Canada Aviation: the four busiest airports to be leased – the which, what, why and wherefores

It has been a long hard slog, but at last a Canadian political leader - the Prime Minister - has committed to privatising Canada's airports, and he has chosen to start with the four busiest.

While the details have yet to be worked out, it appears that some variety of lease concession deal is on the cards, although public-private partnerships for specific infrastructure cannot ever be ruled out these days.

In any event, Transport Canada will retain ownership of the properties and any deal will be for a fixed period of time. There will be no comparison with, for example, the wholesale sales that took place in the UK.

Why is this happening now?

The federal government wants to 'recycle' the value tied up in established properties to fund other high-growth economic projects. That possibly means AI and data centres.

Canada's well established pension funds, which have been scaling down their global airport investments since they were granted the option to invest in Canadian ones in 2025, are most likely to seek to profit from this exercise, but Canada also has a small number of operators from outside that business that could make a pitch.

An entire raft of foreign investors will be sufficiently attracted by these four major assets to make an enquiry at least but it is a whole new market for them with little 'history' to go by.

At the end of the day, politics may play a critical role as Canada seeks to distance itself from the United States of America and into the welcoming arms of the European Union.