Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank the witnesses for being with us.

Our study deals with regional air transportation, which is a very important issue for me. It took the committee a long time to move forward with this study. Yet it's a subject we've been talking about for ages, and we should have tackled it sooner.

I'll start by apologizing to all the witnesses. Since I don't necessarily have a lot of speaking time and there are many of them, I may not be able to ask each witness a question.

I'm going to start with Mr. Côté, president of the Union des municipalités du Québec and the mayor of Gaspé.

Mr. Côté, in 2020, the Quebec government created a regional air transportation working group. To some extent, it was a kind of crisis unit. The group includes representatives from the Fédération québécoise des municipalités, the Union des muncipalités du Québec, the Réseau québécois des aéroports and the Association québécoise du transport aérien as well as other players. Ultimately, absolutely everyone in Quebec's air transportation sector has a seat at the table. Unless I'm mistaken, the federal government isn't one of the participants.

On April 28, 2023, Radio-Canada published an article entitled “L'UMQ dénonce l'absence d'Ottawa dans le dossier du transport aérien régional”. When the Minister of Transport, who was new at the time, took office last fall, I told him that the municipalities and Quebec wanted his government to sit at the table and address the challenge that everyone in Quebec is concerned about.

Has the problem been resolved since that article was published in April 2023 and since my discussion last fall with the ministers?

Xavier Barsalou-Duval

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