Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, recently Yellowknife Tourism announced that they were giving away 150 trips to the Northwest Territories. Excuse me, Mr. Speaker, I misspoke. NWT Tourism announced that it was giving away 150 trips to Yellowknife; well, 93 per cent of them to Yellowknife, anyways.
In a way, it is almost hard to blame them. If I wanted to fly return from Hay River to Edmonton next week, it would cost around $1,400. It would cost half that if I was to fly out of Yellowknife. If I book a couple weeks in advance, a return flight to Edmonton from Yellowknife is a third the cost of one from Hay River. That’s the norm for southern destinations. To put it another way, in the next two weeks, there are days that it is actually cheaper to fly return from Yellowknife to Beijing than Hay River to Edmonton. Although Hay River is the rail, road, and river hub of the territory, Yellowknife is the air hub, so I understand that flights out of the capital would be cheaper, but it should not cost two to three times as much to fly out of the territories' second-biggest community.
These costs do not just apply to flights to the South. If I wanted to fly return from Yellowknife to Hay River in the next couple of weeks, it would cost me around a thousand dollars. That’s almost 10 times more than it costs to drive. I can understand why the proposed airport improvement fees are of concern to Yellowknifers. They have become accustomed to reasonably priced flights. For those of us from Hay River, that is about a 2 per cent increase. That is not our concern. Our concern is the $1,000 for a 25-minute flight.
Mr. Speaker, not only does the cost of airline tickets make it prohibitive for almost everyone in Hay River to fly anywhere, it virtually guarantees that none of the 30,000 tourists who fly into Yellowknife every year will make the trip to Hay River.
The only entity that appears to be able to afford to fly elsewhere in the Territory is the GNWT. Now, I believe that a fair and free market should determine prices, but preferential policies and agreements for government and medical travel are distorting the market, and those of us outside Yellowknife are the ones who bear the brunt of the negative effects of these policies.
Mr. Speaker, this has been a problem for far too long. This is one of those issues that is too big for a two-and-a-half-minute Member's statement. We are just scratching the surface, so consider this part one of many on this topic and stay tuned for much more. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.