Thank you, and good morning.

As you said, my name is Herb Pond. I'm the mayor of Prince Rupert. As an aside, I happened to work in the airline industry for about 20 years when we went through airport devolution and the deregulation of airlines, so I kind of have an interesting perspective on all of this.

This morning, I hope to frame my comments through the lens of nation building. Most of the concerns that today's leaders deal with come from the vast majority of Canadians living in large urban centres. They're grappling with growth and the challenges of maturing cities but not nation building, but there still remains a portion of the country that's very much pioneering and, indeed, nation building. That's certainly the case in Prince Rupert, where 12,000 residents are creating one of Canada's most important trade corridors. It's currently Canada's third-largest port. The most recent announcement by AltaGas brings the current committed projects to over $2 billion in the port of Prince Rupert.

Changes in the broader economy and the way that government services are delivered have made the task of nation building more difficult than it used to be. The tools available at the community level have become outdated. It used to be that a town grew up around an industry. Merchants built retail shops and paid property taxes. Workers brought families, built homes and paid property taxes. Those taxes paid for the services that kept the town alive. That was the compact, and it worked.

Today, retailers in small towns drive vans with Amazon logos, and they pay no local taxes. Increasingly, the workers are fly-in, fly-out and pay little or no local taxes. The same, in a different way, is true of airlines and airports. Not long ago, Transport Canada owned and operated our airport and many, many others. It was a recognition that, in nation building, communities require core assets to be put in place because they're necessary long before they're viable. Not long ago, airlines held rights to certain routes, which allowed them to make investments in those routes and commit to their development.

Today, airlines move like piranhas in feeding frenzies, seeking only the most lucrative markets. A community like Prince Rupert with a heavy industrial base has no choice but to maintain an airport. We are not only a heavy industrial base; we're the hub for four first nations communities who depend completely on access to that air ambulance service. There must be access to air ambulance service or the port will fail. This is particularly true in the winter months, when travel by road to the nearest airport is often ill-advised or not possible at all.

The community of Prince Rupert watches with grave concern as air carriers play their game of three-dimensional chess with their rationed equipment and flight crews. Fare wars right now in our neighbouring community draw traffic from our airport. We estimate that roughly 40% of our air traffic now moves through our neighbour's airport. That traffic justifies more flights next door and fewer flights in Prince Rupert, and fewer flights mean it's more difficult to fly in and out of Prince Rupert, which means even less traffic.

In Prince Rupert, what was once five jets a day in the 1980s is now down to one Q400 daily. We worry that without intervention that trend is irreversible.

All kinds of other infrastructure disappears as that process takes place such as rental car companies and support services for the airlines, so the burden gets shifted to the local taxpayer, and that burden becomes enormous.

I thank you for the opportunity to speak, and I look forward to your questions.