My family and I will be taking part in the national story du jour this week as hundreds of thousands of Canadians take to the skies for summer vacation.
Will we arrive on time and with our luggage? The statistics and real life horror stories we’re personally becoming acquainted with these past few weeks suggest – strongly – that that ain’t going to happen.
Saturday morning a friend texted me urgently inquiring whether I could lend his friend some camping equipment for a canoe trip up north the next morning. The Ontario resident had flown to Yellowknife with a group of other paddlers, looking forward to a bucket list white-water river trip in the unspoiled wilderness of the Northwest Territories. Now he was in some stranger’s garage (mine) accepting unwashed sleeping bags and a mildewy water barrel. His luggage had failed to arrive with him – a story that has popped up in my Facebook feed more times than prairie dogs on a field force-flooded with a garden hose.
The Ontario canoer texted me the next morning saying his camping equipment had “miraculously” arrived around midnight, just in time for the final leg up north, and thus he would not need to bring along my decrepit bedding. My friend’s dad, meanwhile, also arrived Saturday – without his luggage, naturally — on his way to a fishing lodge.
It would be nice to be optimistic and assume all this poor air service is just a temporary annoyance that will go away with the summer crowds. But two years of pandemic travel restrictions have led to us this inescapable result: a still reeling industry with a future still very much in doubt.
Air Canada alone laid off more than 20,000 workers after Covid-19 reached our shores in 2020. The airlines are trying to hire back their lost workforce but who would want to come back, given the uncertainty?
Ditto restaurant workers, tourism operators, hairstylists and anybody else who endured work in feast and mostly famine service industries during the pandemic. One in four workers in Canada were considering a career change, according to the LifeWorks Mental Health Index report, published in November 2020.
A couple weeks ago I remarked on the boldness of MLAs passing a motion pushing the territorial government to increase the population and housing by 25 per cent by 2043. Add declining air service to the list of reasons why this goal is all but unattainable.
Without reliable, relatively cheap air travel, the territory will find it even harder to gain population altitude. Who’s going to want to come live here if it takes grandma three days, including a night sleeping on the departure lounge floor at Pearson International, to get here? This also spells bad news for a tourism industry relying on guests with few extra days to spare to visit the North or businesspeople who need to travel frequently and who don’t have time to spend an extra night in Edmonton mid-passage every second trip out of the North. A shortage of pilots will leave smaller communities especially vulnerable.
Chief public health officer Kami Kandola was recently honoured with the Premier’s Award for Excellence for her efforts to guide the territory through the pandemic and good for her, it’s well deserved, but there is still no sense of when those efforts will get a public airing.
I wrote in this space on April 27 that we need a full public inquiry of the territory’s Covid response to help everyone in the NWT better understand what worked and didn’t work to better prepare us for future outbreaks. Our greatest enemy now is uncertainty, and we’re not going to dispatch that with a closed door departmental review.
Until we have a clearer understanding of what it takes to maximize safety without ruining the economy, I fear important things to Northerners like reliable air travel will continue to elude us, as well as every other bad thing that comes cascading after it.
A few thoughts before departing on my family summer odyssey. Hopefully we won’t have to spend a night on the floor of an airport terminal while our bags are flown to Portugal.