MONTREAL- Three governments took the same stage at Montreal City Hall Friday, an unlikely show of solidarity aimed at keeping the International Civil Aviation Organization in town.
“We can be on different sides during the ballot questions and elections but we work together to make Montreal the great city it is,” said Jean-François Lisée, Quebec’s minister for Montreal.
Lisée, who self-describes as a “hard-line” Quebec sovereignist, shared the podium with Montreal Mayor Michael Applebaum and a Tory- Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird. All of them are trying to stave off an attempt by the Middle Eastern kingdom of Qatar to lure the agency to the capital city of Doha.
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“We know what Qatar’s doing, we know what they want. They want Doha to become a world-class city,” Baird said. “Getting a world class organization will certainly assist in that regard.”
The ICAO is a wing of the United Nations founded in the late 1940s, as air travel was becoming mainstream. According to Karl Moore, a McGill University business professor who monitors the air industry, Montreal made perfect sense to the UN: it operated in both English and French, was close to New York City but outside the United States. Today the ICAO sets aviation policy concerning issues like air quality, security and airline consolidation.
Moore said if the ICAO leaves, it could mean “tens of millions of dollars a year because of the kind of people who live and work here in Montreal. It’s hundreds and hundreds of employees, over a hundred ambassadors. So it does have a very strong economic impact on Montreal.”
The UN will vote on the ICAO’s future in September. For the proposed change to pass, 60 per cent plus one of the UN’s 191 member states will have to vote to approve it. Officials in Montreal say they won’t be idle during the run-up to the vote.
“We will do everything we can to ensure that the agency will stay here in Montreal and show exactly why they should be staying here as they have been for the last sixty years,” Applebaum said.
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