i transfer $25 to my voip account every 3 to 5 months, which means i'm paying $5-$10 a month, depending on usage. with that, i get:

$1.10/number (i have two numbers, so it's $2.20/month,  base rate)

 +

$0.005/minute out-calls anywhere into canada

$0.01/minute out-calls anywhere to the us

$0.01/minute in-calling from anywhere in north america.

(toll free numbers are free to make calls to or receive calls from)

$0.0075/txt (in or out)

- voip works on cisco office phones with modifications and on cell phones running specific apps

- txts are forwarded to email and can be responded to from email as email

- voicemails are forwarded to email in the form of mp3 files.

i don't fly very much. apparently, plane tickets are expensive in canada. that's news to me. apparently, they're looking for ways to reduce ticket costs. 

this isn't the first time that this debunked argument about competition reducing prices has shown up in canada.

canada has very expensive cell phone fees. this was blamed by the right on overregulation and not enough competition, so they tried to break up some large companies, and the prices actually went up. very few people want to admit it, but the reality is that canada is a very big country with a very small population scattered over a large distance and with challenging terrain in between. building anything here is hard, and expensive. canadians need to pay for the cost of living in the wilderness, on the edge of civilization, in an environment where maintaining a network is very challenging.

likewise, carney has wanted to reduce food prices through increasing competition. but the reality is that we have a short growing season and swaths of badlands (you can't grow a damned thing in the canadian shield), and we don't tend to eat the kind of food you could grow here anyways. we import most of our food. we're paying for the cost of oil two or three times through transportation, refrigeration and fertilizers. it has nothing to do with a lack of competition, although i'd welcome steps to grow more food locally, to cut down on two or all three of those costs inputs.

it's a great general solution if you have a specific ideology. you can trot out competition to solve problem after problem.

....except that it doesn't work.

like most cure-alls, it's a kind of snake oil and if you take it too seriously it can cause substantive harm.

as with the other examples, and i'll admit i haven't looked into this too closely, it is highly likely that the higher costs for air travel in canada have to do with canada's isolated geography full of distant communities and endless forests. there probably isn't a way to reduce costs; outsourcing hr has a very bad track record and will predictably lead to 2-3x the labour costs, we have enough data to say that with confidence. 

it's the price you pay for living in the sticks.

canadians will tell you there's upsides to the landscape. it's up to us in the end to decide if the cost of living is worth it or not.

i'm not exactly sure what carney wants or expects the private sector to do in publicly owned airports. i suppose he may want them to take over hiring, or may operate a tim hortons. the argument is that this is good for canada because you can tax it. but you're taxing profits, so it would inevitably be better if you owned it, given you already own it.

it's going to cost a lot of money to sell it, to start. you have to pay lawyers, for example, and they charge a lot. then, you're going to take a percentage of the revenue you would have had 100% of if you had kept it. so, you're going to throw away 95% of revenue, or might even lose money. on it's face, it doesn't seem to be very smart.

what it is is a reflection of the tired old argument that the private sector is "more efficient". this was at best an assumption in like 1975. since then, it's been repeatedly proven wrong by dataset after dataset. but homo economicus is continental and theoretical, it's not analytical or empirical. it relies on theory, not data.

one example is outsourcing hiring, which is probably almost the only thing that a private sector could do in an airport while retaining public ownership. there was a time in the 80s when outsourcing hiring was supposed to save money because the private firm was supposed to be more efficient. then they actually tried it and learned that the opposite was true - the bureaucracy in the private sector infrastructure was brutal, the corruption was rampant and you had to pay the ceo and this whole other layer of management, while you really didn't replace any government workers. the result was that the frontline workers saw a paycut, which was recessionary, overall and the costs still doubled or tripled. it turned out to be the most inefficient, trickle-up policy proposal you could imagine, if you tried. it was a massive transfer of wealth from government workers to private sector ceos and bourgeois service workers like accountants and lawyers.

i don't imagine there's actually much that a private sector investment could really add to an airport that the public sector couldn't do for a fraction of the price. 

the messaging is that carney may have been blocked by the ministry. if that's the case, i hope that data wins out over ideology, after they have their debates, which are healthy and encouraged.