The Canadian Air Traffic Controllers Association has just declared a ''crisis in the skies.'' The union wants not only an immediate inquiry into the safety of the air traffic control system, but a royal commission on aviation management in general. ''The government has to intervene now,'' says President Jack Butt. ''We don't have a lot of time.''

Can these people just relax? It's been taken care of. John Nunziata is looking into it. King Rat declared last week that ''lives are in danger'' at Toronto's Pearson International Airport, and promised local Liberal MPs would hold public hearings on the matter.

The uninvited entry of the Toronto Liberal caucus into the fracas over air traffic at Pearson is but the most absurd escalation of a phoney crisis into a full-scale media circus. As the indispensible George Bain has pointed out, there has been no sudden surge in the overall volume of air traffic in the past months or year. There has been a steady rise in traffic over the past four years of progressive deregulation, but any strains on the system were as present a year ago as a month ago.

Yet in early December, the Toronto Star, the Globe & Mail, and (I'm sorry to say) The Financial Post pushed out series on the ''airport crisis.'' This frenzy of activity stemmed not from any new emergency, but from the strange coincidence of three events on one day: the launch of the Star series, the grounding of 61 flights, and the first day of bargaining on a new contract for the air traffic controllers.

There has since been a blizzard of policy directives and suggestions as to how to deal with congestion at Pearson, from a government-imposed 40% cutback on the number of flights per hour, to more runways, to another terminal, to extra gates, to longer hours, to, of course, more air traffic controllers. But sooner or later, it's a safe bet that somebody is going to blame this on airline deregulation, just as many have blamed similar delays and confusion in the U.S. on that country's earlier embrace of a free market in the air. Cheap fares, it is claimed, have overloaded the skies.

In point of fact, the skies are in no danger of filling anytime soon. The market is working very well there, making air travel a cheap staple for the masses, rather than an expensive luxury for the rich.

It's on the ground where the problems begin, and there the market is not functioning at all. It's not so much the overall crush of passengers and flights; it's that they all tend to arrive and leave at the same time. And the reason for this is that airports in Canada and the U.S. continue to charge the same price for landing slots at any time of the day: zero.

Auctioning off landing rights, so raising the price in peak hours and lowering it in off-peak hours, would give airlines and their passengers the incentive to smooth travel flows over the entire day. Instead, they are simply handed out for free. Not surprisingly, airlines load up at times their passengers, other things being equal, would most prefer to fly.

The ''crisis'' in air travel is not, then, one of too much market, but too little. In this it is similar to the experience in other sectors that have recently undergone deregulation. The collapse of the U.S. savings and loans industry, for example, is frequently identified with the deregulation of financial services, specifically with the lifting of ceilings on savings deposit interest rates.

What is ignored is that it was only later that restrictions on mortage-interest rates - their main source of income - were raised, and later still that the thrifts were allowed into other service areas. As the now-unprofitable S&Ls desperately raised deposit rates to stave off insolvency, millions of dollars of hot money poured in, thanks to government-backed deposit insurance that guarantees all institutions at the same premium, without reference to the chances of failure.

A third example. The breakup of AT&T and deregulation of the telephone industry has ushered in substantially lower fares for long-distance users in the U.S. Yet it is termed a disappointment for failing to deliver the expected stream of innovative new information services, such as electronic yellow pages, instead offering such gimmicks as call-waiting and phones that quack like a duck. But why is that? Because the Bell offshoots have been prevented by law from competing in the new telecommunications services. Too litte market, not too much.