Transport committee  In February and March this year, everyone saw the Omicron variant spreading rapidly and wondered when travel might resume. Public health officials said the worst was over and that some of the constraints could be lifted. At that point, the airlines began discussions with CATSA a

Transport committee  This summer, there was an obvious lack of coordination in the transport industry. Several industry organizations and some of their members have been singled out. There have been some questionable decisions made in terms of number of passengers and flights allowed in airports. Th

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

Transport committee  Commercial aviation is a very complicated business. We have to be able to have coordination among all of the players in the game in order to make sure we deliver service to our customers. The issue has been one where the airlines jumped the gun. They put too much capacity out the

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  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'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  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