ea306 wrote:Gilles,
it really bothers me that you continue to persue this wet lease for wet lease thing. There are a lot of productive well paying Canadian jobs at risk if the Thomson reciprocal agreement is jeopardize by this movement.
I will explain it for the 20th time at least.
Reciprocity is an Immigration Canada (CIC) program. CIC is supposed to keep a tally on the number of Canadian pilots going to work overseas in order to control the number of work permits it delivers to foreign pilots working in Canada. Normally, foreign pilots which obtained work permits through an LMO issued by HRSDC and Wet-Lease pilots DO NOT count in those tallies.
The reason I bring it up all the time, is that we had to educate Immigration Canada about this wet-lease/dry-lease issue and this is precisely one of the methods that was used by Sunwing to muddy the waters which allowed this issue to degenerate to the extent it did.
In Canada, wet-leases of foreign aircraft are approved by the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA). The foreign pilots who come to Canada at the controls of a wet-lease are approved strictly by the CTA and do not need a work permit or any other paperwork from CIC. They are thus totally invisible to Immigration Canada when they are in Canada flying on behalf of Sunwing.
This is the reason :
Immigration Canada did not know about the 50 or so Portuguese pilots that flew for Sunwing in the summer of 2011.
Immigration Canada did not know about the 50 or so Portuguese pilots that flew for Sunwing in the summer of 2012.
Immigration Canada did not know about the 16 Czech pilots that flew OK-TVT last winter.
And if it wasn't for us, Immigrigration Canada would have not known this year about the 56 Czech pilots that are flying the 4 Czech Wet-Lease this winter.
Yet when your Sunwing bosses mention reciprocity to Immigration Canada, they tally the Canadian pilots that go fly Sunwing wet-leases to Europe. CIC is counting apples and Sunwing throws in Oranges in its count. You say its OK.
I cannot speak for CIC but I would have no basic objection to counting wet-lease pilots. But if we are to count them, lets count them in both directions, not just in the way it favours Sunwing.
Either one counts wet-lease pilots in both directions to arrive at a true reciprocity tally, or one does not count wet-lease pilots at all to arrive at a reciprocity tally. One cannot do it the Mr Hunter way, where one counts pilots in a way to make it look like the number of Canadian pilots going to Europe is inflated and the actual number of foreign pilots flying in Canada for Sunwing seems diminished. And that is not the only method used by Sunwing to make the number of Canadian pilots look inflated by the way.
As for your work permit to Europe. You will recall that I was incredulous when you first told me that you had a work permit when you went to fly Sunwing aircraft in Europe. As I do with all things, I did my homework and found out why:
The CTA authorization that is issued to foreign wet-leases in Canada has several conditions. One of them is that the aircraft only engage in International Travel. Your Travel Service Wet-Leases are not permitted to to a domestic flight in Canada with paying passengers.
When Air Transat does Wet-Leases to Europe, its pilots do not require a European Work Permit, which is why I was incredulous when you said you had one. It is because when Air Transat did its wet-leases, we did strictly international flights from Europe, meaning flights to outside the EU, but Sunwing also performs DOMESTIC flights inside of Europe (considered one country), which is why you guys need work permits for those flights.
I am fighting a foreign pilot issue, but Sunwing has been using this wet-lease dry-lease issue to muddy the waters and that must stop.
I spent a lot of hours understanding how its all done, and why everything is done the way it is. I know my stuff now.
You keep saying that you promote equal reciprocity, 1:1 you call it.
IT IS MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE even talk about equal reciprocity using the wet-lease method when Sunwing only has 10 aircraft and imports 21 aircraft from Europe (2 767s this summers and 19 737s this winter) .
