Canada weighs privatizing airports to fund national wealth initiatives
The federal Liberal government is looking at selling Canadian airports off to private owners saying it wants to streamline operations and passenger services, attract more business investment to Canada, and even direct possible proceeds into a national sovereign wealth fund.
Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon downplayed the prospect of any swift moves to privatize.
He told reporters Wednesday 'we're in the early stages of a process with airport authorities and other partners to determine the best way forward.'
The morning after the spring economic update hinted at the government's plans, MacKinnon suggested that he has already been in talks with NAV Canada, which oversees air traffic control in civil airspace and over the North Atlantic, and with the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA) which oversees aviation security in Canada, about how to proceed.
The ultimate goal here is to improve passenger experience and to keep air travel affordable for Canadians, MacKinnon said. Again...we're in the early stages of working with partners and assessing what our options might be.
Asked to what extent the proceeds of any airport privatization sales would be used as seed money to finance a national sovereign wealth fund announced by Prime Minister Mark Carney on Monday, MacKinnon said I don't think that any determination has been made on that front.
However, Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne confirmed Wednesday that is part of the mix.
Speaking in Montreal, Champagne said, I don't want to exclude things, you know, we're going to be looking seriously at different assets. How can they bring value to Canadians? How do you extract the full value for Canadians?
And I think if you look at other countries, there's a lot of best practices that we need to adopt, and I would say, even really modernize,
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