An emergency hub is the dream – but can it be reality?

Mayor Martin Ritsma wants to expand the municipal airport’s role in being a regional hub for emergency response – but can his dream be a reality?

CONNOR LUCZKA, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

During the Air Bridge 2025 training event at the Stratford Municipal Airport on Sept. 27, Mayor Martin Ritsma told the gathering pilots and stakeholders that his dream for the local airport is to be an emergency hub.

“Currently, it's a hub for air Ornge and for OPP operation search and rescue, but I'm hoping that moving forward we will be a provincial hub for emergencies,” Ritsma said. “And so there's my dream, and my belief is that if we can sell that idea and bring that vision here, then it might have a little better uptake in council chambers.”

A better reception from council is perhaps a steep ask. For the last few years, the airport, a city-asset, has nearly been on the chopping block during annual budget deliberations. Although the airport has a relatively small operating budget (a budget of $76,899 was approved for 2025), a few councillors have expressed an interest in the airport being revenue-neutral, an unlikely outcome according to a 2023 study by HM Aero Inc. For some around the horseshoe, it is harder to justify keeping an asset that loses money and is likely to keep losing money.

“I think what we have to do at times … is look beyond the fuel sales and the hangar fees and the flight school pieces,” Ritsma told the Times. “We have to look at the socioeconomic piece of it as well. What can we do out of this airport that maybe you can't put a dollar-figure on?”

Fire Chief Neil Anderson was at the Air Bridge event that day, wearing his other hat as the city’s director of emergency services. He said that if the airport were to become an emergency hub, it wouldn’t push out the airport’s current uses.

“Ultimately it would not be taking Ornge out of the package,” Anderson explained. “This would be more for delivery, a place for people to come, wildfires or animals rescued from up north, organ transfers if required, mostly people transfer or equipment transfers. There's a portable emergency operations centre in there, if our communications go down … I think the beauty is, you don't need the infrastructure for it. You just need the people.”

On that note, Anderson did say that infrastructure would have to be taken into consideration. The airport’s taxiways are maxed out currently – though the airport is surrounded by farmland currently being leased out. Expansion would be possible, but that takes money.

Ali Asgary, an associate professor of disaster and emergency at York University, was at the Air Bridge event that day. Having seen disasters in other parts of the world, he supported the idea of Stratford’s airport doubling down in its role during emergencies. As he said, small airports have a role to play in the event of crisis as larger airports get overwhelmed. Like Ritsma, he looked at the airport’s role beyond the financial pressure it perhaps poses on the municipality.

“(In) 100 years, if this airport, or any small airport like this, can be used for one emergency, larger scale emergency operation, it has done its job in that regard, because there you can save thousands of lives. I've seen it in Turkey. I've seen it in Iran. I've seen it in Japan. I've seen it in Haiti, in all other places. … So all these regional airports can come to support. They may not be active for very large aircraft, but still for emergencies, small aircraft, medium-sized aircraft can provide enough support.”

Ritsma said that the next step after the Air Bridge event is analysis. What was achieved at the Air Bridge 2025 event and what can be done in the future? What other emergency hubs are out there and what can Stratford learn from them? Where does the airport need investment and what partners can the municipality look to?

And with partners comes funding, Ritsma said.

“If we create something in here, maybe it is something that we would look at as a shared service, right?”

For his part, Perth-Wellington MPP Matthew Rae said that the airport is an asset to be leveraged.

“There's competitive advantage and the unique opportunity potentially for more provincial and federal investments if we can bring the right partners together. I think Alliance North is helping facilitate that, and obviously we'll be sharing the feedback from today with (Minister of Emergency Preparedness and Response of Ontario Jill Dunlop).”