Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I rise today to express my sympathy to the family and friends of the late Mike Zubko. Mr. Zubko was a well-respected friend and businessman of the Delta. He passed away on October 28, 1991, after a year-long fight with cancer. Mike worked for Canadian Pacific Airlines in the early 1940s out of Fort Smith, Fort Simpson and Yellowknife. He flew with Ernie Boffa, a well-known bush pilot of those days who taught him how to fly and how to navigate about the North without maps, which largely did not exist in those days.
He moved to Aklavik in 1946 and started Aklavik Flying Service. He married Dawn Smith, the first nurse in Fort McPherson. In 1950 he started a family and eventually had six children. During the early 1950s he flew on the DEWline project and provided the first and only air service to people in the Delta and Beaufort area, including medical evacuations to Aklavik, which were lifesaving to many during the measles epidemic in the early 1950s. He assisted in the new townsite selection which eventually became Inuvik, where he moved to in 1959 and continued to run his business until 1985.
Tom Butters said that Mike Zubko was one of the few people who lived in the North that always had his door open. Commissioner Dan Norris had his first job working for Mike Zubko in Aklavik as his office manager.
Memorial services were held in Inuvik at Sir Alexander Mackenzie School on November 16th. A trust fund for education of aviation students is being set up in Mike's name, to continue the kind of help that Mike gave freely to all who asked for his help and wisdom.
The family requests that people direct donations to this fund. We all will miss him. Mahsi cho.
---Applause