Industry committee  Can I just say one thing too? That's if you can get them into the country under the foreign worker program. That is an impediment. We've had a lot of trouble with it. When we were pre-COVID, there were all kinds of issues. It's expensive to apply. It takes forever. That's not to

Industry committee  I did talk about Canada being a large country. We suffer from a lot of geography and not very many people. We need aerospace and aviation just to get by every day. That goes without saying. The point I was making before is that I haven't come here asking for subsidies. I don't w

Industry committee  I don't know that there are impediments, but certainly there seems to be almost this idea that we want innovation as long as it's been tried before and we can be sure that it works. You're dealing with this kind of schizophrenia of “yes, we want you to innovate, but don't be too

Industry committee  Can I just comment on that? It's near and dear to my heart, and I ran out of time before I could say it 17 times: “Buy Canadian”. Don't be fooled by the ITB structure, because it's a zero-sum game. If you have a Canadian provider, as we do, providing military pilot training wit

Industry committee  Given that we're time-restricted, I'll just focus on the one that we're having the most immediate problem with. When we have out-of-country customers having heavy maintenance on their aircraft, they want to send a technical representative to be with the airplane throughout that

Industry committee  It's not really red tape. We're used to living in a regulated industry. I know part of my comment was to also get you to recognize that when we talk about this industry, we're not just talking about the airlines. We are talking about all the back-end providers who support that in

Industry committee  Our problem wasn't really the loss of skilled workers. It was the loss of customers because our carriers are on the ground. They're not generating any revenue and they can't pay for maintenance. We took a very deliberate decision to keep our workers working as much as we possib

Industry committee  I did mention in my comments that we invested $14 million of our own money—not subsidized—to build a training college in Hamilton, where we also invested in a new wide-body maintenance facility to make sure that we did have a steady pipeline of new employees coming through our fa

Industry committee  Okay. In short, the industry is and will always be a key contributor to Canada’s economic well-being. Don’t forget to consider the full supply chain, be a partner to the industry and buy Canadian. I thank you again for the opportunity to present here.

Industry committee  Thank you very much. As mentioned, I'm currently the president of the KF Aerospace Group of Companies, headquartered in Kelowna, British Columbia. Previously I was the president of Canadian North airlines, so I have seen this industry from various perspectives throughout my 35-y