A decades-long fight for a new airport on a remote Manitoba First Nation is over
The province has committed in its 2024 budget to building a new airport on Wasagamack First Nation, ending about six decades of advocacy from the community, Chief Walter Harper says.
“Everybody is excited, even I was excited. Even today I’m very, very excited because going back to 60-plus years, we were the most isolated,” Harper said on Wednesday, a day after Premier Wab Kinew’s NDP government tabled its first Manitoba budget.
Harper and other band members were invited to the Legislative Building on Tuesday for the announcement.
The budget doesn’t say how much the province intends to spend on the airport. “Wasagamack airport and northern airport, strategy development” is included as a bullet point under “major capital investments.”
However, Harper says an announcement at the airport’s site is planned for early May, and estimates that the airport and a road connecting to it would cost about $70 million.
The First Nation, about 470 kilometres north of Winnipeg, has a population of about 2,000 and can only be reached by boat or helicopter. It renewed calls for an airport last year ahead of the 25th anniversary of a helicopter crash that killed a pilot and two beloved elders, Harper’s mother, Bernadette, and her friend.
“This is kind of emotional to me because … I was thinking about my mom and her best friend. And I’m saying to myself, ‘Look, I did it,'” Harper said. “This is what the community needed.”
After that crash, then NDP MLA Eric Robinson promised an airport would be built, but it was never built.
Calls also resurfaced in 2017 when residents fleeing a wildfire near the community had to be taken 10 kilometres by boat to the airport in St. Theresa Point, where they boarded flights to Winnipeg, Brandon and Thompson.
WATCH | Wasagamack chief calls for new airport ahead of 25th anniversary of helicopter crash
Wasagamack First Nation is calling on all levels of government to invest in an airport in the northeastern Manitoba community, as people there recall a fatal helicopter crash that killed two beloved elders 25 years ago this month.