The following was presented by Mark Laroche on June 6, 2022 at the Ottawa Board of Trade's 2022 City Building Summit. Check against delivery.

Good afternoon, and thank you for sticking around for the last presentation of the day. Sueling, thank you for all the great work you and your team are doing to advance Ottawa’s ambitious agenda for the future.

We’ve heard some impressive plans from my panel colleagues. I have watched Mark and Cameron work through the challenges thrown at them by the pandemic in parallel with working on the exciting developments they shared today. Veronique, I see the great work the NCC is doing in Ottawa-Gatineau. It occurred to me more than once that Y-O-W can play a small part in these projects. For OSEG to reimagine Lansdowne Park and build their sports franchises into tourism assets in their own right, the airport plays a pivotal role. Cameron talked about The Ottawa Hospital’s ambitious plans to build a world-class health facility that attracts top talent from around the world. That talent will be arriving or commuting through Y-O-W’s doors for work or for leisure.

In other words, we are all interconnected, and our individual success is our mutual success.

Now that recovery is underway, things are also busy and looking up at Y-O-W. With people looking forward to travel, airlines continue to adjust their supply to what our city and region’s market is demanding. Currently Y-O-W air travel is at approximately 65% of what it was in 2019. With an important fixed cost base, we need to be at over 75% of our pre-pandemic passenger volume to attain financial sustainability or to break even. Every single day since air travel came to a near standstill in March 2020, we have been operating at a loss and have had to borrow $100M to keep the lights on for this critical infrastructure. While losses are shrinking thanks to both our cost cutting efforts and the return of air travellers, we remain laser-focused on achieving financial sustainability by early 2023.

Pre-pandemic, our priority was on the Y-O-W+ terminal revitalization project. The program had four pillars. The first was to move the domestic preboard screening checkpoint to level 3, which we completed last year. Concession renewal, or pillar 2, has advanced after a lengthy pause. It will continue over the coming year or so as the Canal Market Hall food and beverage area is completed by early next year and, more stores and restaurants are opened. The pillar 3 LRT terminal station is complete except for a few finishing touches. It will be ready well in time to connect to the City’s Stage 2 airport spur.

The 4th and final pillar is the Alt Ottawa Airport Hotel. Germain Group, our hotel partner, is working valiantly to put the pieces in place to move forward, and I am confident they will.

So what are our priorities going forward?

Adapting to a changing workforce and the current challenges with talent acquisition summarizes an important priority. Understanding Y-O-W’s evolving passenger profile, especially the business travel component, in a post-pandemic, virtual meeting reality is another. Providing a safe, efficient passenger experience continues to be essential. And, sustainability will be a key theme going forward.

I look forward to sharing more information on this particular topic in the coming weeks with our partners at Ottawa Hydro who have been quite busy in the last month as we know. Together, we will be working to aggressively decarbonise our operations.

Our most pressing priority is to build back our route network. After losing significant connectivity in 2020, we are working closely with our airline partners to restore non-stop service. The airlines have been very comfortable hubbing service through the big four airports in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Calgary. In fact, the federal government set them up to do so by imposing landing restrictions for international flights in March 2020. Despite the removal of restrictions in August 2021, airlines continue the practice. Between Pearson and Billy Bishop, Y-O-W feeds Toronto nearly 30 times per day, for example.

Needless to say, we are fighting for change. We need our airline partners to see that Ottawa is a primary market deserving of appropriate air service for our size.

Our discussions include serving the market with the right-sized aircraft to ensure long-term success. A Boeing 747, 777 or Airbus 340 and 380, for example, have too many seats for our market. Air Canada has announced the purchase of 182-seat Airbus A321NEO-XLRs. These Trans-Atlantic capable planes would be a perfect fit, and we are in discussion with them as we work towards the return of London Heathrow and Frankfurt service. We also have our eye on Paris.

Porter is also growing its fleet with at least 30 Embraer E195-E2 jets, which are also perfect for Y-O-W. These planes will allow Porter to fly to the west coast, the southern U.S., Mexico and the Caribbean. As with Air Canada, we will work with the Porter team to ensure they understand how Y-O-W can support their aggressive network expansion plans.  

You’ve heard about the arrival of Ultra Low-Cost Carriers to Ottawa. They aren’t without their challenges, but they have had success in our market, and between Flair and Swoop, they are serving 12 destinations. I believe the market has embraced their price point, and they are here to stay.

The reality of Air Service Development is that many new routes are subsidized by third parties - often government or economic development agencies. In fact, airlines now expect this.

Multi-million dollar financial incentives are common worldwide. Examples closer to home include the City of Edmonton’s $10 million investment, with another $5 million from their surrounding municipalities in the Edmonton Airport since 2021. The Province of Nova Scotia is investing $19.3 million in two airports, and both Kelowna and Saskatoon airports are receiving federal funding through Western Economic Diversification. To be clear, these are not infrastructure dollars – these are airline route subsidies.

Unfortunately, we do not have access to these types of government incentives, so our air capacity has stood on its own merit – for better and worse. Going forward, we can’t go down this path alone.

We are proposing a framework for an air service development fund to fill this competitive gap. We hope that long-standing partners like Ottawa Tourism, The City of Ottawa, and others will be enthusiastic participants in support of our long-term growth objective. If successful, we have a good idea of our potential targets. Trust that our efforts will make sense and not compromise excellent strategic partnerships with our current airline partners. Whether global network or local low-cost, every carrier is important to Y-O-W and will play a vital role in our recovery.

If our efforts pay off – and we believe they will – Y-O-W will be ready for growth. In fact, our game changer factors prominently in that belief.

Last month, we broke ground on the first airside infrastructure expansion program in the Airport Authority’s 20-year history. We initiated this new 15M dollar taxiway to accommodate the growing demands of our G7 Capital airport, including the needs of the Government of Canada, for whom we have earmarked 25,000 square metres. The Canada Reception Center where VIP’s from other nations are greeted, currently occupies an old World War II era hangar which recently had part of its roof blown off. We understand that government officials are deciding when the time is right to invest in a new facility. We will be ready when that time comes.

We also have a private-sector organization that has secured a 25,000 square metre parcel with an option to add 18 000 square meters. Add more interest from others, and I am sure you can understand why I’m so bullish about our future and why Y-O-W made the decision to expand its facilities even before completely recovering from the toll the pandemic has had on our operations. I wish I could tell you more, but commercial agreements preclude me from discussing them in detail. Trust that I will be more than happy to share more once the time is right.

The opportunities I’ve discussed and others that we are pursuing represent jobs and economic growth for Ottawa. We are ready to resume our role as an economic generator and hope you will get behind our request for support. In the meantime, I would ask that you include Y-O-W in your travel plans. Every ticket that includes our airport is another demonstration to our airline partners that Y-O-W is an important market in quantifiable and real need of more robust service.

With that, I will turn the mic back to Jeff for the question and answer portion of the panel. Thank you. Merci.