Airports are essential public infrastructure. They connect communities, move goods and support hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Travellers do not have unlimited choices. If you are flying through Vancouver, Toronto or Calgary, there is not another airport down the street competing for your business.
That is what makes airports different. They are precisely the kind of infrastructure where the public interest should come first. Yet once again, Canadians are being told that the answer is more private capital.
We have seen this movie before. In New Zealand, the Commerce Commission found that Auckland Airport was on track to earn hundreds of millions of dollars in excess profits. In Australia, Sydney Airport cut roughly 40 per cent of its workforce after employment protections expired. In Britain, airports were transformed into private commercial assets, creating opportunities for investors to capture returns from infrastructure that had once been publicly controlled.
These experiences do not prove every form of private investment produces the same result. But they demonstrate: when you turn a natural monopoly into an investment opportunity, someone is going to make money from it. The question is who.
That question becomes even more urgent with the government's new Building Canada Strong Act. The legislation promises to accelerate projects, streamline approvals and attract investment. Canada does need to build faster. We need housing, transit, clean energy, ports and rail.
But building faster cannot mean giving corporations a faster lane to profit from public assets.
