CBC News article on instructor shortage
 

Flying schools report losing instructors to regional airlines at a greater rate:

Historic flight school could fall victim to pilot shortage, lack of funding - Business - CBC News

Is this a good thing or bad thing? just curious

Typical CBC, they simply missed the point that the financial stress put on flight schools in Ontario is generated by the absurd fees placed on them by the Government of Ontario charging a fortune to conduct audits {totally not needed, if the Feds would simply do their job} thus taking away their funding which is wasted by the "drones" to provide them with funding so they can stay with their cushy jobs! What a joke Ontario has become!

It's too bad that some of the smaller schools are feeling the pinch right now, and I especially hate to see the Ottawa Flying Club is one of those considering closing its doors as my grandfather trained there back in the late 40's and he is one of the ones who lit the fire, so to speak.

With that said, I too wonder if maybe this is a good thing. A thinning of the weeds helps to improve things in the long run, so perhaps the industry finds the long-term, quality instructors that have spent a career training ab initio pilots at the small schools are forced to the bigger schools, and thus the quality of training for a greater number of pilots is increased.

Of course, there was always something great about going into an established flying club with history and shooting the breeze with everyone...gotta love nostalgia, eh.

Just curious, I haven’t heard of this before. What are they auditing the schools against? The air regulations aren’t theirs to enforce.

Well JO let me give you a rundown on the disaster created by the Government of Ontario and the twits in Transport Canada along with the almost total lack of interest shown by many in the industry. Before we sold our flight schools and charter outfit we were summoned to Brampton by TC and a bunch of overweight employees of the Ontario Government and given an ultimatum to the effect that the Ministry of education along with the folks running the college's intended to inflict audits on all flight schools in Ontario and charge them for the costs of auditing the flight schools, this in spite of the fact that not one of the employees employed by them {note I did not say "working"} for them had or still has a bloody clue about flight training or aviation in general. When the school owners appealed to the director of flight training in Transport Canada to their horror he {Jim Dow} replied to the affect that he and his department SUPORTED such a move, this in spite of the fact that it was the operators with "of shore" students who were the problem, in spite of protests from those of us in the industry the Government of Ontario along with Transport Canada proceeded to inflict huge fees to complete audits on the industry, {which has totally failed to have any beneficial effects on flight training} in fact the reverse is the case. So the situation is rapidly destroying the flight training industry, Mr. Dow is retired on a very nice pension and the airlines and other operators are unable to recruit enough pilots to keep their companies operating with sufficient trained crews to staff their companies. Way to go Transport and Ontario ministry of Education! The nation which produced the pilot and crew members during two World Wars and the Cold War is now having to recruit "of shore", what a bloody joke!

I'm a Canadian pilot who now works off shore, and I'd never come back to work for Canadian wages and pay Canadian taxes on it.
Maybe that's why they will have to resort to recruiting off shore pilots from the same places that our call centres went, and for the same reason.

Now I see why you're frustrated and I fail to understand why TC would have injected themselves into that process. There was literally nothing in it for them. They should have told the province they wanted nothing to do with it (another reason to be happy to be back in private industry).

Did Ontario even attempt to explain why they were doing these audits?

The Ottawa Flying Club up until very recently refused to hire instructors
who they did not train.

They stated that they had a legal agreement with Algonquin College to take
all their instructors from their students.

It's called the incestuous training program that failed to consider that
this source of students rarely wanted to instruct and if they did do an instructor rating, left at the first opportunity.

They are authors of their own misfortune.