Aviation Archives | Massimo Bergamini

ONLINE CAMPAIGN BACKS HARVEY FRIESEN POSTHUMOUS INDUCTION INTO AVIATION HALL

March 12, 2021 Massimo Bergamini

Northern Ontario aviation legend Harvey Friesen grew Bearskin Airlines into one of the leading regional carriers in Canada — he may be gone, but his legacy has not been forgotten. A group of Canadian airline executives, current and retired, have initiated an online petition campaign to boost support for Harvey Friesen’s posthumous induction to Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame.

An aviator and philanthropist

Harvey Friesen passed away suddenly on February 2, 2014, days after announcing he was stepping away from most of his professional responsibilities to embrace a well-deserved (partial) retirement.

Friesen was first and foremost a pilot, but he was also a visionary and a builder.He took Bearskin Lake Air Service, a small air charter operator serving remote First Nation communities in Northwestern Ontario and built it into one of the most successful regional carriers in Canada.

By the late 90s Bearskin Airlines was providing scheduled service to all the major northern Ontario communities and not long after, expanded operations to northern Manitoba.

As president and CEO of Bearskin Airlines from 1977 to 2011, he did not just help connect communities and families across the North and with the rest of Canada, but he opened new markets and created new job opportunities for thousands of Canadians.

He also built a sense of community and giving among all those around him that continues to this day.

His vision for Bearskin Airlines extended beyond its role as a good and reliable mover of people and goods, it involved also being a good and reliable corporate citizen. Not only was he personally heavily invested in the good works and activities of local service organizations, but he encouraged his employees to do the same in each of the communities they served.

Seven years after his passing, much of what Harvey Friesen built, from the Bearskin Airlines brand to charitable sporting events, to a generous sense of community stand as a reminder of his extraordinary achievements as an aviator, a business and community leader and as a philanthropist.

Now his many friends, former industry colleagues as well as people across Northern Ontario and Manitoba believe that his legacy should be recognized and given pride of place in Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame.

If you want to support Harvey Friesen’s posthumous induction into Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame, please visit and sign the petition posted on Change.org by clicking here.

NEW TRANSPORT MINISTER BRINGS CLEAN SLATE TO AIRLINE PANDEMIC RELIEF NEGOTIATIONS

January 22, 2021 Massimo Bergamini

It is likely that there was more to last week’s surprise cabinet shuffle than just some pre-electoral housekeeping triggered by the decision of the former minister for innovation Navdeep Bains not to seek re-election.

Considering the growing clamour over air service cuts that are leaving communities — in Atlantic Canada and elsewhere — isolated from the rest of the country, a more likely explanation is that the prime minister also saw in his minister’s decision an opportunity to break a political logjam that threatens the Liberals’ election prospects.

The shuffle’s marquee move was the shift of former foreign affairs minister Francois-Philippe Champagne into the vacated innovation portfolio with former transport minister Marc Garneau replacing him as Canada’s top diplomat.

Rounding out the cabinet shakeup, Winnipeg MP Jim Carr returned to cabinet as special representative for the Prairies and Mississauga Centre MP Omar Alghabra replaced Mr. Garneau as transport minister.

While the appointment of a new minister of foreign affairs who would be expected to reset the Canada-US relationship got top billing, it also served to overshadow the fact that the changes would help the government reset its relationship with Canada’s air transportation sector.

Given the storm brewing in a number of communities that find themselves without air service, the latter relationship may be of more immediate political importance to a prime minister who has been openly speculating about an early visit to the polls.

For months, Canada’s airlines and airports had been pleading for help navigating the turbulence from a pandemic that has cut their revenues by over 80 percent.

But early optimism that like other national governments, Ottawa would step up to keep the industry from collapse, finally ran out of runway last November.

Industry sources say that a relief package had been promised by the former minister, and when it failed to materialize in the government’s fall economic update, many felt abandoned by the government.

Since November 30 when finance minister Chrystia Freeland delivered the government’s economic update the situation has only become more worrisome for the air transportation sector.

In the last two weeks alone, Air Canada and WestJet each slashed more domestic capacity, laying off almost 3000 more workers and leaving communities such as Gander, NL; Sydney, NS; and Fredericton, NB without any air service.

In that context, the appointment to the transportation portfolio of an affable but low-profile MP with no cabinet experience surprised observers.

But lost in the shuffle was recognition of the political value of a minister coming into a tough new job without having to check any baggage at the gate.

Unlike his predecessor, who many in the industry had come to view as an unreliable interlocutor, the new minister arrives with a clean slate on which to map a way out of a crisis that threatens to ground Canada’s airline industry and isolate dozens of communities.

The former transport minister’s bumpy relation with Canada’s aviation sector predated the pandemic and he was known more for his acerbic and sometime provocative public statements about air carriers than for being a champion for the industry.

His tendency to frame publicly — if not necessarily view — the resolution of commercial aviation issues and policy disagreement as a kind of zero-sum game left little room for meaningful negotiations and compromise.

The new minister on the other hand will enter into negotiations with air carriers unencumbered by any such personal baggage.

Carrying a clean slate will not only help the minister in talks with the industry, but it will help him and the government in selling to Canadians an assistance package that, given the scope of the crisis, will come with a hefty price tag.

For five years, Mr. Garneau played stern paterfamilias to Canada’s air carriers with the gusto worthy of a method actor.

Delivering a comprehensive and long-term assistance plan for Canada’s air transportation sector would have been against type for Mr. Garneau.

Mr. Trudeau recognised that. Steeped in the art of the theatre, he gave that role to someone else.