Canada should stop gouging airline travellers

Inexpensive, safe flights are accessible for most of world

Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un may soon rendezvous somewhere, but as the New York Times points out, the “somewhere” is unfortunately limited by the fact that Kim’s sole Soviet-era plane fails the standard aviation test of probably being able to fly.

As ever, North Korea is an outlier. Older planes are not necessarily dangerous planes. This is fortunate for much of the world, in which inexpensive flights – often facilitated by older planes – are not necessarily dangerous flights.

Much of the world, but not Canada, which does not have inexpensive flights. We could fly a patched-up Hindenburg and it wouldn’t be inexpensive. Canada should do all it can to have access to seats that are both safe and cheap. Ryanair and easyJet – both budget airlines – have the least blemished flying safety records in the world. No one has ever died in an accident involving either.

Of course, to say that cheap flights are usually safe flights is not to say flying is always safe. Something shocking happened last week, but it was only shocking because it is so rare: A person died in an airplane accident. The engine failure on a Southwest Airlines flight was terribly tragic; it was also exceedingly unlikely. It’s particularly unlikely with this carrier. Until last week, no one had ever died flying Southwest, an airline that previously held the best fatality record among airlines, which is to say there weren’t any.

Another “of course”: To say that cheap flights are usually safe flights is not to say that they are all equally so. A 60 Minutes investigation alleges that Allegiant, a low-cost carrier flown by many Canadians, is responsible for 3.5 more mechanical failures than other U.S. airlines. This, again though, is rare.

All airlines must meet certain regulations regardless of ticket prices, and if airlines are going to race to the bottom, most do so merely by making our lives less pleasant rather than by putting them in mortal danger. They confine themselves to subjecting us to innumerable and various indignities, such as making us scramble for unassigned seats, and giving us weight limits that allow us to pack no more than a T-shirt and a laundry bag for our single allotted T-shirt. That at least is more civil than forcing us to sit in a cabin as it fills with smoke, as some Allegiant passengers described.

This is how the Europeans (and most of the Americans) stay in business: They consider instituting petty outrages like charging passengers to use the malodorous phone booth dubiously described as a washroom; they don’t threaten you with bankruptcy for visiting your mother.

Compare this to Canada, which according to a 2015 report was 130 of 138 countries ranked for most taxes and fees on flights. One-hundredthirtieth! Of 138!

Now, the Europeans do a few other things that we don’t. They are clever enough to be born in Europe, for one, a smaller geographical area that seems specially designed to keep fueluse down. They have also taken certain actions to ensure there are more of them, which keeps demand higher.

But additionally, they have private airports, support ultra low-cost airlines and decline to charge impossibly exorbitant ground rent. The House of Commons Finance Committee having argued that privatizing Canada’s not-for-profitowned airports will not reduce barbarically high flight prices, the government may not take action on the first issue; by having taken some action on the second issue – now allowing more foreign investment in airlines – three new ultralow cost carriers may grow or start business this year. Canada would also do well to stop treating airports as more a revenue source than a vital driver of economic growth and human connection.

For now, pundit Scott Gilmore points out that it costs him more to fly to northern Manitoba than to most countries in Asia – one fairly lonely exception being North Korea. Canada’s only conceivable retort is that North Korea can’t fly its own leader out without maybe killing him. At least our prime minister can get on a plane. Who else could afford it?

Shannon Gormley is an Ottawa Citizen global affairs columnist and freelance journalist.