Ford’s Billy Bishop plan is a bad idea that won’t take off

Christopher Hume –

Ontario Premier Doug Ford never fails to get it wrong: his policies range from the mere­ly misguided to the downright life threatening. Whether ban­ning downtown speed cameras, raising highway speed limits, removing bike lanes, proposing to tunnel under Highway 401 or defunding safe injection sites, he is this city’s worst nightmare.

Little wonder that a recent Angus Reed poll puts his ap­proval rating at 31 per cent, second-lowest of Canadian premiers.

Unsurprisingly, Ford’s recent move to reopen a long-debunked proposal to bring jets to Billy Bishop Airport is every bit as ill-advised as one would expect. Not only did his sudden interest in expropriating and expanding the facility to accommodate jet­liners come out of nowhere, it is entirely off the mark.

Once again, in his bluster and bombast, Ford has overlooked a few crucial truths. In addition to its location on Toronto Island at the foot of Bathurst Street, the pocket airport, so close to the downtown core, works not despite its minuscule size but because of it. Anything big enough to handle passenger jets would defeat the very point of its existence.

Yet Ford envisions some sort of mini-Pearson Airport, small­er, closer and more accessible to the city. It doesn’t work that way: to deal with the logistics of a larger international hub, the facility would need a whole lot more space to handle bigger air­craft and the hordes, passengers and staff, they would attract.

Already, Billy Bishop is a busy operation. Getting to and from it isn’t easy, but so far the city has managed to handle the load without making life com­pletely unbearable for the thou­sands who live and work within earshot. We know, we know, nothing matters more to Ford than business, but at a certain point the mindless growth he promotes becomes counter-pro­ductive.

Since Waterfront Toronto was created by the federal, provin­cial and civic governments in 2001, the tripartite agency has ploughed billions of dollars into revitalizing 800 hectares along the shores of Lake Ontario. It has planned and built whole new neighbourhoods – West Don Lands, Central Waterfront, Bayside – as well as numerous public amenities such as Sug­ar Beach, Biidaasige Park and Sherbourne Common that have changed forever the relationship between the city and the lake.

With a budget of less than $5 billion it has generated more than $14 billion in private in­vestment, in the process remak­ing the landscape of the city and opening up huge swaths of real estate for redevelopment, resi­dential, commercial and leisure.

All this would be seriously compromised by the spectre of jets flying overhead night and day.

Ford and his friends tell us that these planes are quieter today, but is that true? Their massive propulsion engines are inherently noisy, polluting and invasive. Then there’s the ve­hicular traffic and commotion of getting in and out of the airport.

Lengthening the airport’s sin­gle runway presents another ma­jor obstacle. The space here is extremely limited; there would be little room to manoeuvre in an emergency. In short, this is simply the wrong place for such a large operation. As much as avoiding the mess that is Pear­son is desirable, it wouldn’t be worth the cost even if possible.

More important, there are in­finitely better ways to use the waterfront. Indeed, many To­rontonians argue that Billy Bish­op Airport should be shut down and the island transformed into a green space available to every­one. Certainly this wouldn’t ap­peal to the likes of Doug Ford, to whom green space is a place to store money.

The fundamental question the airport poses is about our vision for the city in the dec­ades ahead. Will it be a place for planes or people?

Then there’s the equally vex­ing issue of who gets to decide. As premier, Ford has the consti­tutional power to ride roughshod over City Council and the three million residents it represents. He has exerted that power time and again. Democracy in Cana­da does not extend to its cities. As mere “creatures of the prov­ince,” we have no choice but to sit and watch as Ford – the bull in a political china shop – tells us what’s best for us.

Torontonians don’t need to be told what they should and shouldn’t want for their city. They don’t need Doug Ford to figure that out, thank you very much.