Forget Mars. Try getting a suitcase from YYZ to YOW first.

Canada’s failure in commercial airline transport puts a big question mark on its future in space.

Yesterday, Canadian Minister of Transport, Omar Alghabra, looked deep into the eyes of a gathered throng of journalists.

Then, with a perfectly straight face, he announced that under a regulatory framework overseen by his leadership, Canada could soon become a hub for commercial space launches.

It’s difficult to take Alghabra seriously. During his time as Minister of Transport, he’s earned a reputation for screwing up moving people and things here on earth, specifically, airline passengers and their bags. How can this man, whose Mr. Bean-eque management style has doomed many Canadian air travelers to piss-poor service and thousands of dollars of losses, even think about leading a nation into a thriving commercial space program?

It’s a question that urgently needs an answer.

For context, and for those who have not had the misfortune of needing to use Canadian airlines or airports in recent years, Alghabra has presided over Canada’s federally regulated air travel sector as its service has crashed to such lows that the country has earned a reputation for having both the worst airports and the worst airlines in the world.   

Some of the structural problems which have led to these rankings are due to pandemic air travel policies which Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government clung to for political reasons long after experts gave advise to lift them. Well after global air travel had begun to rebound from pandemic-related lows, Canadian airports and airlines had to attempt to entice passengers to while the Liberal government maintained tourism-killing policies like an expensive hotel quarantine requirement, intrusive on arrival testing, and a glitchy passenger arrival app that snarled customs lines and raised concerns about passenger privacy.

Alghabra’s unwillingness to question or remove these roadblocks, particularly long after the rest of the world did so, put Canadian airports and airlines in positions where staff layoffs, route cancellations, a decline in service, and revenue loss became the norm. So today, despite an entirely foreseeable post-pandemic spike in travel demand, within Canada, air travel operations have been slow to recover. 

In practical terms, today, if a passenger books a flight with a Canadian air carrier, it may be randomly changed and canceled before departure. For example, this month, Canada’s flagship air carrier, Air Canada, suddenly announced that it would be entirely pulling flights on a route with national significance. This change came days after another Canadian airline, Sunwing, abruptly announced the cancellation of all of its flights to and from Regina, leaving many Canadians stranded abroad.

At Canadian airports, passengers are likely to wait in long security lines. International travelers have had to wait hours in an aircraft before getting into long customs processing queues. And woe betide the poor soul who makes the fatal error of checking a bag on a Canadian bound flight. If said bag somehow makes it to its destination (something increasingly becoming unlikely), it can be fated to end up in a random pile with hundreds, if not thousands, of other passenger bags. 

And passengers have almost no hope of compensation for their troubles. The situation has become so bad that the agency responsible for dealing with serious passenger complaints - which also sits under Alghabra’s purview - has a backlog of over 33000 cases. With no hope of resolution or compensation through this agency, many passengers are out of pocket big bucks for cancellations, delays, and general f–ckery meted upon them by the Canadian government, airlines, and airports. As a result, they are now turning to the courts.

Despite Alghabra’s mandate and responsibility to address these issues, which have become an impediment to Canadian economic activity and human morale, his response has functionally been to throw his hands up and shrug. He has taken no real action to clear the backlog of passenger complaints, address the structural issues at airports, or sanction Canadian air carriers who have attempted to blame stranding passengers on unbelievable excuses like being taken by surprise by the Canadian winter. And last month, the most Alghabra could seem to muster for thousands of passengers caught in one of the biggest travel clusterf-cks in recent history seems to have been to produce a video about Santa.

So Canadians have every right to be skeptical about this man’s ability to oversee a Canadian commercial space launch program.

It’s not that commercial space launches aren’t necessary. They will likely be a critical part of any future Canadian defense and economic strategy. And Canada, in theory, has the raw goods to deliver. And as other countries rapidly expand satellite capacity, and companies like SpaceX look to space to solve major industrial problems, the vast expanse of Canada’s north and long coastlines make it an attractive geographic location for launching rockets. 

However, the problem for Canada for success on this front isn’t its geography. It’s a bumbling federal government that can’t seem to manage basic matters here on earth while other industrialized nations are reaching for the stars. Sources of private capital looking to invest in space launches know this, and no amount of glossy announcements from the Liberals will convince them to invest money in the risky and pedantic regulatory environment Trudeau’s government currently maintains. And given its track record on infrastructure development, there’s no reason to believe Canada’s current government could deliver where private capital likely won’t.

The unfortunate reality for Canada’s future space prospects is that Alghabra can’t get on a stage and make promises with any measure of credibility regarding his ability to deliver on them. That’s because right now he can’t even credibly assure Canadian travelers that they and their luggage can get from one part of the country to another.

Until he can prove he can fix these matters that are closer to home, when it comes to building a future for Canada in space, Alghabra is sending static out into the stars.