OTTAWA — Defence Minister Peter MacKay says Canada has "some work to do" to repair relations with the United Arab Emirates.
MacKay made the comment to reporters Thursday as he departed for Lisbon, Portugal, with Prime Minister Stephen Harper for a summit of leaders of the NATO military alliance.
MacKay declined to repeat what he called a "private conversation" reported Wednesday in which he said Canada would not have lost a military base in the U.A.E. if it had granted aircraft landing rights in Canada as requested by the Gulf sheikdom.
MacKay was quoted saying the failed negotiation set back Canada’s relations with the U.A.E. by a decade.
As well as seeking more flights, Emirates Airlines had wanted to establish a North American hub in Toronto for its mammoth Airbus A380 aircraft, with smaller Emirates aircraft taking through passengers to other cities, a source familiar with the negotiations said.
The request to flood Canada’s long-haul aviation market, as Emirates and Etihad have already done in Australia, New Zealand and Britain, was bitterly opposed by Air Canada.
"My view is we obviously have some work to do," MacKay said. "We have some work to do in repairing the relationship with the United Arab Emirates."
MacKay said he was referring to "the circumstances" under which Canada left the base, dubbed Camp Mirage, that had been used to channel equipment and Armed Forces personnel to Afghanistan for a decade.
All the costs of relocating to Cyprus and Germany have not been calculated yet.
Since Canada moved to Mirage after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., it quickly became the main logistical hub for Canada’s war in Afghanistan. Over the years, about 72 million tonnes of cargo has passed through aboard C-130s and, latterly, much larger C-17 transports.
Some C-130s were always based there. From time to time, the airfield was also home to P-3 Aurora surveillance aircraft from bases in Nova Scotia and British Columbia.
Several prime ministers and as many as 270,000 passengers also traveled through Mirage while going to or returning from Afghanistan. It was also used by hundreds of sailors joining or leaving Canadian warships patrolling in the Middle East.
Most of those travelers stayed at least one or days each time at Canada’s makeshift camp, which included a ball hockey rink and where mechanics had to toil on hot plate-like airframes in temperatures that often reached into the 50s.
The troops also had opportunities to relax on the Emirates’ beaches and be awed by its extravagant shopping malls.
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Canada-U.A.E. relations will take some work, MacKay says