Transport committee  Thank you very much. Good afternoon, members of the committee. My name is John Gradek. I'm a faculty lecturer and academic programs coordinator for supply chain and aviation management at McGill University's School of Continuing Studies. I'd like to start by thanking the commi

Transport committee  The issue about governance is really important, that we try to understand that we have airports that are major drivers of economic growth in this country. We need a strong and financially viable airport system to make this thing work. I think it's important that we have a way in

Transport committee  I think what you're seeing at Pearson and at the Montreal Trudeau airport is not lack of infrastructure. We had capacity in both airports to operate the schedule that can be put through those airports. If you look at the flight movements in 2019 in both Pearson and Trudeau, they'

Transport committee  I think it's pretty obvious. When you talk about March 2020, when industry was shut down by government policy, the airlines, the airports, the air nav people, everybody basically shut down their staffing and released people in order to save their P&L, their operating line.

Transport committee  When you're looking at the airports and how the airports work today, and whether there is anything in their administrative practices that would have resolved the problem we saw, I don't think there is.... I think the only thing that was missing, really, was the authority by the a

Transport committee  In the spring and summer of 2022, the airlines saw an increase in demand. In response, they decided to significantly increase the number of flights. They had the aircraft and the pilots they needed and proceeded to embark on a major marketing campaign. Then they released a very b

Transport committee  I'm talking about all flights. The airlines were greedy, especially when it comes to international flights, but domestic flights as well.

Transport committee  Everywhere on the planet, the airline industry went through a pretty tough time, during which it had to assess the available capacity and the impact on services. Several airlines and many European and Asian airports, such as Schiphol in the Netherlands and London's Heathrow, made

Transport committee  I'm thinking in particular of a handful of American airline companies that made some effort over the last few months to really cut back on the number of flights being offered. American Airlines, United and even JetBlue cut back on 10% to 15% of their operations in order to better

Transport committee  Yes, the situation continues in the airline industry as well as in customer service in general, where there are close to a millions vacancies. In Canada, the airline companies are pursuing their efforts to hire more staff, but they're having a hard time, and there are several rea

Transport committee  Airlines are federally regulated, so the federal government has a say in matters of compensation through the regulations that apply to these companies.

Transport committee  The government's involvement in baggage handling is not the solution. Rather, the airlines themselves should look at the means available to them to address baggage handling issues. There are a number of technologies that airlines and airports could adopt to improve the situation.

Transport committee  When you look at the whole rent model that we have, which Transport Canada has implemented, with NAS and non-NAS, you see that it really is inefficient. It's not something that has a vision for what airport infrastructure should look like. We've done a good job of doing that. It

Transport committee  I don't think I wanted to say that the airlines could have avoided the layoffs. The layoffs were an absolute knee-jerk reaction to revenue being dropped and people not being allowed to fly. If you have an infrastructure of 40,000 employees at Air Canada or 20,000 at WestJet and t

Transport committee  I've used the term “revenge travel” quite a bit in my public statements over the last year. People were, in fact, waiting to get to travel, and there was a lot of pent-up demand. Then, when the airlines saw all of those vaccination requirements disappear and saw all of the requir