international holocaust remembrance day 2003

In response to that, and because we have so many worldclass recreation facilities, unimaginable ski hills, golf courses, everything anyone could possibly want in the form of recreation in our area, a proposal has been put forward to extend the Cranbrook airport runway from 6,000 feet to 9,000 feet. Furthermore, most people end up leaving the Cranbrook area, driving over to Calgary and taking advantage of WestJet and other discount carriers in the area. Therefore, because the landing fees have been increasing, they have been decreasing the number of passengers as they have been able to.Īt the same time the government has consistently increased the taxes on airline travel, to the point that now it costs over $700 for a round trip between Cranbrook and Vancouver. Now we end up with the situation that the airlines have chosen, to downgrade from 737s to Dash 8 300s, Dash 8 100s, Beechcraft 1900s and so on, the imperative being that the fewer the number of passengers on the plane the lower the landing fee. Therefore, the development has taken place. My constituency, I should say, produces about a quarter of the world's metallurgical coal.

That development work has stabilized and now, as a result, we have a very solid employment base. One thing is that at that time, in the early eighties, with the amount of development that was happening in the Crow's Nest and people coming to the Cranbrook airport in 737s from Vancouver and Calgary and then going on up to the Crow's Nest, we had a very large volume of people coming through the airport. It is unique in the fact that the overall airport traffic in the early eighties was approximately 155,000 passengers and today it is down to under 90,000 travelling passengers. It is unique, as are all smaller airports, I am sure. I want to speak briefly, in the context of Bill C-27, about the city of Cranbrook and the Cranbrook airport. What it basically means is that there was an absolutely unpredictable, unforecastable expense that is now facing the city of Cranbrook and the Cranbrook airport. Now, as we have just been discussing, response times are totally different. On the issue of the Cranbrook airport, when the city of Cranbrook took over the airport response times were stipulated at that point. Speaker, it is very interesting to follow my seatmate, my colleague here, and his comments. Transport Canada also noted that in making ad hoc decisions, it had for over 60 years assumed more and more responsibility for airports.īecause it had no policy for what it was supposed to do, it did whatever it figured had to be done every day. It was strictly ad hoc.Īlthough Transport Canada began the process of transferring airports in the late 1980s and has been leasing out airports since 1992, only in 1994 did it indicate a need for a National Airports Policy. It knew nothing about firefighting timelines, financing and borrowing. It has nothing.Īgain I will quote from the Auditor General's report at section 10.19 which says, “A comprehensive national policy on airports did not exist until 1994”.

Speaker, that is another aspect of the exact same problem, that the government does not have a clue what it is doing. Does the member have any comments on the fact that the government, when it put these airports out to other authorities to run, said that they did not have to have this type of response and now it is reneging on that and putting a huge burden on a lot of small airports across the country? Today we have the firefighters from across Canada on the Hill with regard to the emergency response issue. There are many issues at many of those airports across the country that need to be addressed, and CARs 308 is one of them. It only deals with 28 airports, I believe, and all the rest are left out of this. One of the biggest problems in the bill is that it does not address airports that serve millions of Canadians. That to me seems to be what is going on with these airport authorities. Speaker, the member's scenario kind of reminds us of the old saying that the Liberal government will tax something until it quits moving and then once it stops moving it subsidizes it to get it going again.

International holocaust remembrance day 2003