Carney is talking about bringing private money into Canada’s four biggest airports. Before everyone starts yelling “they’re selling Pearson,” here’s how Canadian airports actually work. The federal government owns the land. It does not run the airport day to day. Toronto Pearson is run by the Greater Toronto Airports Authority, the GTAA. That is not a government department. It’s a private not-for-profit. No shareholders. No dividend cheques. It charges airlines and passengers, borrows money, and then pays Ottawa rent for using the land. Last year that rent was about $236 million. So if your mental model is “the government operates Pearson like a post office,” that’s already wrong. You already pay for it through landing fees, the extra fee on your ticket, parking, and overpriced airport food. A chunk of that money goes back to Ottawa as rent. The catch is the not-for-profit part. The GTAA can’t raise equity. It can’t sell shares and bring in a pile of investment cash. It can mostly just borrow and charge passengers more. That’s like owning a giant mall and only being allowed to renovate it with a credit card and a cover charge at the door. The same basic setup exists at the other big hubs: Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver. What Ottawa is floating is not “we’re selling the runways and the dirt.” The government keeps the land and the assets. The idea is long-term concessions: private investors and operators put capital into the big airports, and Canada recycles that value into other infrastructure, especially smaller regional airports that can’t fund themselves. That’s the actual pitch. The busy hubs already print money. The airports that keep smaller cities connected often don’t. Use the mature asset to fund the ones that need help. The smart question is not “public versus private.” Pearson is already privately operated. The smart question is whether the deal is regulated tightly enough that a new operator can’t just jack fees and call it modernization. Don’t argue the cartoon version. Argue the real one.