Meegwetch. Good morning. Remarks in Oji-Cree.

My question is for the Premier. Twenty-seven First Nations in the Far North are air access only. These northern airports are lifelines to essential services: policing, groceries, mail, education, health care etc. They use gravel runways 3,500 feet in length, which may have been okay in the 1960s, but is definitely not okay today. What is the government doing to plan to extend and improve these gravel runways?

Speaker, imagine landing a six-ton aircraft at 160 kilometres per hour on a gravel runway that is less than a kilometre. Stop and think about that. We would never say it is safe to drive a car or a bus or a truck on a gravel road at 160 kilometres per hour, yet every day, planes are landing under these conditions. In Kingfisher Lake, my home community, the airport runway, which is gravel, was built in 1987. We are still using the same gravel runway.

What is this government’s plan to update these airports, to make them as safe as airports in the rest of Ontario?