Adding hundreds of family-wage jobs to the Spokane economy is good news in anyone’s book, but the prospective deal involving Cascade Aerospace USA offers a couple of bonus chapters.

If all goes as hoped, the aircraft maintenance business, based in Abbotsford, B.C., will move into leased space at Spokane International Airport in February, starting with 138 jobs and adding 245 more within the following three years. The average Cascade wage is more than $43,000 a year, 30 percent higher than the average wage in Spokane.

First, though, everything depends on whether Spokane International Airport gets the $2 million grant it requested from the state Community Economic Revitalization Board. The board is scheduled to decide at its next meeting July 17 at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

It’s a bold request – $2 million is the maximum grant CERB is authorized to hand out – but the funds are needed to upgrade the long-neglected hangar complex where Cascade would perform heavy maintenance on military and commercial aircraft, such as Boeing 737s and 757s.

Assuming the state grant comes through, Cascade’s interest in the area could be a signal of more good news to come. As airport spokesman Todd Woodard noted, the Canadian dollar is strong, a far cry from the days when it represented about 75 percent of par value against U.S. currency. Investing on facilities in the United States is a timely move for solid Canadian companies.

Meanwhile, Alberta is enjoying a bustling economy. The province’s vast oil sands were once costly to exploit, but rising energy prices and technological advances have turned the mass of gooey bitumen into a lucrative resource. The Athabasca oil sands in northern Alberta are said to be the second largest reserve in the world, after Saudi Arabia’s, and the Alberta economy seems to have an expansive future.

Some parts of northern Washington state, such as the Bellingham area, have already welcomed a number of Canadian businesses that found American real estate prices and a skilled labor pool appealing.

Bringing Cascade to Spokane has been an 11-year saga, according to Woodard, but with CERB’s blessing, a happy ending is in store. And maybe, once a precedent has been set for cross-border partnerships, a series of them.