Finance committee  In terms of the capital gains approach, what we did was look at the Income Tax Act in its totality in terms of how we deal with options. The options provisions are available to publicly traded and privately held companies--large, small, or medium, it doesn't make any difference.

Finance committee  I'm going to look over my shoulder at my accounting folks we have here.... It's approximately 10% to 12%.

Finance committee  I don't think we'd ever quite get to that level, but if we did, there would be issues we'd have to look at. But in terms of being in control of your own destiny, having 90% of the employees own the shares would be a fairly useful thing.

Finance committee  At this point there is not.

Finance committee  I'm just happy you're flying with us.

Finance committee  Thank you for that.

Finance committee  It's at market, yes.

Finance committee  Yes, because right now, if you bought those 100 shares—let's say, for the sake of argument, they cost $200—and you paid $100 off your paycheque to buy those shares and WestJet contributed $100 in shares to you, then you would immediately have to pay tax on the $100 in shares that WestJet bought for you.

Finance committee  As income. Now, you can't sell those shares for a year, so you're not going to get any cash from those shares for at least a year. From our perspective, it's the same as an option: you don't get an immediate dollar value from the option, you have to wait two years, three years, one year, whatever, to cash in those options.

Finance committee  We have to look at what our proposal is designed to do. Our proposal is designed to drive productivity. The airline industry, by any measure economically, is a silly business. It's ferociously capital-intensive, highly cyclical. It also traditionally does not have very good relations between employers and employees.

Finance committee  Well, you can come and work for us, Mr. Chair. We'd be happy with that. Again, I go back to the purpose of it, and the purpose of it is to make companies better, so by definition, you're looking toward your own employees. I could make the same argument to you about stock options.

Finance committee  I would argue that stock options are probably fairly good, and also are a way to encourage people to work for their companies. You can't simply go and give stock options to every employee. The investment community would ditch your stock because you'd be too ferociously diluted. What we do is we go to the open market and we purchase those shares.

Finance committee  Sure, but this would apply, obviously, to any company that wanted to take advantage of it and establish employee share purchase. This can also apply to privately held Canadian-controlled companies. It doesn't have to be a publicly traded entity. If you can create shares in your own company, a privately held company, you can have those shares purchased by your employees.

Finance committee  You can do it through your RRSP, but you can max that out fairly quickly with the company matching.

Finance committee  They don't let me near the luggage, I'm afraid.