The New Democrats are furious at news the federal government is, in its own words, “assessing opportunities to unlock the full value of airports in support of investments in Canada’s long-term growth, including through alternative models of ownership.” It’s what normal human beings call privatization.
“The government should be protecting our public airports, not selling them off for parts,” said federal NDP Leader Avi Lewis, employing a metaphor that makes no sense in this context. You sell a machine off for parts when it won’t work anymore and you don’t want to pay to fix it; Lewis is trying to tell us that the private sector would ruin our airports, implying that they run rather well as it stands, which at least several absolutely do not.
“Privatization … drives up costs for the public, quality suffers, and workers always end up paying the price,” Lewis told reporters last week.
Confronted with this news, I suspect a good few normal Canadian human beings asked themselves something along the lines of, “Wait, how are airports public?”
You might take public transit to the airport. But you also might take a taxi or a ride-share, or drive and pay an absolute fortune to park. That spending isn’t going to count against your tax bill.
You’ll go through security, which is under the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority’s (CATSA) purview. But the security officers you interact with don’t work for CATSA. They work for CATSA’s private-sector contractors.
Any airline employee you interact with, on either side of security, is certainly not working in any respect for the government.
The duty-free store, you will not be surprised to learn, is not run by the government.
Feeling a bit peckish? Not a lot of public-sector food-service options at your average Canadian airport, I’m afraid. It’s the same stuff you’ll find in any mall food court, basically — except of course that you’ll pay far more for it.
In recent years, Toronto’s Pearson Airport “partnered” with several well-known chefs to offer higher-end dining. Fine idea. But in reality, those chefs partnered with HMSHost, a Maryland-based subsidiary of the quite profitable publicly traded Swiss company Avolta, which is expected to offer a shareholder dividend this month.
Speaking of workers: HMSHost employs most food-service employees at Pearson, regardless of what brand they work under. The company is currently listing a Starbucks cashier position that pays a maximum of $20.34 per hour, which is a whopping 15 per cent above Ontario’s minimum wage.
But, oh no! Privatization!
Other than the air traffic controllers landing and taking you off safely — and if you ever meet one of them, something has gone terribly wrong — airports are a private-sector experience from curb to gate. So we’re holding on to the tens of billions of dollars of profitable real estate on which they operate, which we could use to much better purposes … why, exactly?
It’s a classic Canadian issue: “Change is scary. Best to stick to the status quo.” And as with all classic Canadian issues, opposition to change is by no means confined to one tranche of the political spectrum.
“Broadly speaking, Canada’s current model already works,” former Conservative cabinet minister James Moore wrote in a piece for CTV News. “Canada’s airports are run by not-for-profit airport authorities that already operate at arm’s length from government. They reinvest revenues into infrastructure rather than distributing profits to shareholders.”
(Moore now works for Edelman Canada, a firm that has lobbied the government in the last year on behalf of WestJet Airlines.)
It’s certainly true that Canadian airports “reinvest” their winnings, after all their private-sector partners take theirs. They never stop investing. If I ever arrived in Montreal and found the airport not rent asunder by baffling construction, I would fear I was hallucinating.
But is that investment always, or even usually, in the consumer’s best interest? I quite like the monumental abstract Richard Serra sculpture that Pearson Airport plunked down in the middle of Terminal One’s international departures area. But why is it there? And why is the ceiling 60 feet tall? If human beings could fly, they wouldn’t need airports.
None of that was free. And it’s not like Pearson is trying to compete with less fancy airports. (If only!)
Toronto’s Island Airport is an interesting comparison to Pearson. It’s a premium airport, you might say, but it’s much less fancy. Business travellers love it because it’s right downtown (although with the state of traffic and public transit in this city, it’s not half as convenient as it should be). After years of discussion, it finally has U.S. preclearance facilities. But the terminal is in no way, shape or form impressive. It’s comfortable, nice, serviceable — all an airport terminal needs to be.
The airport is governed by a “tripartite agreement” between the city, the province and the feds. Ontario Premier Doug Ford is intent on seizing control from the city; extending the runway to allow for passenger jets like the Airbus A220 (formerly the Bombardier CSeries); and permitting many more takeoffs and landings.
I’m ambivalent-to-dubious about the expansion plan, although I do enjoy watching Toronto Liberal MPs squirming about it — because Prime Minister Mark Carney gives every impression that he’s on board, and many of those MPs’ constituents are very much not.
But Queen’s Park claims the move would “increase competition in the air travel sector (and) support more routes and cheaper flights,” and it bloody well should — at least, if Ottawa ever found its way to supporting genuine (i.e., foreign) competition in the airline industry.
Fear of change is not what the Canadian airline industry needs.