BRUSSELS — A North Saanich manufacturing facility is looking to scale up to a 500-person workforce by the end of next year, now that a billion-dollar water-bomber order from European customers is nearing completion.
Mary Ng, Canada’s minister of Export Promotion, International Trade and Economic Development, was in Brussels this month to celebrate the deal with outgoing European Union crisis management commissioner Janez Lenar膷i膷.
Ng is hailing the purchase of 22 De Havilland Canadair 515 firefighting planes by European customers as a national success story.
“This transaction is good for Canadian industry, Canadian jobs and the Canadian economy,” she said in a statement released during her visit.
The deal, worth just over $1 billion, will create 650 jobs at De Havilland Canada and support 2,600 additional jobs in the supply chain, she said.
Neil Sweeney, De Havilland Canada’s vice-president for corporate affairs, said the company is looking to scale up to a 500-person workforce at its North Saanich facility by the end of next year to keep up with demand.
Sweeney said the majority of those jobs will be on the production line, but the company is also looking for positions in finance, human resources and customer support.
As of April, employee count at the facility had already doubled to 300.
In a production update video released this month, De Havilland said it’s on track for on-time delivery for its planes.
The company said last year that the planes would be ready before the 2027 fire season.
However, in an email to the Times Colonist, Sweeney said the planes are now expected to be complete in time for the 2028 fire season, with deliveries first expected “either late 2027 or early 2028.”
Mouktar Abdilahi, spokesperson for Canadian Commercial Corporation — Canada’s government-to-government contracting agency — said 20 of the 22 orders have been finalized with Spain, France, Croatia, Portugal and Greece. The last two-plane contract with Italy is expected to be complete this month, he said.
The Crown corporation, which partnered with De Havilland Canada to negotiate the sale with the EU and six of its member states, is not releasing the value of the individual contracts, as it is considered commercially confidential information, he said.
However, some buyers have disclosed the terms of their purchases to the public.
Croatia signed a 105-million-euro agreement for two DHC-515 aircraft, which will increase the country’s aerial firefighting capabilities by a third. (One euro is about $1.50 Cda.)
Greece inked a 361-million-euro deal for seven planes, with two of those going to the RescEU fleet.
RescEU was created by the European Commission to provide ad ditional resources for disasters and emergencies.
“It includes a fleet of firefighting planes and helicopters, a medical evacuation plane, and a stockpile of medical items and field hospitals that can respond to health emergencies,” the EU says.
Spain, which has an aerial firefighting fleet of 14 planes, approved a 375-million-euro order for seven planes. Two of the new planes will go to the RescuEU fleet.
Portugal’s two planes were purchased for 100 million euros through EU funds, according to the LUSA news agency.
France made a two-plane purchase. The number falls well short of the 16 planes that President Emmanuel Macron promised to bring in to replace its current 12-plane fleet before he leaves office in 2027.
Asked about whether more orders are coming from France, Sweeney said De Havilland Canada is still in talks for additional orders from “current and potential customers” in Europe.
Demand for the aircraft is high due to the increasing number of areas that see regular wildfires due to climate change, he said.
The company is also discussing orders from customers in Canada, Africa and South America, Sweeney said.
Of the 22 water bombers, the EU is funding 12 planes to the tune of 600 million euros.
Those planes — the purchase of which is being equally split among the six countries — will be part of the EU’s first permanent firefighting fleet under RescEU.
It’s something that has been in the works since the devastating 2017 fire season in Portugal killed about 120 people and burned about half a million hectares.
EU civil protection officer Claire Kowalewski said member states were unanimous in pushing for the Canadairs to be selected for the main amphibious firefighting plane to be stationed across southern Europe.
“The planes are really efficient in regards [to] the Mediterranean terrain,” she said in an interview with the Times Colonist. “It’s not too big, not too small — it’s perfectly adapted.”
About 70 Canadairs are in service in Europe, Kowalewski said. “It’s a tool that is just remarkable for the European response.”
Over the years, the Canadair name has become a shorthand for hope in communities threatened by wildfires — as the Martin Mars water bombers were in parts of B.C.
Europe takes a different approach to wildfires from Canada because it’s much more densely populated, Kowalewski said.
“We have very fast fires, powerful fires that usually last [only] for a few days,” she said. “We are not able in Europe to let the fire burn, because quickly it will reach a village, it will reach a community.”
When Ng met with Lenar膷i膷 to celebrate the plane purchases, the two leaders posed for photos just a few steps from the EU’s 24-hour crisis management centre.
Inside, civil protection officers were busy co-ordinating the response to the floods in Central Europe.
The day Ng’s trade tour to the EU started, Bosnian authorities reported that at least 26 people were killed in their country following a series of floods and landslides.
The crisis centre had just wound down its operations in Portugal, where about 5,000 firefighters and eight firefighting planes were deployed under the EU’s civil protection scheme to fight wildfires in that country’s northern regions.
The twin disasters were on Lenar膷i膷’s mind when he spoke to EU lawmakers in France last month.
“Europe is the fastest warming continent globally and is particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events like the one we are discussing today. We could not return to a safer past,” he said.
“We face a Europe that is simultaneously flooding and burning,” he said.
In the 2022 fire season, a shared European pool of disaster resources couldn’t fulfil requests for airborne assistance “for several days, reaching 10 aircraft missing during the worst day of the season,” according to meeting minutes published by the EU’s executive commission.
Lenar膷i膷 estimated that extreme weather events such as fires and floods now cost its 27 member states more than 50 billion euros per year, up from about eight billion euros in annual costs during the 1980s.
There is no longer a fire season, and Europe must be prepared to fight the next fire at any time of the year, he said.
— with files from The Associated Press
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