Good morning, everyone. Thank you for the opportunity.
I'll just give you a quick overview.
I'm Nick Vodden, president and CEO of Perimeter Aviation LP. We are a remote aviation operator in northern Manitoba and northwestern Ontario. We service predominantly passenger, charter and freight needs to about 30 remote communities in northern Manitoba and northwestern Ontario. We've been in business for about 60 years, with bases in Manitoba and Ontario. We are about an 850-employee-sized company, pre-pandemic, of course.
Obviously, it has been a very challenging nine months here. Working with our long-standing partners and relationships with our first nations communities, we put in a number of protocols right at the onset of the pandemic, from cleaning and flight segregation to thermal infrared temperature-reading equipment and you name it.
Throughout the pandemic, we have worked with each individual community and either their rapid response team or pandemic leads to assist with pre-approval processes, and we have taken any avenue we've been able to so as to help these communities do their best to keep the virus out of the community and, when it gets there, to meet the needs safely.
Among the key challenges that have appeared throughout the pandemic in the north is that the passenger volumes have reduced so much that it becomes very difficult for us to maintain the viability of operating these routes. Since most of the time we're the only carrier and we have long-standing partnerships, we have elected to continue to operate these routes in order to get in essential medical supplies, to get the members of communities out for medical appointments and to just to help meet the needs of the community.
Some of the key challenges we've tried to help them with, which some previous speakers have spoken about, are hospital infrastructure and medical shipment movement, which seems to be a challenge in these communities.
With really only small nursing stations and no hospital features, rapid testing is an immediate need and is starting to roll out to many of the communities. The problem is that the vials that operate the rapid tester are in such scarce supply that they can't use them, really, for rapid testing needs. They're only used in close contact situations up until this day. The program is moving, but there's a real sense of urgency.
The next most important thing we can do for these communities is to set up the vaccination program to prioritize the high-risk individuals and get vaccines into the communities to limit the spread, because many of these communities have unfortunately experienced cases in the last 60 days.
As for the recovery initiatives we would like to talk about—and really, these points somewhat echo those made by previous speakers—the Internet and telecommunications infrastructure is still very poor in most of the communities, with slow high-speed Internet or no cellphone service at all. That would really assist, particularly in a time like this, when we still have communities that have no high-speed Internet at all.
The health care facilities are very small-scale, with limited resources in the communities. They require a high degree of daily movement, whether for medical shipments or for nurses or patients to come back and forth. They're really not set up with adequate supplies to handle anything of this magnitude, or even a small measure that might happen.
The other item that we are really leaning on for the recovery portion of our strategy is the housing piece. It seems to be very challenged in the north. They're crowded and lots of areas still don't have running water. It's very tough for them to have a healthy lifestyle in this environment, especially when a community could be in lockdown right now.
Those are our three key long-term items.
I think that's it for our overview.