Planes, trains and economics

Rome, as the saying goes, wasn’t built in a day. Aqueducts, roads, infrastructure — it all took time. Atlantic Canada’s tourism infrastructure wasn’t built in a day, either — especially not its arteries, the air and other travel routes that bring out-of-province tourists and their dollars to our shores. And now that many of those arteries are shrinking due to a lack of customers, it’s pretty clear that the impact of that may last quite a bit longer than simply the eventual end of the pandemic.

The Atlantic region’s travel industry has been hit hard.

Airports are looking for financial help as flights dry up, and bus and train routes are atrophying from a lack of customers. Many Atlantic airports have lost whole blocks of regular flights, and still more changes are likely in the spring, when WestJet has announced a further round of belt-tightening. WestJet’s already dropped four Atlantic cities from its routes; Air Canada has completely halted flights to two cities and scaled back routes at other Atlantic airports.

The problem is, it’s not the kind of capacity you can simply rebuild by flicking a switch, whether it’s airlines or even bus routes. Capacity builds back slowly after regular customers move to other options, and equipment and staff have to be found by companies that will have, in the best of situations, weak balance sheets and little ability to bear the costs of re-expansion. Coming back from the COVID-19 customer collapse may have to be more organic, and slower, than the tourism market, among others, will need it to be.

And it’s probably worse in the Atlantic region. Fourteen-day quarantine rules, while they have been extremely effective at slowing the spread of the COVID-19 virus in the region, have also lessened travel considerably, making routes uneconomic for travel operators.

Airlines operating regional routes were encouraged by a federal government commitment early in the pandemic of support, but the spending was not spelled out in detail in the government’s fiscal update. In all, $206 million was earmarked to “support regional air transportation” over the next two years, but there was little to explain as to how and when the money would be applied. With the money not flowing, routes are dropping — and, frankly, it’s easier to keep a route in place with timely assistance than it is to find the funds needed for a full restart.

That’s left airports struggling. In St. John’s, the airport authority is using a line of credit to pay for operations, while Halifax’s airport authority is asking for debt relief. The last plane left the Sydney airport monday morning.

Even bus operators, like Maritime Bus in New Brunswick, are cutting routes at this point.

Put it this way: it’s not enough to be a great place to go, if there’s just no way to get here.