an open-skies type of agreement, then we would propose that option to the other country. But in some cases what we would prefer to do is to follow a m

International Trade committee  That's correct.

International Trade committee  We have air rights that we negotiate in an air transportation agreement. For example, we could negotiate an allowance or right to give both our airlines the opportunity to fly into each other's market five times per week. But under that agreement, Air Canada, as an example of o

International Trade committee  No, not in our transport agreements. It depends on the agreements, but we normally would identify the national carriers in the specific air agreement that we negotiate. Marc may want to add something.

International Trade committee  Typically, on an annual basis, prior to setting a negotiating plan for the year, we would negotiate with our national carriers. We would negotiate with our airports. We would negotiate with our provinces and territories, and with our tourism commissions federally and provincially

International Trade committee  Yes, consulting.... We'd be consulting with them for their input. This year Minister Fast requested that we broaden our consultation stakeholder base to include the key business associations, which we have done this year. We will continue to do that in subsequent years when we'

International Trade committee  Basically it's a clause in an air transport agreement, the model that Canada uses, that stipulates that our airlines should not be paying tax in more than one municipality. It's a similar clause to what we would use in any of our trade agreements. Therefore, for our domestic car

International Trade committee  In my situation as the chief air negotiator, I report to the deputy minister of international trade in my department, but I also report directly to the deputy minister of Transport Canada. In that respect I have two bosses to whom I report simultaneously. Marc has his own managem

International Trade committee  Sorry, which ones of the 50 are we not...?

International Trade committee  The five GMAP markets that we're not negotiating with are Brunei, Burma, Madagascar, Kazakhstan, and Zambia. Again, the reason is that they're small markets, essentially, and there doesn't seem to be an interest to exploit the opportunities in those markets. In terms of the plan

International Trade committee  Okay. I'm just going to list some of the countries: Antigua and Barbuda, Cambodia, Haiti, Cuba, Bolivia, Indonesia, Grenada, Japan, Australia, Mexico, and China. That gives you an indication of the countries that we hope to meet with this year.

International Trade committee  No, the right continues to exist until we sit down with the other government to renegotiate the air transport agreement. I don't know if there are any examples of us lowering the number of frequencies, for example, in an existing air agreement. We normally build on them, but we h

International Trade committee  As I mentioned earlier, an open skies agreement has very few restrictions at all in terms of the rights that foreign and domestic airlines can take advantage of in each other's market. For example, for our open-skies type of agreement with the United States, there's no limit. The