Lol.. Sec 3... be nice!
I will admit Canada and other countries needs to work on being more competitive. But its tough when your trying to measure where the competitive level will be with places like China or UAE.
Contacted... good point, but this is a terrible aticle. I see the argument ... however this article and the author is deficient in many ways. Australia and Canada comparison as a vacation destination? You can tell right here that the author is not intelligent enough to see that there is a difference. One is in a deep freeze half the year when the other is not. Need I say more? I may not be right..and I certianly do not insist that I am as others do. However, this article does not ring intelligently. When I went to school, we learned that outtright competition based on uneven playing fields (economies, labor footprints, private vs public, etc), does not always work as an ideal, or is as simple as one might expect. As I have said many time.. free trade between similar socio-economic footprints is a no brainer. But then that's not the case here is it? When dealing with countries with unbalance trade platforms to your own, more analysis has to been done. Otherwise, you will just extinguish your own industry, just as been happening to N. America for the last 3 decades. You might say that is the price to pay to being competitive. But there would be a loss factor in the mean time that maybe the gov'ts are not willing to support. It would hurt our GDP in the end, and that is the bottom line. That is not to say that there is not a place for Emirates serving Canada.
Yes Emirates has a better platform and cheaper footprint and better service than Air Canada. But why? Does it mean that competitively Canada should allow EK whatever routes it wants without question? Every dollar EK makes goes to one man. The man that in fact, owns a whole country. Personally I am not comfortable with that. I am not saying EK should not fly to Calgary or whatever. In fact I believe, it was offered previously, but the frequency was not good enough.
This article is good, but its entirely pro free market. And that is not balanced. There are plenty of articles and books and economists that go the other-way too. Read "The Predatory State".
I am happy to see that the gov't is taking an analytical approach to this. The limitation at this time might be a way to open market share for others. Specifically those that would be better positioned that the UAE airlines. How about Air India? They are the market actually that UAE is serving. Or how about Turkish? They are a new Star Alliance member and have started a big growth push too. And they are perfectly located for flow-through. Even better than UAE possibly. Also being Star member, the traffic would be a codes share with AC.
I believe EK is not the only players at the poker table influencing this situation.