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

MR. DEAN: Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I present a petition again today on behalf of our air ambulance service in the District of The Straits & White Bay North. It is addressed to the hon. 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 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.

Mr. Speaker, government’s recent decision to relocate the air ambulance medevac service from St. Anthony to Happy Valley-Goose Bay continues to be very disconcerting. It continues to be unacceptable to the people of The Straits & White Bay North district in particular, the district which I represent. I believe, as people across the Province get to understand the implications and the short-sightedness of doing what we are doing, I believe that it also is getting support across the West Coast in particular of people who realize that it does impact them negatively. Regardless of the statistics that want to be presented, of what the minister wants to say and so on, the reality is that the response time will be longer on the air medevaces that are requested out of Goose Bay compared to St. Anthony. I have said before and I would say again, just so people understand: you can fly from St. Anthony to Deer Lake much quicker than you can fly from Goose Bay to Deer Lake. So, I do not know how you can provide that same level of service when that second aircraft has to be involved.

A lot of assumptions are being made in numbers. You can make numbers do what you want them to do and so on. As the MHA for the region today, these are people of the Province. These are people who have a voice, these are people who deserve to be heard, and these are people who deserve to have the same services as any other district in this Province.

So, I would call upon government again today to talk to the people, to listen to the people, to place this decision on hold. That service has been there for fifty-five years. It does not need to go away in the next three to four months or next year or two years, whatever the case might be. We can take the time, we can reassess this, and I believe that logical thinking and level-headed decisions and so on would bring us to a point where we would understand that, yes, perhaps we have missed some vital information. Perhaps, again, we have gone and made a decision kind of prematurely, and hopefully we would have the wherewithal and the willingness to accept the fact that this decision needs to be again looked at, and just changed.

I looked in particular at government policies and government structures – the Rural Secretariat and the rural lens - and I have read the vision and the mandate and so on of the rural lens and the Rural Secretariat. I have asked the question, and I have gotten the answer that in this case the Rural Secretariat was not engaged at all, so the decision that was made certainly flies in the face of what government is trying to do in the Province. On the one hand, they want to understand, they want to hear from stakeholders, they want to hear from people in the regions, and they want to hear from the local people and the local bodies and the councils and so on. On the other hand, they have gone and made this important decision, one that cannot be overemphasised and one that cannot be misunderstood, and they have made this decision with no consultation, with no Rural Secretariat involved, with no rural lens looking through that process and so on. So, again today I ask that government would reconsider this, and that they would look at it. Let’s put the brakes on, and let us understand that what we are doing is what needs to be done.