Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In regards to the second part of the
motion, we of course are going to be looking at the fire crews. We had very good fortune and a good response when we started training emergency firefighters, and the issue of are we adequately staffed on the ground is one we’re going to look at as part of our comprehensive annual review that we do. So we are going to work on that.
In relation with community firefighters, fighting residential fires is one that we haven’t explored that much, but we definitely are going to be looking at are we staffed up to the right degree with the fire crews on the ground, especially if we anticipate that this may be something close to a new normal. Hopefully it’s not, but we don’t know.
In regards to retaining of the 215s, there is a fuel shortage. Avgas, as a fuel, is becoming harder and harder to get. It contains lead; we have to special order it; we have to try to guess where it’s going to be needed. Either that or we put it in all of the communities in very large quantities and then it has a shelf life of six months. If you ship it into the more remote areas and you have no use for it, there’s no fire season, you are left with a huge inventory of avgas that costs us a fortune and we have no way to dispose of it. Then we have to go through the process of, in fact, hauling it out and it has to get recertified or it has to get disposed of because of the short shelf life.
There is a cost. We are now paying about $4 million per year to keep these planes operational. We are going to be using these planes up until 2017 as we wait for the new 802s to come off the assembly line and get ready to be put into service. So we are going to keep them in the air for that length of time. Right now, they are worth roughly $5 million. In four years we expect that that number is going to drop, it could be as much as 25 to 30 percent, and that’s for all four of them. They have a diminishing value, and if the avgas becomes even harder to find, then that value may go down even more. We do have, as has been pointed out, a substantial parts list, but that would be part of the deal as we looked at moving away from this.
The other big piece I mentioned yesterday, is these are not exportable, so they sit on the runway if we are going to keep them. If we were called and we had to send planes south and our 802s where busy, these ones would have to sit on the runway because they won’t be allowed to fly in any other jurisdiction. They have served us well, their time has come, there is some life left in them, but it might be another thing except firefighting.
Final comment, Mr. Chairman, is we had a similar situation like this 20 years ago where we had Canso bombers and they were the equivalent of what 215s are today. They were old, antiquated, small capacity, high maintenance planes that for all the wrong reasons, in retrospect, we kept. We tried to keep them in our fleet and we spent enormous
amounts of time and money. They were, in fact, a liability before we finally made the decision that this is crazy to keep these old Canso bombers with a high, high repair rate, accident prone, but we were bent and bound and determined we were going to keep them in our fleet in the air with a lot of the same actors that are still proponents for those types of planes.
We’ve had hard lessons in the past, so I do appreciate everyone supporting an interest in the fire program; we need to have good equipment. On this one, the department has made the case why it’s necessary to divest ourselves of this. It would add another $4 million or $5 million to our budget that we don’t have that we would have to take from somewhere. Would there be a consequential effect on available money to do other things? I would suggest, most certainly. Thank you.
