Toronto Pearson, Vancouver, Montreal and Calgary generated roughly $1.92 billion of EBITDA in 2025. Sydney Airport sold at about 24 times pre-pandemic EBITDA, Gatwick at roughly 20 times. Apply those multiples to Canada and you land somewhere between $28.8 billion and $42.2 billion of enterprise value, against about $11.8 billion of existing airport net debt. Ottawa isn’t selling the airports; it’s selling decades of their future cash flow for money it can spend now. That doesn’t create economic value on its own. Whether Canadians come out ahead depends entirely on the terms: aeronautical charge caps, the Airport Improvement Fee, capital commitments, independent regulation, what happens to $477 million a year in federal ground rent, and who captures the upside on Pearson’s 4,600 acres of federal land over the next 75 years.
Ottawa wants private investors in Canada’s four biggest airports: Toronto Pearson, Vancouver, Montréal-Trudeau, and Calgary.
Prime Minister Mark Carney is careful with the words he uses. The airports aren’t being sold. Ottawa keeps the land and the underlying assets. Investors get long-term concessions to run and develop them.
That distinction matters legally.
Economically, Ottawa may be putting $30 billion to $40 billion of airport value on the table.
I went through the airports’ financial statements, comparable international deals, passenger charges, even Pearson’s land-use plan. Here’s why that number isn’t a stretch.
These are already very profitable businesses
Canada’s major airports run on an unusual model.
The federal government owns the land. Independent, not-for-profit airport authorities operate the airports under long-term leases. No shareholders. They fund themselves through airport fees, passenger improvement fees, commercial revenue, and debt.
And they throw off real cash.
In 2025:
| Airport | Revenue | EBITDA | Net debt | Federal rent |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Toronto Pearson | $2.085B | $990M | $5.05B | $236M |
| Vancouver | $718M | ~$242M | ~$1.17B | $78M |
| Montréal | $961M | $443M | $2.60B | $107M |
| Calgary | $541M | $245M | $3.02B | $56M |
| Total | ~$4.30B | ~$1.92B | ~$11.84B | ~$477M |
Almost $2 billion of annual EBITDA is exactly the kind of predictable infrastructure cash flow pension funds and infrastructure investors chase.
And there’s plenty of precedent for what they’ll pay to get it.
What airports sell for
Sydney Airport is probably the closest comparison we have.
A consortium including IFM Investors, Global Infrastructure Partners, QSuper, and AustralianSuper took Sydney private in 2022.
The price: A$23.6 billion of equity value and A$32 billion of enterprise value.
Sydney generated about A$1.34 billion of EBITDA in 2019, its last full pre-pandemic year. That’s roughly 24 times pre-pandemic EBITDA.
London Gatwick is another data point. VINCI bought 50.01% of Gatwick for about £2.9 billion in 2018. Gatwick’s EBITDA was £411 million. Analysts at the time put the airport’s total enterprise value around £8.5 billion, about 20 times EBITDA.
Heathrow shows how far this can go. A 2024 deal involving Ardian and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund implied an equity valuation around £8.7 billion, and that’s despite Heathrow carrying more than £14 billion of airport-level net debt.
Airports are scarce. You can’t build another Pearson or Heathrow next door to the existing one.
That scarcity is worth money.
Put those multiples against Canada’s airports
The four Canadian airports generated approximately $1.92 billion of EBITDA in 2025.
Run a range of airport multiples against that:
| Multiple | Enterprise value |
|---|---|
| 15× EBITDA | $28.8B |
| 18× EBITDA | $34.6B |
| 20× EBITDA | $38.4B |
| 22× EBITDA | $42.2B |
Ottawa’s talk about unlocking “tens of billions” doesn’t look ambitious anymore.
It might even be conservative.
At 20× EBITDA, the four airports are roughly a $38 billion infrastructure business.
They also carry about $11.8 billion in net debt.
Subtract that and you’re left with something like $26.6 billion of residual economic value. At 22×, it clears $30 billion.
None of this tells us what Ottawa will actually pocket. A concession structure is a different animal from selling shares in a company. Existing bonds, airport-authority leases, capital commitments, and federal ground rent all have to get sorted out first.
But it tells you the scale we’re talking about.
And that’s just today’s business.
Pearson shows why investors may see more
Pearson generated almost $1 billion of EBITDA in 2025.
Airlines are only one piece of an airport’s economics.
In 2025 Pearson pulled in revenue from landing fees, terminal charges, its Airport Improvement Fee, concessions, rentals, parking, ground transportation, and other commercial activity. The commercial side alone already generates hundreds of millions a year.
That matters because privately operated airports are starting to look like small cities with runways attached.
Sydney Airport has built out offices, hotels, freight facilities, hangars, industrial buildings, rental-car facilities, and more.
Heathrow pulls significant revenue from retail, parking, restaurants, property, and transportation on top of its aeronautical charges.
And Pearson has something the others don’t.
Land.
Pearson sits on 4,600 acres of federal land
Pearson occupies roughly 4,600 acres of federally owned GTA real estate.
Its Master Plan carves that land up among runways and aviation infrastructure, terminals, transportation, environmental areas, and a category called “Other Airport Development.”
That last one is the interesting one.
Based on my read of Pearson’s 2037 land-use map, roughly 750 to 900 acres fall into that Other Airport Development designation. That’s a map-derived estimate, not an official GTAA figure, so treat it that way.
Permitted uses include commercial offices, industrial development, cargo and logistics, hotels and convention facilities, retail, parking, rental-car facilities, maintenance, and other airport-support functions.
Some of that land is spoken for already, tied up in aviation needs.
But there are potentially hundreds of acres sitting there with real commercial-development optionality.
There’s also another large block of protected land that could eventually become future terminal facilities or more Other Airport Development.
A 50-, 75-, or 99-year investor isn’t pricing that land based on what’s sitting on it today. They’re pricing what could be sitting on it in 2050, 2075, 2100.
Hotels.
Warehouses.
Multi-level logistics facilities.
Offices.
Retail.
Transit-oriented development.
Structured parking replacing surface lots.
Commercial uses nobody’s thought of yet.
That option value might be one of Pearson’s most underrated assets.
Then there is passenger growth
Air travel isn’t going away because of climate change. If anything, the opposite.
Long-term aviation forecasts still project real global passenger growth through 2050, even in scenarios that assume higher energy costs, sustainable aviation fuel mandates, and tighter climate policy.
Past 2050, the uncertainty gets a lot bigger. Climate damages, carbon constraints, new aviation technology, shifting travel patterns. A 75-year passenger forecast is close to meaningless at that point.
But investors don’t need passenger volumes to grow forever.
They need enough growth, enough commercial development, and enough productivity gains to keep cash flow climbing over time.
Which gets us to the actual logic behind Ottawa’s proposal.
Ottawa isn’t really selling airports. It is monetizing time.
Right now Canada’s airport authorities have no equity shareholders.
They borrow, operate, pay Ottawa rent, and reinvest whatever’s left over.
In 2025 the four airports paid approximately $477 million in federal ground rent.
Pearson alone paid $236 million.
Private infrastructure investors will write Ottawa a big cheque today because they expect decades of future airport cash flow to be worth even more than that cheque.
That’s what a long-term concession is, at its core.
Ottawa converts future airport value into capital today. That capital can then go into regional airports, transportation infrastructure, broadband, transit, or whatever else counts as nation-building this decade.
That does seem to be the government’s actual strategy. Earlier federal documents talked openly about attracting private capital into airports and using Canada’s infrastructure more productively. The 2026 Spring Economic Update said Ottawa was examining ways to “unlock the full value” of airports for long-term growth.
The September announcement pushes that further: long-term concessions on the four largest airports, Crown keeps the underlying assets.
That’s the mechanism for turning airport economics into $30 billion or more of investable capital.
But “unlocking value” and “creating value” are different things.
The $30 billion isn’t free money
If an investor hands Ottawa $30 billion, they’re not donating it.
They expect a return.
That return comes from one of five places:
More passengers.
More commercial and property revenue.
Greater operating efficiency.
Higher airline and passenger charges.
Lower payments to government.
The first three genuinely create new economic value.
The last two mostly just move existing value from one pocket to another.
That distinction should be at the center of how Canadians judge whatever concession agreements eventually get signed.
Australia offers both the opportunity and the warning
Australia privatized its major airports through long-term leases while keeping public ownership of the land, a model close to what Canada is looking at now.
Those airports went on to become very valuable infrastructure businesses.
But Australia’s competition regulator has also flagged concerns about airport market power more than once.
Over a decade the ACCC examined, inflation-adjusted aeronautical revenue per passenger rose substantially at several major airports, including Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney.
That’s the core problem with airports.
A passenger flying to Toronto can’t realistically swap Hamilton for Pearson on most international routes. An airline serving Toronto can’t just go build a second runway somewhere else.
Major airports have natural-monopoly characteristics.
Private ownership doesn’t erase that monopoly. It just changes who gets to keep the money it generates.
Brazil is worth a look too. Academic research on airport concessions there found routes involving privatized airports had airfares roughly 3 to 3.5% higher than routes with publicly operated airports, and the effect got stronger where airline market concentration was higher.
That doesn’t mean privatization automatically bumps Canadian airfares by 3%.
It means the regulation attached to this deal matters. A lot.
Canada’s opportunity is to separate airport value from monopoly pricing
There’s a version of this deal that actually works well.
Ottawa grants long-term operating concessions while:
capping aeronautical charges,
protecting the Airport Improvement Fee,
requiring substantial capital investment,
setting up independent economic regulation,
establishing service-quality standards,
preserving competition,
and keeping some stake in future real-estate development.
Under that structure, the private operator makes its money by growing the airport, not by charging more for the privilege of using it.
More retail revenue.
Better restaurants.
Hotels.
Logistics.
Commercial property.
Advertising.
Parking.
Transit-oriented development.
Higher passenger volumes.
Better operations.
That’s real value creation. And Pearson’s land base makes this model especially interesting to watch.
Ottawa also needs to decide what happens to the rent
The four airports currently pay almost half a billion dollars a year to the federal government.
On paper, killing that rent would make the concessions worth more.
Obviously it would.
It would also mean taxpayers gave up a roughly $477 million annual revenue stream.
Using today’s EBITDA, wiping out ground rent would push the four airports’ combined operating earnings from about $1.92 billion to almost $2.40 billion.
At a 20× multiple, that gap alone is worth roughly:
$9.5 billion.
But Ottawa hasn’t created $9.5 billion out of nowhere.
It’s converted future federal rent into higher airport cash flow, and therefore a higher concession price.
Which is exactly why the headline concession number will tell us almost nothing about whether Canadians got a good deal.
We need to know what Ottawa gave up to get it.
And we need to know who owns the upside
This might be the biggest question of all.
If Pearson develops hundreds of acres of federal land over the next 75 years, who captures that increase in land value?
If passenger volumes double, who captures that?
If airport retail revenue doubles?
If a future transit hub spins up a major commercial district around it?
If parking lots turn into hotels, offices, or logistics centres?
A concession could be structured to maximize Ottawa’s cheque today by handing most of that upside to investors.
Or Ottawa could take a smaller upfront payment and keep ground rent, development royalties, profit sharing, or periodic concession payments instead.
Those two paths lead to very different places for Canadians.
So what are the airports worth?
Based on 2025 financial results and comparable international deals, my preliminary answer is:
probably $30 billion to $40+ billion in enterprise or concession value.
At 18× EBITDA: $34.6 billion.
At 20×: $38.4 billion.
At 22×: $42.2 billion.
Against that sits about $11.8 billion of airport net debt, which is why Ottawa’s actual upfront cheque could land well below the headline enterprise value.
Sydney makes this point well. It sold for A$32 billion enterprise value but A$23.6 billion equity value.
Canada’s deal will be structured differently, but the gap between those two numbers is the same idea.
The question isn’t whether someone will pay billions
They will.
Canada has four scarce pieces of infrastructure generating nearly $2 billion of annual EBITDA, serving tens of millions of passengers, sitting on strategically located land, in metro areas where you couldn’t rebuild them if you tried.
That’s exactly what long-term infrastructure investors look for.
The real question is: what does Canada keep in exchange for the cheque?
The federal government could turn these airports into $20 billion, $30 billion, maybe more, of capital it can spend today while still owning them on paper.
That’s a lot of infrastructure elsewhere in the country.
But the value doesn’t vanish when Ottawa cashes the cheque. It moves. From future airport cash flows into today’s federal balance sheet.
Whether this policy works out will come down to the terms, not the size of the number: airport charges, passenger fees, capital commitments, regulation, federal rent, real-estate rights, and how much of the future growth Canada actually keeps a piece of.
Because if investors think Canada’s airports are worth $40 billion today, the question that matters isn’t how much they’ll pay us.
It’s what they think those airports will be worth tomorrow.
Sources and notes
- Government of Canada airport-concession announcement. Reuters, September 15, 2026. The federal government announced plans to invite long-term private investment in Toronto Pearson, Vancouver, Montréal and Calgary while retaining public ownership of the airport assets. Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon described the planned process as competitive and regulated and said Canadian pension funds and international infrastructure investors were expected to participate.
Reuters: Canada seeks private investment in major airports
Reuters: Expected investor interest in Canadian airport concessions
CBC News: Canada’s 4 largest airports to be opened up to private investment (free to read, if the Reuters links are paywalled) - Toronto Pearson 2025 financial results. Greater Toronto Airports Authority. Pearson reported 47.3 million passengers, $2.085 billion in revenue, $990.2 million EBITDA, $366.1 million net income and $402.7 million free cash flow for 2025.
GTAA: 2025 Annual Results - Vancouver International Airport 2025 financial statements. Vancouver Airport Authority. The figures used in the article are calculated from YVR’s audited financial statements because YVR’s presentation differs from GTAA, ADM and Calgary.
YVR: Annual Reports and Financial Statements - Aéroports de Montréal 2025 results. ADM. The 2025 results reported approximately $960.8 million in revenue and $442.9 million EBITDA. ADM also reported $106.6 million in rent paid to Transport Canada and $41.8 million in payments in lieu of municipal taxes.
ADM: Financial information - Calgary Airports 2025 financial results. Calgary Airport Authority. The 2025 statements are the source for YYC’s approximately $541 million revenue, $245 million EBITDA, debt and federal lease-payment figures used in the analysis.
Calgary Airports: Reports and publications - Sydney Airport sale. The Sydney Aviation Alliance acquired Sydney Airport for A$23.6 billion of equity value and approximately A$32 billion of enterprise value. The consortium included funds affiliated with IFM Investors, Global Infrastructure Partners, QSuper and AustralianSuper. This is one of the most useful international benchmarks for valuing Canada’s airports.
Macquarie: Sydney Airport acquisition - London Gatwick transaction. VINCI agreed to acquire 50.01% of Gatwick for approximately £2.9 billion. Gatwick reported £764.2 million of revenue and £411.2 million EBITDA in the year ended March 2018. These figures provide another useful major-airport valuation benchmark.
VINCI: Acquisition of London Gatwick Airport - Heathrow ownership transaction. Ardian completed the acquisition of a 22.6% stake in Heathrow’s holding company in December 2024, while Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund acquired another 15%. Contemporary transaction reporting put Heathrow’s equity valuation at approximately £8.7 billion.
Ardian: Heathrow acquisition completion - Australian airport privatization model. Australia’s federal government privatized its major airports by selling 50-year leases with options for another 49 years, while retaining federal ownership of the underlying airport land. This is particularly relevant to Canada’s proposed concession model.
Australian Department of Infrastructure: Airport economic regulation - Australian airport charges after privatization. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission reported that, over the decade it examined, real aeronautical revenue per passenger increased 59% at Perth, 36% at Brisbane, 31% at Melbourne and 15% at Sydney. The ACCC also noted that Sydney had nearly doubled its charges shortly before its 2002 privatization and has repeatedly raised concerns about the market power of major airports.
ACCC: Effective airport regulation needed - Current Australian airport charges. The ACCC’s 2023-24 monitoring report found aeronautical revenue per passenger of A$29.36 at Sydney, A$21.33 at Brisbane, A$18.57 at Perth and A$17.88 at Melbourne. The ACCC uses aeronautical revenue per passenger as a proxy for average prices paid by airlines because negotiated airline-airport contracts are generally confidential.
ACCC: Airport Monitoring Report 2023-24 - Evidence on privatization and airfares. Brito, Oliveira and Dresner, Transport Policy 114 (2021), examined Brazil’s airport-concession program using a difference-in-differences methodology. The study found tickets on routes involving at least one privatized airport were approximately 3 to 3.5% more expensive than routes between publicly managed airports, with stronger effects where airline market dominance was greater.
Transport Policy: An econometric study of the effects of airport privatization on airfares in Brazil - Toronto Pearson Master Plan and land-use plan. GTAA’s Master Plan covers approximately 4,688 acres and establishes the airport’s long-term land-use framework, including airfield, passenger-terminal, environmental, ground-access and Other Airport Development lands. Permitted Other Airport Development uses include cargo, maintenance, commercial offices, industrial uses, hotels and convention facilities, retail, parking and other aviation-support and commercial uses. The acreage estimates discussed in this article for these development areas are my map-derived estimates, not figures published by GTAA.
Toronto Pearson: Master Plan - Valuation calculations. The 15×, 18×, 20× and 22× EBITDA valuations are analytical scenarios, not government or airport-authority valuations. They apply illustrative infrastructure valuation multiples to approximately $1.92 billion of combined 2025 EBITDA. The resulting $28.8 billion to $42.2 billion range represents estimated enterprise or concession value before considering transaction structure. The estimated net-debt deduction is similarly intended to illustrate the distinction between enterprise value and potential proceeds rather than predict the eventual federal concession payment.
- Pearson land-development estimates. The estimates of approximately 750 to 900 acres of Other Airport Development land, roughly 400 to 650 acres potentially having discretionary commercial-development potential, and another approximately 300 to 400 acres of dual-purpose terminal and development reserve were derived from my analysis of the colour-coded Pearson 2037 Land Use Plan. They should be treated as approximate rather than surveyed acreage. Any valuation of those development rights would also depend on the federal ground lease, aviation requirements, environmental constraints, servicing, permitted uses and the eventual concession agreement.
A note on the “$30 billion+” figure
The article deliberately distinguishes three concepts that can easily be confused.
Enterprise or concession value is my estimate of what the economic rights to the four airports could be worth based on their cash flows and comparable airport transactions.
Potential federal proceeds depend on how roughly $11.8 billion of existing airport debt, federal ground leases, airport-authority obligations and future capital requirements are treated in the transactions.
Economic value created is different again. Converting future airport cash flows into an upfront concession payment does not by itself create new economic value. Additional value would have to come from increased passenger volumes, greater commercial and property revenue, productivity improvements, better capital deployment or other incremental economic activity.
That distinction is essential when assessing the government’s eventual claim about how much value the airport concessions have “unlocked.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Ottawa actually selling Canada’s airports?
No, and the wording is deliberate. The federal government keeps the land and the underlying assets. What investors would get is a long-term concession to operate and develop the airports. Legally that’s a meaningful distinction. Economically, Ottawa is still putting decades of airport cash flow on the table.
Where does the $30 to $40 billion figure come from?
From applying comparable airport transaction multiples to the four airports’ combined 2025 EBITDA of roughly $1.92 billion. At 15× that’s $28.8 billion, at 18× it’s $34.6 billion, at 20× it’s $38.4 billion and at 22× it’s $42.2 billion. These are analytical scenarios, not government or airport-authority valuations.
What do major airports actually sell for?
Sydney Airport went private in 2022 at A$23.6 billion equity value and roughly A$32 billion enterprise value, about 24 times its 2019 pre-pandemic EBITDA. VINCI bought 50.01% of Gatwick for about £2.9 billion in 2018 against £411 million of EBITDA, implying roughly 20 times. A 2024 Heathrow deal involving Ardian and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund implied about £8.7 billion of equity value on top of more than £14 billion of airport-level net debt.
Would Ottawa actually receive $38 billion?
Almost certainly not. The four airports carry about $11.8 billion of net debt, and enterprise value is not the same as a cheque. Existing bonds, airport-authority leases, capital commitments and federal ground rent all have to be sorted out first. Sydney illustrates the gap well: A$32 billion enterprise value, A$23.6 billion equity value.
Why does Pearson’s land matter so much?
Pearson sits on roughly 4,600 acres of federally owned GTA real estate. Based on my read of its 2037 land-use map, something like 750 to 900 acres fall under a designation called Other Airport Development, which permits offices, industrial uses, cargo and logistics, hotels, retail, parking and more. That’s a map-derived estimate, not an official GTAA figure. A 75-year investor isn’t pricing that land on what’s there today.
Does an upfront concession payment create economic value?
Not by itself. It converts future airport cash flows into capital Ottawa can spend now. Real value would have to come from more passengers, more commercial and property revenue, or genuine operating efficiency. An investor return built on higher airline and passenger charges, or on lower payments to government, mostly just moves existing value from one pocket to another.
Does airport privatization raise fares?
It can, depending on the regulation. Australia’s ACCC found real aeronautical revenue per passenger rose 59% at Perth, 36% at Brisbane, 31% at Melbourne and 15% at Sydney over the decade it examined. Research on Brazil’s concession program found routes involving at least one privatized airport carried fares roughly 3 to 3.5% higher, with stronger effects where airline concentration was greater. None of that automatically transfers to Canada, but it’s why the terms matter more than the headline number.
What should Canadians watch for in the eventual deal?
Caps on aeronautical charges, protection for the Airport Improvement Fee, binding capital investment requirements, independent economic regulation, service-quality standards, and whether Ottawa keeps a stake in future real-estate development. Also what happens to the roughly $477 million a year in federal ground rent. Eliminating it would lift combined EBITDA toward $2.40 billion and raise the concession price by about $9.5 billion at a 20× multiple, but that isn’t new value. It’s taxpayers giving up a revenue stream.
