MR. SPEAKER: The hon. the Member for the District of The Straits & White Bay North.

MR. DEAN: Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

It is an honour for me today to stand and present this petition for the members of my district, The Straits & White Bay North, on maintaining our air ambulance service. I would like to read into the record the prayer of the petition:

To the Honourable House of Assembly of the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador in Parliament assembled. The petition of the undersigned residents humbly sheweth:

WHEREAS it has been brought to our attention that the air ambulance service is being removed; and

WHEREAS St. Anthony Airport can provide the most optimal service to the whole of the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador;

WHEREUPON the undersigned, your petitioners, humbly pray and call upon the House of Assembly to support and maintain the air ambulance service in the St. Anthony area and furthermore will proceed with strengthening the service with the placement of a Flight Specialist Team located in St. Anthony.

And as in duty bound your petitioners will ever pray. It is dated April 11, 2010.

Again, there has been a lot of debate in the House in the last couple of sessions on this atrocity of moving this air ambulance service from St. Anthony into Goose Bay. The more that we consider it and the more that we consult and look at the numbers that really speak truly about the service and so on, the more we realize that this is really disenfranchising the operation of air ambulance in the Province, and that this move is not the move that needs to take place. It does not improve the service, as government would want us to believe today. Certainly for our own district, the area of the Northern Peninsula and Southern Labrador in particular, it puts us at a disadvantage.

Just this weekend, on Friday night, we had an air medevac out of St. Anthony, as we often do this time of the year, in the wintertime, when the aircraft left under conditions that it quite simply would not have been able to get into the area due to the low ceilings and so on.

This is one of the main concerns for us in removing the service, that locally we have an airport that is unmanned from 5:00 in the afternoon until 7:00 in the morning. The air ambulance has operated out of that airport for the past number of years that it has been there, and it has done a lot of air medevacs from the local area and has been able to do so without any problems, in conditions that really would not allow someone to come in and take it out. It is the only aircraft in St. Anthony at 5:00 o’clock in the evening or 2:00 o’clock in the morning. There is no other aircraft. It is the only aircraft that is available. When that aircraft is away and an aircraft cannot come in and do that air medevac then we are left with the option, basically, of transporting that patient to Deer Lake, which is a four-and-a-half to five hour ride. So I would suggest that while we would want to sing praises of the decision and that it is improving air ambulance services in Labrador, it certainly is not improving it on the Northern Peninsula. I certainly would also argue that it is not presenting it in many parts of the Island as well.

I am pleased today to be able to present this petition, and I would ask that the House would give consideration and certainly many more signatures attached right now. Just in the past few days there have been over 5,000 signatures that have been collected along the Northern Peninsula, Southern Labrador and other parts of the Province as well, that are calling upon government to back away from this, to reconsider and to maintain the air ambulance service in St. Anthony.