Gander Area Business Community Struggling with the Suspension of Air Canada Flights at Gander Airport
The Gander and Area Chamber of Commerce has heard loud and clear from its membership that the suspension of flights by Air Canada will be detrimental to the business community and will impact recovery from the economic downturn of the COVID crisis. Below are testimonies of the many concerns expressed over various busines sectors:
- A portion of my medical supplies (not equipment) and medication arrives by air via Gander, as they are required more urgently than ground transportation will allow. By losing the AC service means that my supplies will likely have to come ground instead, delaying the customer receiving it. Or my vendors may have to shift air through St. John’s and then arrange ground transportation to me. This will add more time and certainly more cost. And certain cold chain products may become inaccessible to me because of this additional time as manufacturers have a time limit from shipping to receiving their cold chain medication while maintaining product integrity.
- Losing this flight destroys our link to medical services on the mainland and even more importantly, we will lose our delivery system for critically important nuclear isotopes that are used for nuclear medical diagnostics. It also eliminates a pathway for urgent access to medical equipment or drugs that are not available in the province needed on an emergency basis.
- Central Health relies on this connection to bring in health care workers and vendors and more importantly the utilization of temporary physicians and locum physicians to maintain a safe and reliable healthcare throughout the region all of whom are dependant on a direct connection to Gander airport.
- This decision prevents our business from acquiring parts and materials via air shipments. It also prevents any supplier/customer from being able to visit our facility (if required and able) to either support our equipment or assess our capability.
- As a small business that depends on overnight delivery of fresh flowers from Ontario this is terrible news for me. The supply chain has been broken and the new obstacles it will cause for my small business could be detrimental.
- I own a vacation accommodation business in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Our locations are predominately around the Gander area. Most of our out of province guests, as well as ourselves, use the Gander airport to access the area. The loss of this service to the Gander area will make the road to recovery that much more difficult. I believe the area will suffer because of the new difficulty in accessing it.
- As the mining exploration industry is very decentralized operating in some of the most remote and far-reaching regions of this country we often require rotational workers to supplement the locally available workforce as high skilled persons are often required and not available in sufficient quantity in local labour pools. To facilitate this our company needs access to high quality transportation networks and specifically air travel. New Found Gold (NFG) currently employs personnel in Gander travelling from British Columbia, Ontario, Manitoba, Yukon, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia; all of which is facilitated through the use of Air Canada’s direct service to the Gander International Airport.
- As the mining exploration industry is very decentralized operating in some of the most remote and far-reaching regions of this country we often require rotational workers to supplement the locally available workforce as high skilled persons are often required and not available in sufficient quantity in local labour pools. To facilitate this our company needs access to high quality transportation networks and specifically air travel. New Found Gold (NFG) currently employs personnel in Gander travelling from British Columbia, Ontario, Manitoba, Yukon, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia; all of which is facilitated through the use of Air Canada’s direct service to the Gander International Airport.
- In addition to the transportation of personnel to the project site NFG also relies on air travel for the movement of freight with many of the specialized mining tools and services we require are often only available in the established mining hubs of this country such as Sudbury, Timmins and Val d’Or. NFG currently conducts three to four freight shipments per week of drill core samples with Air Canada Freight to Timmins, Thunder Bay and Sudbury, ON grossing one to two metric tonnes of air freight per week. With the rapid expansion of our business, we expect this volume of air freight to grow throughout 2021.
As you can see from the above testimonials, this action by Air Canada has a far-reaching effect and is felt by all sectors of business/services provided throughout the Gander area and that of the whole of Central Newfoundland and Labrador.
Chamber 1st Vice Chair, Hannah de Young stated, “Today we are asking for the Federal government’s support and leadership to ensure that Gander and area is not permanently severed from the rest of Canada due to the suspended operations of Air Canada through Gander International Airport. We must balance the health and safety concerns from COVID-19 with the long-term impact on economic recovery, long term consequences to our vulnerable business sector, and considering employment for our area residents.”
The Gander and Area Chamber of Commerce, which supports 300-plus members, promotes, and improves the economic climate, while supporting the needs and concerns of the business community and enhancing the civic and social well-being of the area.
