Katrina Nokleby

Thank you, Madam Chair. This is the first I've heard of that, so I will definitely commit to looking into that. I just also wanted to let you know that the department has just asked me to come to Hay River on the 23rd of March, so it looks like somebody was listening to the Member somewhere, and it sounds like a trip to Hay River is being planned sooner rather than later.

I can get back to you with the details. However, my understanding is we can land significant-sized airplanes on the Yellowknife runway, so I would have to get back to you on that. However, the Yellowknife airport has a master plan. Sorry, I will have to get back to the Member. I am being reminded of my protocols.

There is a Yellowknife airport master plan. If you'll just bear with me to let me find the correct page here, I can give you some details on that. The Yellowknife airport is being looked at. Oh, where did I lose it here? It's being looked at for its own capacity and its own merits...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have enough on my plate without ENR, so, yes, thank you .

---Laughter

It is my understanding that Northwest Territories Tourism, they are a destination marketing organization, they are actually at this point continuing to market to China, as not the entire country of China has been impacted by this. So it is our plan to continue with marketing toward China and Chinese tourists. As well, we will work with the Chinese tourism counterparts to ensure that we can communicate with them that we want them to come to the Northwest Territories, that we are still committed to...

Fair enough. I may be a little bit optimistic in using the word "vibrant," and I acknowledge that. I would like to hope that we will continue to see a good season. However, I do acknowledge what the Member is saying in that there is no way I could predict that at this time. Again, I also cannot fully answer what metrics will be collected. Obviously, we will be looking at things like direct impacts to airfare, cancellations on airlines; we will be looking at asking the hotels, et cetera, to provide numbers for their types of cancellations, and such; so I assume that there will be a fairly...

Let me just clarify my point, then. While I said that I did not feel like we would have a great or a full understanding of the entire impacts until the fall, I am sure that we will be apprising the public and the Members -- we will be; I will commit to that -- prior to the fall. As we start to collect the data and we can analyze it and look, we will commit to updating the Members as we progress through that data analysis, and I will commit to it being a robust data collection. As an engineer, I love data, so I will commit to that to the Member.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We do know that there will be impacts as a result of the coronavirus. However, at this time, we don't have those numbers in front of us, and we don't feel like we will really have the full picture until likely around the fall of this year, when we can look at the numbers for the season and see where we are at. I would like to remind that, while we do have a lot of Chinese visitors and they do play an important role in our tourism sector, we do have people coming from other locations around the world. While this will impact our tourism sectors and we will feel the impact...

The mentorship program has not been developed yet, so they are open to any sorts of suggestions. One thing that I have found with ITI is they are definitely not a "this is the way it has to be" kind of department. They are pretty flexible in some -- well, you can ask Kevin, but they are very flexible sometimes in their ways of doing it. When we have been discussing all of these sorts of changes that we are going to be doing, a lot of it will be end user feedback. I have had that conversation a lot with the department, so if there is a need, and clearly, if we are going to talk about business...

We feel taxiing down the runway does not pose a significant delay and thus can perform fire suppression activities accordingly.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The department talked with the Northern Air Transport Association, or NATA, and Northwestern Air Lease and Air Tindi are members of that association. The runway level of service did not change, therefore the aircraft used by Air Tindi and Northwestern Air Lease were not impacted. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

The Fort Smith airport is designed for a 737. The geophysical features allow the operation of water bombers; the same level of service is maintained. Every aircraft that can land in Hay River can also land in Fort Smith. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.