Carney Wants to Privatize Airports. It’s a Terrible Idea

This is an excerpt from my latest article I wrote for The Walrus! As always, they have been an exceptional partner. Make sure to go read the full article, and sign up for their newsletter! They work so hard with a skeleton crew, and they deserve your support!

Around 2,000 people gathered in Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square on September 14, preparing to march to the Art Gallery of Ontario, where Prime Minister Mark Carney’s much hyped Canada Investment Summit was holding a gala dinner to open the event.

The protesters held signs that said “No deals behind closed doors” and “Billionaires not welcome here.” They chanted, “Ce n’est qu’un début”—this is just the beginning. Many are seeing the writing on the wall: Canada’s assets are for sale. Privatization is on the way. Carney wants to have $1 trillion worth of investments in Canada, bringing mass capital into our sluggish economy, mostly around infrastructure projects. From natural gas to oil pipelines, everything is on the table.

But one specific project has received more media attention than others: opening Canada’s publicly owned airports to private investment—specifically Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Calgary. “Following best practice in other countries,” Carney said on September 15, a day after a federal Liberal caucus call to discuss the initiative, “the Government of Canada will retain ownership of the underlying land and assets,” but they’ll bring in private capital to maximize growth.

Backlash from unions and worker groups has been swift. The Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) issued a statement opposing any form of a sale as well as any transfer of ownership and control. Mark Hancock, president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), which represents more than 20,000 airline workers across eleven airlines, said, “There is no magic to airport privatization: private investors expect a return, and Canadians will be the ones paying for it.” The Canadian Airports Council came out in favour of the country’s “made-in-Canada model” that’s provided decades of “stable, sovereign and financially sustainable approach to managing critical national infrastructure.” The list goes on.

The biggest advocate for change is private industry. It loves when major infrastructure gets turned over to them. For them, it’s win-win. But for Canadians, it’s lose-lose.