Avi Lewis: Canada’s airports are not for sale

NDP Leader Avi Lewis issued the following statement in response to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s plans to privatize Canada’s four largest airports:

“Privatizing Canada’s airports would be a disastrous deal for travellers, workers and the public purse.

Prime Minister Carney is opening some of Canada’s largest, most important airports to private investors. Canadians should be asking a simple question: why would we hand a natural monopoly to investors whose only job is to maximize profits?

Around the world, privatization has led to higher travel costs, fewer jobs and worse working conditions. In Australia, the Sydney Airport cut 40 per cent of its workforce as soon as employment protections expired. In New Zealand, regulators found the Auckland Airport was on track to earn hundreds of millions of dollars in excess profits while travellers had nowhere else to go. In the UK, the government sold off its airports only to watch private owners capture enormous profits from those public assets for decades.

Canadian airports already support hundreds of thousands of jobs, yet workers are already dealing with contract-flipping, insecure employment and staffing shortages. Handing these critical services to profit-driven owners would put even more pressure on working conditions and safety.

The alternative to privatizing our airports is very simple: don’t do it.

We should be making air travel more affordable, protecting good airport jobs and improving public infrastructure, not turning critical public assets into decades-long money printing machines for CEOs and their shareholders.

You don’t save Canada by selling it off piece by piece. Protecting our sovereignty means keeping our airports in public hands. The NDP stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Canada's labour movement in putting airport workers, travellers and the public interest ahead of profits for foreign investors.”