Chris Selley: Hating our airports is just what Canadians do. Demanding they improve isn’t

Support for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s plan to “privatize” operations at Vancouver’s, Calgary’s, Toronto’s and Montreal’s international airports, and the lack of support for it, is dividing along interesting lines.

David Eby, the NDP premier of British Columbia, says he’s willing to support privatizing Vancouver airport so long as the revenues are invested in improving smaller airports in the province. That’s more or less Quebec Premier Christine Fréchette’s position as well.

Meanwhile, Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles is dead-set against privatizing Toronto Pearson Airport, and federal NDP leader Avi Lewis is dead-set against the entire idea on principle, with both guaranteeing all manner of disaster for passengers.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is over the moon about the idea, though he seems most excited about the prospect of expanding Toronto’s Island Airport — an idea thwarted, at least for now, by the Carney Liberals. Carney is “on fire,” Ford declared this week on the PM’s policy cavalcade … on the same day the premier endorsed legendary Island Airport-hating Toronto mayor Olivia Chow for re-election. (His office later insisted he hadn’t endorsed her. You can listen and decide for yourself.)

In substance, federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s position isn’t as different as you might expect from Lewis’s and Stiles’, considering he’s the fellow who gave the annual Margaret Thatcher Lecture in London earlier this year. “Canadians are already cash-strapped and broke. We want to make sure that it doesn’t end up being sweetheart deals for corporate power brokers and Liberal insiders at the expense of hard-working Canadians,” he avers. “We want to see how it’s going to save money for Canadians, because if it doesn’t save money, then why do it?”

It’s a wise message politically, considering the country’s populist mood … but then, the Canadian public seems to be willing to follow Carney and his policy team just about anywhere these days. Some of us do pine for some old-fashioned ideology, though.

“State control is fundamentally bad because it denies people the power to choose and the opportunity to bear responsibility for their own actions,” Thatcher wrote in a 2006 piece for the libertarian Reason Foundation. “Conversely, privatization shrinks the power of the state and free enterprise enlarges the power of the people.”

Could this plan wind up enriching “Liberal insiders”? Quite possibly; probably, even. But surely privatizing airport operations — as opposed to selling off the assets, which is not on the table — is less an invitation to political meddling than having governments or their arm’s-length “not-for-profit” agencies in charge.

This debate is a classic Canadian confusion between form and function, combined with our crippling suspicion of change — pretty much any change. We mustn’t have “privatized” health care … even though we already do, in many respects, and no one really proposes nationalizing pharmacists or blood labs. During the worst days at long-term care homes during the pandemic, the Ontario media fixated on the fact publicly owned facilities seemed to be faring better as a group than privately owned ones. But the vast majority of long-term care homes in Quebec are publicly owned, and they produced similar horrors. The issue is oversight, not ownership.

Several reasonable commentators have suggested it was a misstep for Carney to mention all this right now. It strikes me more like the perfect time.

Toronto Star columnist Adam Radwanski wondered why the PM would drop such a “contentious type of investment into the mix” at an otherwise-successful investment summit. But surely the whole point of the summit was to attract investment, including foreign investment from (as Radwanski put it) “all the visiting wealth … from Middle Eastern sovereign funds to American private-equity giants.”

Why would we be concerned about “sovereignty” in one industry and not others? Say what you will about Middle Eastern sovereign funds, they’ve invested in some pretty decent airports — as have Canadian pension plans, in other countries — notably London’s Heathrow. There are terrible airports in Canada under current management (Montreal) and pretty decent ones (Vancouver, which placed 10th in Skytrax’s most recent World Airport awards, higher than any other North American entrant).

There are crummy and excellent publicly owned airports and crummy and excellent privately owned airports. And we’re not even talking about ownership, just management.

The most frustrating thing is imagining this all coming to naught, for whatever reason, and Canadians just going back to hating the status quo at our biggest airports — Toronto and Montreal, anyway — but never demanding better. It’s one of our natural afflictions.

cselley@postmedia.com