Passenger flights between Taiwan and Canada are projected to increase by 61 percent within two years following the signing of a new aviation pact between the two countries yesterday. The pact was inked by Taiwan’s Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) Director-General Jean Shen (沈啟) and Canadian Trade Office in Taipei Executive Director Kathleen Mackay.
Aside from increasing the number of passenger flights, the agreement has lifted the cap on cargo flights and listed relevant clauses on aviation safety.
“This arrangement recognizes the ongoing demand for the transport of people and goods between Canada and Taiwan, and reflects a desire to improve upon our strong long-term economic and people-to-people relationships,” Mackay said in a statement.
According to the CAA, the previous aviation pact between the two nations allowed Taiwanese carriers to offer a total of 13 flights per week, including both passenger and cargo flights.
Currently, China Airlines (CAL) flies seven passenger flights to Vancouver, and EVA Airways (EVA) dispatches three passenger flights to Vancouver and three to Toronto.
Under the new agreement, passenger flights dispatched from both sides would increase to 17 per week.
In addition to removing the restrictions on cargo flights, the agreement allows Taiwanese carriers to carry goods from Canada and transport them to a third country.
CAA statistics showed that the average occupancy rate for flights to Canada was about 84 percent.
Taiwan’s Tourism Bureau said that the Canadian government waived the visa requirements for Taiwanese in 2010, which has helped increase the number of tourists traveling between the two countries to 137,0000 last year.
Both CAL and EVA said that they are assessing the possibility of increasing the flights to Canada.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read: