In 2024, the landscape architects PUBLIC WORK imagined the Billy Bishop Airport lands as an urban park home to arts, commerce, agriculture, extensive wetlands and more – while linking the park to the city via the airport’s pedestrian tunnel.PUBLIC WORK/Supplied
An incoming jet roared over the playground at Hanover Gate in Regent’s Park in London. It flew low enough that a girl on a slide could read the markings on the fuselage. The Airbus A220 crossed the lines of treetops and terraced houses and touched down at Regent’s Park Airport, where Bank of England governor Mark Carney disembarked and caught a cab for a four-kilometre trip to his office.
None of this ever happened, of course. Londoners would never tolerate an airport in one of their most important public spaces. London City Airport is more than 10 kilometres from the heart of the capital.
Toronto is different. Billy Bishop Airport already barricades the city’s most important public space, the Toronto Island Park. A proposed expansion would boost the airport to five times its current capacity. As The Globe and Mail’s Jeff Gray reported last week, an expansion would add almost a kilometre of landfill in Lake Ontario, bringing jet noise and pollution within spitting distance of lakefront parks and dense neighbourhoods.
That agenda would be disastrous for Canada’s largest city. It is being pushed by private interests, including American capital, who have provided no convincing rationale. Nobody is counting the negative impacts of an expansion or imagining other options for the site.
Only Mr. Carney, as Prime Minister, can stop it from taking off.
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He’s well qualified to evaluate the airport’s business case, which is bogus. Nearly all of Toronto’s air travel, about 95 per cent, passes through Pearson International Airport. Yet Billy Bishop proponents claim the tiny secondary airport generates huge economic impacts. They say an expansion would boost that contribution to $8.5-billion a year, nearly half of Pearson’s 2025 impacts of $19.6-billion.
How is that plausible? The province won’t say. (Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria’s office did not reply to several e-mail and phone requests.)
Billy Bishop’s jet advocates – Nieuport Aviation, which owns the airport terminal and is controlled by J.P. Morgan Asset Management, and the federal Toronto Port Authority – likewise offer few specifics. Their broad claim is that CEOs like the airport. And they imply that will still be true if the airport grows much larger, bringing tourists with strollers to crowd the security line. On the other hand, if the airport closed tomorrow, its flights and passengers would vanish like so many contrails.
You don’t need to be an economist to suspect this is hooey. Pearson (thanks to a major investment from the federal government) is 25 minutes by train from Union Station. Even the most delicate investment banker can manage that odyssey.
As they should. As the futurist and Aerotropolis co-author Greg Lindsay explained to me in March, an airport is an important economic asset for a city; but two are generally worse than one. Its “hub function” increases as its routes and amenities are concentrated. “Anything that dilutes Pearson’s hub function risks real economic harm,” he said.
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Pearson has empty acreage and active plans to expand. Supporting those plans is the obvious policy choice.
How does the Toronto Port Authority sell its agenda? With misdirection. In 2023 it published a self-serving report from Richard Florida’s Creative Class Group, which referred extensively to Aerotropolis but totally misconstrued the “hub” argument.
No surprise here. The Port Authority, which reported a paltry $17-million in net income in 2024, is making a case for its own survival. Its staff have every incentive not to imagine other options.
But Canadians do. What if these 85 hectares were something else? In 2024, the landscape architects PUBLIC WORK imagined the airport lands as an urban park home to arts, commerce, agriculture, extensive wetlands and more – while linking the park to the city via the airport’s pedestrian tunnel.
That project would transform Toronto’s image overnight. How would it goose tourism? How many locals would come, along with the 1.5 million who already visit annually? What would the payoff be?
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Now imagine building housing. What could Build Canada Homes, the new federal agency for affordable housing, achieve here? Across the harbour, a new island, Ookwemin Minising, is being planned by Waterfront Toronto to hold 12,000 homes and more in a buildable area of 19.4 hectares. You could put two such districts on the Billy Bishop site along with a large and transformative park expansion.
Waterfront Toronto – co-owned by the federal government – should study these scenarios and do a rigorous economic analysis. That would be basic due diligence on a decision that will resonate for generations.
The government should also understand how Billy Bishop competes with Alto, the high-speed rail line in which Ottawa is rightly making a huge investment.
Meanwhile, make the Port Authority show its cards. Now is the time for a real public reckoning of the physical impacts, the pollution, the traffic, the billions in likely costs, and the direct and indirect damage a jet expansion will wreak on central Toronto. A sophisticated federal government should enhance its most valuable asset: the city.