Loyal Air North customers love the Yukon’s airline for its reasonable fares, friendly customer service and, of course, the first-rate economic analysis found in its in-flight magazine.
CEO Joe Sparling’s letters to his passengers are usually filled with fact-filled answers to airline questions you didn’t know you had.
Sparling’s latest letter sheds light on a question a lot of Yukoners have been asking since the cyanide landslide at Victoria Gold: how does mining benefit my family and me, personally?
It’s an important question. We don’t directly get a share of the royalties, like our friends in Alaska do with their oil; it all goes to governments. And once the mining tax revenues are put in the Department of Finance blender, you can’t tell if your government job or grant would only exist because of mining.
So why would a regular Yukoner support mining after Wolverine, Minto and Victoria Gold?
Sparling highlights one reason you probably hadn’t thought about: it makes your flights to Vancouver cheaper.
Legally, Air North is a private business. Economically, you could see it as a shared service for Yukoners.
Consider one of Air North’s new 737-800 jets. Sparling describes a typical flight to Vancouver with 109 passengers filling 70 percent of the plane’s 156 seats. The flight burns 7412 litres of jet fuel, or 68 litres per passenger.
(By the way, just reflect on how remarkable that 68 litres per passenger figure is. Air travel is a big contributor to global warming, but your pickup burns that much fuel in just three weeks if you have a 15-kilometre commute.)
This is where the sharing comes in. If that plane had a full load of 156 passengers, and you assume the incremental fuel burn of one more passenger on an already-heavy plane is close to zero, they would only burn around 50 litres per person.
On the other hand, if the Yukon’s population fell to one person — just you — and you were the only passenger, you would have to pay Air North for all 7412 litres.
Applying that simple math to fares, if you assume a one-way flight to Vancouver normally costs $250, having a full plane would lower that to $175. If you and Taylor Swift wanted the plane to yourselves, it would cost you $16,350 each.
Sparling says that in 2023 Victoria Gold generated 8000 ticket sales, generating $2.1 million in scheduled revenue, $2 million in charters and $200,000 in cargo. The mine, in effect, covered $3.1 million or 11 percent of Air North’s overhead costs.
What this means is that those 8000 Victoria Gold-related passengers, without meaning to, made air travel a bit cheaper for you. If you repeat my simple math above with 11 percent fewer passengers, it means that $250 ticket goes up to $281.
Mining has many positive and negative impacts in the Yukon, as both Victoria Gold’s payroll before the landslide and the landslide impacts show. This is just one of them. But the Air North numbers remind us of how mining helps share the burden of other shared infrastructure, like the power grid or cell phone network.
Yukoners will be weighing these pros and cons in the next election, where the future of Yukon mining will be a top political issue.
In fact, mining may be one of the key political wedge issues. The big news out of January’s Roundup conference in Vancouver, a major industry event, is who didn’t attend. As the Yukon News story put it, “The Yukon NDP is altogether boycotting Roundup in Vancouver. Yukon NDP Leader Kate White typically attends, but not this year.”
”The reality is that there needs to be some really tough conversations,” said White at the time.
In the old days, support for mining was solidly tri-partisan. The Yukon Party supported mining strongly. The NDP, with its strong roots in the working class and mining unions at Faro and elsewhere, did too. The Liberals, in the middle of two pro-mining parties, were also pro-mining.
Now, I sense the Yukon is going through a political alignment similar to what we see in other Western countries. The working class is drifting towards right-wing parties, while the progressive parties focus on urban voters with environmental and social priorities.
White is signalling a much more mining-skeptical position for the Yukon NDP, one that I am sure investors and mining executives at Roundup noticed.
They don’t invite me to NDP political strategy sessions, but from the outside I see another benefit for the NDP of staking out a mining-skeptical position. It creates a wedge between them and their partners in the Liberal-NDP alliance. By voting to keep the Liberals in power for many years, the NDP currently risks owning not just their successes but also their failures.
Smaller partners in such alliances have been hammered by voters in the last few years, from the Greens in BC to the Liberal Democrats in the UK.
Now, as the only mining-skeptical party, the NDP distances itself from its Liberal allies.
So Yukon voters may get three quite distinct choices at the ballot box. The Yukon Party offering a pro-mining stance and a change in government. Liberals running on the Liberal-NDP alliance legacy and support for mining, as evidenced by their spending on fixing up the Eagle Gold property. And the NDP, also touting the accomplishments of the Liberal-NDP alliance but pushing a new strongly mining-skeptical direction.
Since polling is so spotty here, we don’t know which of these strategies is currently working with Yukoners. If only Air North distributed voter surveys with its famous warm cookies, Joe Sparling might be able to tell us about Yukon politics too.
Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist and the winner of the Canadian Community Newspaper Award for Outstanding Columnist. His most recent book Moonshadows, a Yukon-noir thriller, is available in Yukon bookstores.
