Thank you, Madam Chair. I’d like to welcome the Minister and the department here today. I do appreciate over the course of the better part of the year, I know the Minister has been diligent on providing much of the technical and financial assessment to committee in preparation for today. I do appreciate a lot of the background. But for a lot of people tuning in, this is a lot of new information and we’re going to be throwing a lot of technical data here at them. With that said, I think we need to go through a bit of an exercise, because I think we are embarking on a new format when it comes to fire suppression.
We know that the current fleet of CL-215s, these were planes that we inherited for, I believe, a very minimal amount of money. I heard that the transaction was a $1 bill from the federal government, and we maintained the operations of these 215s over the years. But really, by virtue of this capital process, we’re actually now getting in the business of actually buying new planes for the first time ever, when you think about it, so I think it’s important that we do the due diligence here to make sure that if this is indeed what we want to do as a government. Do we want to be in the business
of owning planes? Do we see what the economic benefit is and what the strategic advantage is for us to be the owners of very technical and expensive pieces of equipment?
Now, I know Mr. Bouchard went and talked a bit about the technical aspect, and I do have some concerns that may have not been mentioned and that I think need some response to. These 802s or amphibious air tankers, otherwise known as the fire boss, are definitely a smaller plane. Anyone who is able to Google it will be able to see online this is a very small plane and a very small payload capacity in comparison to the 215s, and I’ll talk about the 415 in a second. The concern I have, and I think Mr. Bouchard kind of mentioned, is given the nature of the fire season that we had last year, and, hopefully, we don’t have a repeat, but quite frankly, we don’t know. We know that we had one of the worst fire seasons, if not the worst fire season in the history of the Northwest Territories, and I would caution to say we probably had one of the worst fire seasons in North America vis-à-vis any other jurisdiction in Canada. So we literally have the prime situation where we could test a lot of these planes, and I know a lot of these planes through our MARS program did come up and help us fight those fires.
My concern is whether or not the 802s would stand up to the rigours of the type of fire that we had last season and dealing with that first attack mode given the smaller plane, smaller payload capacity, the fact that these planes are more susceptible to wind and wind shear, and we know very clearly that fires create their own atmosphere, fires create their own climate, and with that a lot of my dialogue with pilots who actually fly these planes have clearly indicated that the 802s, given the ferocity of a fire and the climate that a fire creates, could serve to be problematic given the type of fire we had last season. I want to at least point that out, that there are obviously advantages and disadvantages for every one of these planes that we look at.
The other concern that I do have is the ability for the 802s that when they’re flying, they’re flying by visual only and they do not have the capabilities of doing instrumentation flying, which then limits, I guess, the amount of time that these planes could be in the air fighting fires. It also could hamper the ability of these planes to go overnight, if need be, to other locations. They would have to fly during daytime only, so where, I believe, the 215s currently and a 415 counterpart do have the ability to fly what is referred to as VFR.
Going back to my original issue without getting more into specifics of the specs, I’m still a little bit on the fence here as to why the GNWT feels that we have to own these planes outright, that we’re not able to consider any type of private operation or private ownership. The department and Minister
have clearly embarked on many P3 initiatives for other investments in the Northwest Territories, such as the fibre optic line and the Stanton project, but yet it appears that this project here, we want to do it in house. I have a hard time deciding when we do a P3 initiative or when we don’t do a P3 initiative. But more importantly, what are the economic and strategic advantages for us to get into this business. Given the fact that we are entering close to our debt wall, we do not have the luxury of other jurisdictions to get in this business, and so I would probably like the Minister to comment on that as well.
Finally, Mr. Chair, with your indulgence, I’d like to spend just a second to talk about the planes that aren’t on the list today, and I know these are more expensive planes, but given the climate that we live in here and given the fact that we faced literally the most vicious fire season in the history of the Northwest Territories, the 415 aircraft is really the plane of choice when you look at it. This is the industry benchmark in amphibious aircraft, and really, if you talk to anyone in the industry and you read any brochure, you read any factual sheet in the fire suppression world, the 415s are the backbone of the firefighting missions around the world. I’m not saying that I want to spend a lot of money on them, because we don’t have the luxury. But it would be nice to hear whether or if we indeed do not have the money for a 415 plan of action, what is the strategy for potentially looking at a private company, private ownership where we’re leasing a 415 to deal with literally a very problematic climate and we’re dealing with large distances and, as I said, without putting a lot of technical issues on the floor, we are hampered by design specifically and technically with an 802 fleet.
I know I was kind of a little bit on both sides of the equation here, and if need be, I can go more into detail, but it was more of the general comment of concern. I believe the 802 is a solid plane. I want to rest assured and let the people know this is a solid plane. It might be, in my humble opinion, a bit too light duty for the type of fire and fire seasons that we could face in the near future.