Alex Bozikovic is the architecture critic of the Globe and Mail. Last weekend, he wrote a column titled “Doug Ford’s obsession to expand downtown Toronto Airport would be economic vandalism.”
I asked myself why an Ontario Premier would want to vandalize the economy of the city responsible for half the province’s wealth creation.
So I took my pencil and marked everything in Bozikovic’s piece that’s vague, sloppy, partisan or just plain wrong. I’ll begin at the beginning.
“Doug Ford’s push for jets at Billy Bishop Airport wouldn’t just wreck Toronto’s waterfront. It would be economic vandalism.”
How exactly would it wreck Toronto’s waterfront?
Noise pollution?
Actually, the new regional jets are quieter than older jets. They’re louder than prop planes, like the Bombardier Q400s that Porter uses, but not that much.
So how about wrecking the Harbour with a longer runway that jets require?
The current runway is 3,988 feet. A new runway to accommodate jets would be 5,440 feet. That 1,500 foot difference is no small number. But it wouldn’t prevent boats from operating in the Toronto Harbour. I keep my kayak on the islands and I have to steer clear of the airstrip when I go out for a paddle. But I don’t view that as an inconvenience. I’m a recreational boater; surely the more time I spend on the water, the better. And if I’m on the Toronto Island Ferry, the extra time it takes me to get to the Island and back is negligible.
So how about polluting the air and water?
Well, adding jets causes a small increase in local air pollutants, but nothing compared to having an airport there at all and certainly compared to downtown traffic. Next…
“[Billy Bishop…moves….] less than 5 per cent of Toronto air passengers. Yet Billy Bishop claims $2.1 billion in ‘economic output’ each year. They expect Canadians to believe that, if the airport closed tomorrow, none of its flights would move to Pearson, all its jobs would disappear and its visitors would choose not to come to Toronto. Which is absurd.”
What’s absurd is to think that none of these flights would move to Pearson. I assume that all of them would try to get landing slots at Pearson, that the 2,000 people who work at Billy Bishop would try to find jobs at Pearson, Hamilton, Waterloo or Oshawa, and that visitors would choose to fly to Toronto and land at Pearson International that handles millions more passengers and is 30 minutes away.
The fact is, Billy Bishop is one of Canada’s 10 busiest airports and one of the world’s top 10 best airports (fewer than 5 million passengers a year). Since 2006 when Porter first launched, passenger loads have risen from less than 25,000 to 2 million annually. And even with the opening of the Pearson UP Express in 2015, over a million Canadians drive the 170 kilometres to Buffalo to catch a flight – a two-hour drive not counting delays at the border.
Okay, so what about Billy Bishop contributing to declining real estate values on the waterfront? Not true. Condo prices near Billy Bishop are 10 per cent higher than those east of Yonge Street.
Bozikovic interviewed urbanist Greg Lindsay for his column. Lindsay is the co-author of Aerotropolis, which was published in 2011. He says: “I can point to any number of papers that show concentrating your traffic in a single hub is better than dividing it into two.” And since Toronto’s Pearson Airport is that hub, “anything that dilutes Pearson’s hub function risks real economic harm.”
Tell that to New York (7 airports), London (6), Los Angeles (5), Melbourne, Paris, Dusseldorf and Moscow, Tokyo, Stockholm, Dubai, San Francisco and Boston (4), plus dozens more with 3 airports.
Next…
“Billy Bishop is used by many members of downtown Toronto’s business and political elites. The few people who use the airport, including local Liberal MPs and their staff, benefit from its tiny scale and small crowds.”
Are you an elite? I am. Or rather, I’m not. Or I am sometimes, and I’m not other times. Very much like everyone I know and like many of the 2.75 million citizens of Toronto. And are we elite by income? By education? By job category? Restaurant choice? Political power? Fashion sense? Home ownership? Bozikovic uses “elite” as an all-purpose insult, even though he belongs to a very elite group of full-time architecture critics.
As for “the few people who use the airport,” a minute spent on Perplexity would tell him 2.8 million passengers used Billy Bishop in 2019. That fell by 75 per cent during COVID, then bounced back up to 1.7 million in 2022, 2 million in 2023 and 2.1 million in 2024. It fell again when Canadians went “Elbows Up” and stopped flying as much to the U.S. But the opening on March 10 of U.S. pre-clearance will likely have it return to 2.8 million in the next couple of years.
Next…“I like flying Billy Bishop,” says Mr. Lindsay who is based in Montreal. “It is convenient. It is nice and this is a mistake that we make. People are mistaking their personal preferences for what is the best policy choice.”
I’m not sure that selecting something because it’s convenient is a mistake. Uber is more convenient than taxis, Airbnb can be more convenient than a hotel; and my iPhone is more convenient, at times addictively so, than a landline/camera/calendar/writing pad/calculator. And of course airplanes are more convenient than railways. I certainly don’t view them as policy mistakes. Such mistakes have created trillion-dollar companies.
Next…“The bulk of new flights would also be to the U.S. I would think an expansion runs counter to the stated goals of the Carney government to increase its trading partnerships overseas versus the United States.”
The Carney government is not in favour of no trade at all with the United States. It wants to lower its current level of 76 per cent of its exports going to America. Canada has all sorts of other ways to divert its overdependence on those exports. And when the market for flights is literally just across the pond, why not expand there rather than to Mexico or Great Britain or India?
Finally…
“So, what would be best? For that we need to determine the real negatives of a jet expansion: filling of the harbour, pollution and noise. Not to mention the continuing multibillion-dollar development of the port lands led by Waterfront Toronto. Airport flight paths are already limiting development potential there, and jets could add to that burden. The city has spent 50 years trying to clean up its lakefront. Mr. Ford’s whims could prove ruinously expensive.”
Yes, there is some filling of the harbour by lengthening the runways, but not enough to cause anyone real inconvenience. Pollution and noise would be much the same as there is today. As for flight paths limiting development, by ‘development’ is he talking about more condos on the waterfront? Surely we’ve learned they won’t make the waterfront more beautiful or human. As for Mr. Ford’s whims, the author has failed to make the case for how they could prove ruinously expensive.
To be clear, I have issues with jets flying from Billy Bishop. For example, I share Taras Grescoe’s view that we need railways, not runways. My complaint is how weakly the Globe and Mail’s architecture critic made his case against Doug Ford.
In fact, the sense I get from reading Alex Bozikovic’s piece is that he called it in. He assumed the reader accepts his premise of “Ford + Waterfront = Destruction” when a basic check could have revealed how paper-thin it is around the facts.
In a word, it is lazy. While I don’t expect more from the author, I do from the Globe and Mail.
Meanwhile…
1. “To be a woman right now…especially a woman who loves men, is to try to reconcile the love and respect that you have for the men that you trust, with the utter loathing, disgust and sense of betrayal you feel toward men in general…” And here’s how the founder of Noma, René Redzepi, resigned, and how the Cesar Chavez story came out.…andHarvey Weinstein: The Rikers Interview…and have you come a long way, baby?…Finally, can your favourite movie pass The Bechdel Test?
Speaking of…hooked on baguettes. And…of the Top 250 women in the world of sustainability, Toronto’s Kathleen McLaughlin is Number
2. Circumcision rates…In different countries. 31.9% in Canada and 80.5% in America?
3. Keep the meter running. A guy waves down a taxi in New York City, jumps in and says “take me to your favourite place and keep the meter running.” The cabbie is then interviewed on their way to their favourite place, usually a very local ethnic restaurant. Without fail, each cabbie turns out to have a remarkable life.
Speaking of…happiness in every language… and of other New York delights: 3-D scans come to the Met, and Mozart at the Morgan.
4. New Canadian media mogul. We’ve had Lord Beaverbrook, Ken Thomson and Conrad Black. To that list add Toronto billionaire Stephen Smith who just bought 26.9% of The Economist from Lynn Forester de Rothschild. Smith’s purchase is only the third major ownership change in the magazine’s 183-year history.
5. Delightful takedowns of dreadful wankers. First, Andrew O’Hagan on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Then, Michael Ignatieff on predatory hegemons. Then Margaret Atwood shows off to a seductive and possibly psychopathic AI bot. Dan Gardner wonders why Donald Trump keeps saying “We don’t need anybody.” Finally, the Secret Police Playbook. You don’t join ICE or the secret police because you’re a fascist or a sadist or a monster. You join because you didn’t do as well as your peers at the police academy, or your career is stalled.
6. Elton John and Glenn Gould, in the same breath, in the same city. The Glenn Gould Prize is one of the most coveted awards in the world of music. As it should be. This year’s winner is Elton John who lives in Toronto (and Beverly Hills, England and France), and on Saturday, May 9, Elton John will be honoured at an evening with performances by Diana Krall, The Beaches, Jeremy Dutcher, LOONY, Ron Sexsmith, Emily D’Angelo, and Ryan Wang. Tickets here.
7. The good old days…how they handled bad PR in Hollywood…plus playing realhardball…plus Peanut-Butter-cup Toothpaste…plus the first airplane fatality…And finally, the non-death of reading.
8. Not Hamlet the play, or Hamnet the movie…But Hamlet the dance. April 24, 25, 26 at the Elgin Wintergarden Theatre Directed by Robert Lepage, danced by Guillaume Coté. 10% off to readers of this blog (PROMO CODE: RAMSAY10). Tickets here.
9. Different strokes…for showing off your wardrobe…for cats in art books…for figuring out Spotify…for human speedbumps…and why we can’t hear movies any more. And finally, Joe Rogan’s podcast with Pierre Poilievre. Rogan has 21 million subscribers.
10. Feel good, see great…As it says in Desiderata, and timelier than ever: “With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy…like this…and this…..and, oh wow, this.