Grounded in Cape Breton

As if 2020 couldn’t get any worse, more bad news arrived on Tuesday.

The indefinite suspension of Air Canada passenger flights from the J. A. Douglas McCurdy Sydney Airport to Toronto effective Jan. 11 is a major blow to Cape Breton Island. Flights from Sydney to Halifax were recently suspended as well.

This follows recent WestJet route suspensions earlier this fall.

Airport CEO Mike MacKinnon told the Cape Breton Post that the news “is effectively the final nail in the coffin for air service to/from our community for the foreseeable future.”

The impact of that bleak synopsis to the region is enormous. Jobs will be lost, tourism will suffer, rotational workers will have to find alternate travel routes to and from Western Canada, family time for these families will be significantly reduced, fewer international students will opt to attend Cape Breton University (CBU), local businesses will suffer and the list goes on.

Not that we didn’t see this coming.

Even pre-pandemic, McCurdy officials had warned on more than one occasion that passenger travel needed to increase if the airport was to remain a viable operation. In other words, ‘use it or lose it.’

ARRIVAL OF PANDEMIC

Then the pandemic arrived and air travel around the world was decimated with usage dropping by more than 90 per cent in most cases.

An Air Canada spokesperson cited significantly reduced traffic due to COVID-19, ongoing travel restrictions and quarantine rules, low seasonal demand and the termination of the Atlantic travel bubble as reasons for the suspension of local flights this week.

So who could blame them? Without government financial support, there is no way any airline can remain operating indefinitely these days.

This week’s news has sparked the expected reaction with local MPs promising to do what they can to help out (what took so long?) and concerned community groups and organizations planning to meet to discuss what, if anything, can be done.

Cape Breton University president David Dingwall and students’ union president Amrinder Singh are even calling on the federal government to restore the air service to Sydney, an initiative that should be whole-heartedly supported.

It’s difficult to find a positive here but the hope that flight suspensions will be temporary – that they will return once vaccines become commonplace and the world becomes a safer place to travel again – is something to hold onto.

In the meantime, Cape Breton will seem like a more isolated place come Jan. 11. Kind of like it was when passenger train traffic to Sydney ended 30 years ago. And this summer when the cruise ship industry ground to a halt.

And when Dr. Robert Strang recently told everyone to stay away from the Halifax region except for essential trips.

Safer, in many ways, perhaps. But certainly more isolated.