By Court Edeburn
Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to meet with representatives from airlines across North America, all convened for a conference in Chicago.
I came prepared to sell YSJ and southwestern New Brunswick.
I was armed not just with compelling data – the attractive business case for flying out of Saint John Airport.
I also brought a secret weapon, of sorts: Ganong chocolates, handcrafted in St. Stephen. Local ingredients, made by people I could point to on a map.
When you slide a box of those across the table at the end of a long day, it does something a spreadsheet can’t. It reminds the person across from you that behind every passenger number is an actual place, with actual people.
As it turned out, a lot of those people already knew our story, thanks to our recent successes making the rounds long before I got there.
The event was the Jumpstart Conference, put together by Airports Council International. The format is intense. Airlines cycle through back-to-back meetings with airports, 20 to 30 minutes each, one after the other, all day, for two days straight. Someone described it as speed dating, and that’s exactly what it feels like.
My message in every meeting was the same: Saint John has the demand, the community alignment, and the data to support new air service. What I didn’t expect was how many airlines were already seeing it.
A number of carriers had noticed our passenger numbers – nearly nine per cent growth so far this year, even before the new Pascan-Porter service through the brand-new Montreal Metropolitan Airport that launched last week. That growth rests on the success of the flights we already have with Air Canada, with Flair Airlines and with Pascan Aviation.
In a climate where some airports are seeing declines, that gets attention.
Hearing airlines name that back to me, unprompted, was one of those moments where the work feels like it’s registering somewhere beyond our own community.
Chicago was actually one stop in a busy stretch.
Earlier in the month, I took our message to the Southwest New Brunswick Business Community Summit in St. Andrews, where I spent two days meeting with business leaders, talking about our operational performance and the flight options available out of YSJ.
Before that I was in St. John’s for the Canadian Airports Council meetings – where I joined the board of the Atlantic Canadian Airports Association. That role is really about advocating for airports with government and building the kind of national profile that helps communities like ours get heard. It felt like a natural fit.
But back to what the airlines are seeing – because it matters.
What they look for, beyond raw demand, is whether a community is genuinely lined up behind its airport. Is it treated as a pillar of economic development? Are the destination marketing organization, the business community, and local travellers all pulling in the same direction? That alignment matters more than most people realize. It’s often the difference between a route that gets established and one that gets passed over.
Saint John can answer yes to all of those questions. You can see it in how Envision Saint John talks about YSJ. You can see it in the conversations we’ve been having through Team YSJ. The story is real, and it’s starting to travel.
I left Chicago feeling genuinely optimistic. I had positive meetings with eight or nine different airlines – some of those conversations surprised me. But I want to be honest about what that means and what it doesn’t.
New routes take time. It can be two or three years of sustained conversations, relationship building, and contract work before a single new flight ever lands here. Fuel costs, aircraft availability, geopolitical instability – any of those things can shift the timeline.
In the end, these decisions come down to personal relationships with the people who make them. That’s the most important part – and it’s the part you can only build face to face.
This is a long game. My job right now is to make sure Saint John is on the map and in the minds of the people making those decisions.
I believe we got there in Chicago.
Court Edeburn
President & CEO
Saint John Airport