Smith eyes incentives to entice airlines to regional airports
Premier Danielle Smith says the province may consider covering some initial losses of airlines that agree to expand service to regional airports, including Medicine Hat, Lethbridge and northern centres.
She made the comment at a Chamber of Commerce address in the Hat, where the city and business groups have tried for 15 years to add flights to the municipal airport with mixed results.
Smith, the MLA for BrooksMedicine Hat, said she understands what travellers face and usually does a five-hour drive to the city, rather than spend six hours including layovers to take connecting flights from Edmonton.
“It’s faster to drive to the (next) airport rather than face the unreliability for the air service, and it’s the same problem in northern Alberta as southern Alberta,” she said citing Grande Prairie and Fort McMurray.
“These are going to be centres of growth and when you have growth you need to have good air service.”
Earlier this week, Smith and Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen announced longterm plans for a commuter rail transportation master plant that would initially involve an Edmonton-to-Calgary corridor, then potentially branch out to other regions over time.
She says Dreeshen will also make regional airport development a priority, and last month the province provided $1 million for regional airports to plan for service increases, including $150,000 for Medicine Hat.
Medicine Hat is already in the process of updating the airport master plan this year, and officials told the News that efforts to attract air carriers is ongoing. The Chamber of Commerce has long promoted the need for more flights and competition in the region.
City managing director Pat Bohan, whose division oversees airport management, attended the speech and told the News work is ongoing.
“We started last year studying airline retention and attraction,” he said, adding initial discussions have taken place with three airlines. “That also involves community engagement, working with the chamber, and we’ll have a presentation on that work in the next couple weeks.”
Smith said the province’s initial talks with air carriers have been casual, but one option could be the province would outline requirements and airlines would submit minimum numbers of travellers required to make the route financially viable.
“As the amount of traffic is building up, you pay the difference so they are at least profitable, and over time you build it up,” she said, naming a number of potential carriers, such as Porter Air, Central Mountain Air and Air North, which currently flies to White Horse, Yukon.
“I don’t know who would come forward to offer service on that basis, but I do know my transport minister is very keen to build out runway capacity so we can service our mid-sized cities.”
That could draw industry and remote workers to areas outside major centres, she said, but access to air travel is a necessity for high-tech centres and global trade industries.
“It’s our job to find a way to bridge this gap,” she said. “It’s the core business of the provincial government to provide that infrastructure.”
Beginning in the late 2000s, the city began actively courting airlines to service the local municipal facility. In 2018, WestJet began arriving in Medicine Hat with a regional carrier that for a short time also offered direct flights to Edmonton. It offers three flights each weekday to Calgary.
Air Canada serviced the city since 1998 but in 2019, the airline reduced the number of flights per day to Calgary from six per day (three round trips) in 18-seat aircraft to twice per day in the larger 50-seat Dash 8.
That ended however, in a predetermined decision in early 2020 just as the pandemic began to impact air travel industry.