Air North president Joe Sparling is calling on Yukoners for support by choosing to fly with his airline when they travel south to Vancouver.

Additional support will help the company avoid further layoffs and cutbacks, Sparling notes in a memo he wrote to employees and stakeholders which was posted on Air North’s webpage last Friday.

Sparling says buying local, flying local, means supporting the local economy, which benefits everybody by keeping the money in the territory, and not having it go south.

While the Air North president simply describes his competition on the Vancouver route as a mainline carrier, Air Canada is the only mainline carrier with Whitehorse-Vancouver flights.

Flying with the other mainline carrier puts Yukon jobs at risk and represents a leak in the local economy at a time when the territory can least afford it, Sparling writes in his memo.

He notes that in August 2019, Air North employed 375 full-time equivalents.

Last month, the company employed 228, or 147 fewer, he writes. The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enormous impact on the company.

At the end of August last year, Air North had $5.5 million in profits for the year to that point.

This year, to the end of August, it was down $11 million, but did receive $5.5 million in federal COVID-19 relief that went mostly to payroll.

The company currently flies 18 flights a week, with 13 going to Vancouver and five servicing the regional communities of Dawson City, Old Crow and Inuvik. The company has dropped its regular scheduled flights to Mayo, and Edmonton and Calgary.

If the company wants to maintain its current schedule and avoid further cutbacks, it will need to increase its market share of southbound passengers from 65 per cent to over 75 per cent, Sparling told the Star Tuesday.

Sparling explained in his memo there were four flights per day in August: two by Air North and two by the competition. But all those passengers could have been accommodated on two flights, he points out.

He also notes the September southbound traffic has fallen 10 per cent from August and is expected to drop another 10 per in October, but there are still three flights per day, including Air North’s two.

“If the market is only able to support two daily flights this winter, there will be more than 100 Yukon jobs on the line if we are forced to split the traffic,” Sparling writes.

“This is a critical time for us, and while we can still operate sustainably with half of our current flights and less than half of our current employees, this would be a worst-case scenario and one which is completely avoidable if we can encourage just a few more passengers to purchase their travel locally every day,” says the memo.

“The Yukon market is currently producing and will likely continue to produce sufficient traffic for us to operate sustainably, without major layoffs, without major airfare increases and without subsidy. To do this, we need to increase our share of the traffic with the help and support of our employees, our customers, our shareholders, and all of our other key stakeholders.

“We know Yukoners increasingly understand and support the concept ‘buy local’ and we believe it should resonate well with those visiting or doing business in the Yukon.”

The company president notes without the wage subsidy, Air North’s August employment numbers would have had to be 196, or 32 fewer than where they are right now and half of where they were a year ago.

... “In the absence of continued subsidy, that is where we will need to be if we can maintain our current flying schedule – and that is a big if,” Sparling writes.

He told the Star he wrote the memo to be upfront with employees and lay the circumstances on the line, to explain the importance of Yukoners flying with Air North at this critical time.

It was also to encourage company employees and others to talk to their friends and neighbours about supporting Air North when they travel, about the importance of buying local.

Buying local, and not just airline tickets, said Sparling, benefits everybody.

If they have to cut back to one Vancouver flight a day this winter, they would need to lay off another 50 per cent of their staff, he said.

“If we cut our flights in half, we have to cut our staff in half.”

Air North, he writes in the memo, will ultimately survive, and is absolutely prepared to operate on a smaller scale, “but how much we have to shrink to survive will have a direct impact on our Yukon employees.”