With Queen’s Park contemplating opportunities to open up the Far North to development, Sioux Lookout is taking an aggressive approach toward expanding services through its airport.
The community of 5,500, located between Thunder Bay and Winnipeg, runs the fourth busiest airport in Northern Ontario moving about 120,000 passengers and 900,000 pounds of freight annually. Most of the 30,000 yearly aircraft movements are to and from the 29 isolated First Nation communities that Sioux Lookout serves.
In the offing for the airport is a $12.5-million expansion to its passenger terminal building that will roughly double the size of the facility with 1,000 square metres of much-needed space. More parking and a new service road will be built. The groundbreaking is tentatively scheduled for late 2015, early 2016.
The facility has a 5,300-foot runway with Bearskin and Wasaya as the scheduled carriers, and Northern Skies Air Service, Sky Care and North Star Air available with chartered aircraft.
Airport manager Ben Hancharak believes there’s enough local ridership to lure a mid-sized jet carrier to provide direct flights to Winnipeg.
“Once the terminal is a go, they’ll be more serious consideration from these companies.”
Sioux Lookout was one of 32 communities invited to WestJet’s Calgary headquarters last year to make a pitch for expanded service.
In handling 80 flights a day through the airport, “(WestJet) did indicate they like the feed we have from the North,” said Hancharak.
The airport will be the focal point of a unique First Nation-municipal enterprise partnership project that would see Sioux Lookout become a warehousing and distribution centre to deliver healthy and affordable food to remote communities.
“That project has just gotten bigger and bigger,” said Sioux Lookout economic development manager Vicki Blanchard. “This is going to be a social enterprise co-operative.”
On board are partners such as Lac Seul and Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nations, Lakehead University and Cloverbelt Food Co-op in Dryden, and the potential is there to create 40 to 50 jobs.
The community also is positioning itself to be a supply and staging base should an east-west road network be built into the Ring of Fire mineral deposits in the James Bay lowlands.
On the construction front, a $35-million secondary school is slated to be built and the hospital has a $15 million addition on the books.
Through relationship-building initiatives like Sioux Lookout’s Friendship Accord with Lac Seul, Blanchard is eager to attract a university partnership to establish a Think Tank campus to study the Far North and tackle issues on transportation, climate change and food security.
The municipality is working with Lac Seul to finalize details with Cape Breton University and its Purdy Crawford program to bring an Aboriginal business pilot project to the area.
“That’s going to be huge for the region,” said Blanchard. “This is exciting because I think we can become a knowledge-based think tank for the North.”
