Daryl Campbell

Calgary, Alberta, they had a company called Paladin Security take over the airport security in 2024.

And a lot of contractors came back and said, hey, not only are they severely understaffing us, they're also not letting us take bathroom breaks or have water on the line.

And that's both causing...

unhappiness in general, but also it's meaning that a lot of people are calling out.

And Calgary actually had one of Canada's worst TSA equivalent security lines of like 30 to 40 minutes being standard when the rest of Canada was about 10 to 15 minutes.

And so that's just something that you can pretty easily point to that privatization isn't this magical answer that's going to solve everything.

The devil is really in the details.

And what worries me specifically about doing this under the Trump administration is they've shown, number one, a pretty strong disregard for the details.

And number two, this kind of cronyism where they'll give the contract to their friends or someone within the Trump family or someone who just happens to have a connection to Mar-a-Lago.

And that doesn't mean it's a fair contract bidding process or even they're getting the best possible answer.

It's just whoever has the presidency or whoever can get a line into them.

And that usually means that you're getting a lot of bloat, a lot of inefficiency, and a lack of quality, which...

perversely is exactly the thing that privatization proponents point to as the problems that get solved by doing it.

On principle, I don't hate the idea of TSA privatization, but the way that the debate gets framed almost locks us into this false choice that you can either accept the status quo or you can accept privatization.

There are workarounds.

Probably the easiest one would be just to protect that line of funding that pays TSA officers so that when the government gets shut down, they still get paid.

It's conceptually easy to do.

They did it for ICE.

Why can't you do it for TSA?

They do it because it's a useful political football, and it's a useful way to lock people into this idea that this is the only alternative.