Ottawa is providing over $1.1 million in funding to North Bay’s Jack Garland Airport.
Terry Sheehan, Parliamentary Secretary to the FedNor Minister, says the non-repayable contribution will help mitigate the financial pressures brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
He says the money will support airport operations for a year and help maintain 11 local jobs.
However, Al McDonald, Mayor of North Bay says hundreds of jobs could’ve been impacted at the Airport Industrial Park if they lost their airport.
“You can imagine losing 500 good-paying jobs, and that’s just on the aviation side, that’s not all the other businesses that depend on our airport including the 65 mining companies that we have in the City of North Bay that have to fly in and fly out,” he says.
Jack Santerre, Manager of the Jack Garland Airport, says the air transportation system as a whole is still severely impacted by the pandemic and it’ll be a while before they come out of it.
He says their scheduled passenger traffic dropped an average of 80 percent in the past 16 months while aircraft movements dropped an average of 55 percent, impacting their revenues.
Santerre says they were able to stay open with help from the city and various government initiatives.
“We were able to continue to provide service for freight, air ambulances, police, military aircraft, all of the essential services that needed to take place through the pandemic and most recently with the return of Air Canada we are starting to see growth back of our scheduled passenger, essential business travel,” he says.
Santerre says the funding announced will allow them to continue to provide a critical transportation link for the region and time to establish pre-pandemic levels of traffic, as they start to build the ‘new normal’ for the industry.
He says he’s read studies that say it’ll be two to five years for a return to pre-pandemic figures.
“Air Canada is already making plans to return with their second daily flight, we’ve gone through daily flights with Air Canada, we have Bearskin this morning just announced that they’re going to return additional flights. There is movement, the economy is starting to open, people are starting to travel,” Santerre says.
The federal money is flowing from the Regional Air Transportation Initiative (RATI), which was launched in March 2021, and supports access to air transportation and regional ecosystems.
