The Decibel - Ontario’s failed bid to expand Toronto’s island airport

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

Billy Bishop Airport, located on the western edge of the Toronto Islands, just south of downtown, has long been the subject of controversy. There was opposition to its expansion when Porter Airlines launched back in 2006, and again in the early 2010s when Porter wanted to allow jet traffic. The latest push to expand Billy Bishop took off in earnest in the spring, when Ontario Premier Doug expropriated Toronto’s stake in the agreement between three levels of government that govern the airport. However, after six weeks of public consultation, the Liberal government declined to allow jets at Billy Bishop “at this stage.” Jeff Gray covers Ontario politics for the Globe. Today, he’s here to explain why the question of expanding Toronto’s downtown airport is so hotly contested, the unique agreement that governs it and where the saga goes from here. Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I think it was taking off. Oh my God, there it goes. There's an airplane taking off right now. That's really cool. My toddler would love this. I'm just on my bike ride, and I'm a few hundred meters away from a taking off airplane. I recorded this on my morning bike ride into work.

And my route takes me right by Toronto's downtown airport, Billy Bishop. If you didn't know there was an airport here, I don't know that you would know. There are some people with suitcases, but other than that, it's not really any busier than any other intersection. Straight ahead of me is the CN Tower, surrounded by condo buildings. This airport has been in the news a lot lately,

after the Ontario government tried to push through an expansion project that the city didn't want, and that concerned a lot of residents. And this isn't the first time, we've seen drama like this play out at the small urban airport. So today we've got the Globe's Ontario politics reporter, Jeff Gray, on the show. He'll tell us about the controversy of trying to expand this airport, the unique agreement that governs it, and where this saga goes from here. I'm Rachel Leifie McLaughlin, in for Cheryl Sutherland, and this is The Deceble from the Globe and Mail.

Jeff, thanks much for being here. Thanks for having me. So I was talking about my bike ground. in going by Billy Bishop Airport, this airport, downtown Toronto. For people who don't bike by it every day, what should we know about it? So just to set the scene, this airport's been there since the 1930s, and it is on the Toronto Islands, which are the sort of archipelago of islands that surround Toronto's harbor right in the center of its downtown.

In the mid-2000s, the first decade of the 21st century, it became a busier place because Porter Airlines launched. And Porter and Air Canada since then have flown these turboprop planes, not jets, in and out of that airport, to regional destinations mostly. And it's for travelers, it's been very popular because it's very convenient. It's right next to downtown compared to Pearson, the big, big airport northwest of the city. It's a quiet and more pleasant place to fly in and out of. You said turboprop planes, but not jets. Are turboprop planes smaller?

Like what's the size different? They are the difference in those planes. They are smaller. I mean, you can have a small jet too, right? You can have an executive corporate jet that's small. At the moment, for commercial carriers, only turbo prop planes can fly. And they carry the ones they use, carry about 78 passengers each. Jets are allowed if they're Medevac or emergency services jets.

But otherwise, jets are not allowed at the airport. And you said this. has been around since the 1930s. Does that mean that it's older than Pearson? Yeah, it was. I mean, in the beginning of air travel, it was the airport. And then what became Pearson obviously becomes much, much bigger as the city and the country grew. So interesting.

So I know the airport has had its fair share of controversy, including in the early 2000s. And I read a story of yours from 2006 about the launch of the ferry to the airport. Can you please tell me this story? This is such a fun day. So the airport has always been a flashpoint. in Toronto politics. And it has to do with the fact that people who really care about the islands, the beaches, the parks on the waterfront aren't keen about a whole bunch of planes flying right over top of them.

That's essentially. There are some other concerns about a noise has been an issue, the environment generally, and the ability of the city to build tall buildings closer to the runways. But leaving that aside, back in 2006, I think, we had a mayor, David Miller who had run his campaign when he won cancelling a bridge to the island that was meant to allow the airport to expand.

So he cancels that when he comes into power and midway into when Miller was mayor in 06 we have the launch of Port Airlines and we have to get a lot more people over to the airport. There was a boat, a ferry and the port authority had got a new one

and they were eager to show it off and the airline was as well. And so they had this big launch event that media and dignitaries were on the boat. But if you know where this ferry goes, it is an extremely narrow. Yeah, it's like a couple hundred meters. Like you can maybe like throw a tennis ball, not really, but it feels like he could. It's not a very long way. I would joke that you just have a ferry that was as wide as the channel and then you

wouldn't, you could just leave it there and people could just walk across. But anyway, so it was a pretty big. boat. Anyway, for some reason, I did not go on the boat. I was covering City Hall for the globe at the time. I went ahead with some of the camera guys and got there early. So I was already on the island, already at the airport. And it's quite a windy day. And as the ferry gets closer to the docks, the folks that had designed this event had decided it would be a great idea that just as it pulls in for the first time on what was supposed to be, I think, a minute-like, long voyage.

Right. That they would set off all these smoke bombs and fireworks. I was like, I think it was like purple smoke everywhere and fireworks. Seems like a risky move. And so as the ferry approaches, they do that. And the ferry stops dead because the guy driving it cannot see where he's going anymore. And then the wind is kind of churning up the water and the ferry is sort of starts to back up. I mean, if you ever backed up like he had to drive your friends,

minivan or something, you know, like in a narrow driveway. Like all of a sudden you're kind of going back and forth. It's like that scene in the Austin Powers movie where he can't control the golf cart. You know, anyway, so the ferry is stuck now in the middle of the channel. And this goes on, I feel like it was 30 minutes, 45 minutes. At one point, the ferry backs up and smashes into the back of the break wall. Oh, my gosh. And then it finally, it finally arrives.

Just truly a disaster. So what does that tell us about? I mean, at the time, the opponents of the airport found that whole event, including the mayor, who was trying, I think, not to smile when we talked to him briefly. They found that event quite delicious. And so it was a bizarre beginning for the – and, of course, they still have the ferry, but they also have now a tunnel underneath the channel to get more passengers in and out. So this is how long we've been talking about drama with Billy Bishop Airport. Yeah, how long I'd been involved with it. Yeah, I know.

So this was your start with Billy Bishop drama. Yeah, we covered, we did stories about anytime the poor authority had a meeting, a whole bunch of people who were opposed to the airport would show up and it always got a bit ugly. So before we get into the plan and why it was so controversial, the plan for expansion, can we talk through the different parties that are involved in the governance of Billy Bishop? Who are the groups that we need to know about? So until recently, when things changed thanks to Premier Doug Ford, Let's just park that for a minute.

The airport, because it was such a problem, you have this thing called the tripartite agreement. And that's an agreement that is signed by the city, which until recently owned some of the land, the port authority, which is the actual, it's a federal agency, it governs the airport, runs the airport, and the federal government. And that deal sort of set in stone what you can and can. can't do at the airport. And among its limitations was you can't have jets. And so that's how the airport was governed. But the very nature of it, with most of the time, the city opposed to

expansion or jets and the other parties sort of interested in it, there were obvious tensions. So up until recently, the province was not involved? No. I mean, airports are federal. So there was no formal role for the for the province okay so let's talk about this expansion plan for billy bishop where does the story start what happened walk me through this so and i would say that up until earlier this year we hadn't really the airport really wasn't on the agenda short of this plan that the city actually approved which was a smaller extension of those runways not really an extension of the runway itself but an extension to allow for these things called runway safety areas so they could continue operating as is with the current planes, Transport Canada said by next summer, they need to have

150 meters of kind of safety zone on either side of the runway so that a plane that doesn't stop in time has a little extra runway to stop on. That plan was already approved. That plan had already approved. They're already doing that. And then earlier this year, we get wind that the Premier wants to expand the airport. And he had raised it at a couple of speeches he'd given about, geez, that airport is in great. And we got word that the Premier's plan was to expropriate the city, cut it out of this

tripartite deal, take over its chair at that table so that anti-airport expansion, the blockage there would be removed. And that's exactly what they did. They passed legislation to do that earlier this year. So how did they do that? The province can do almost anything it wants in its jurisdiction with a piece of paper that they passed through the legislature. And it said, we're taking the same. city's stake in the airport in the land there, which means we become the city for the purposes of the tripartite agreement. The legislation also said, and finally enough, for days after it was introduced and passed, nobody could explain this, but it also, in its expropriation provisions, and its list of what are called property identification numbers, the actual properties that

the legislation gave the government the discretion or the power to try. choose to expropriate if it wanted to, was the entire Toronto Islands. Not just the airport. Everything. The parks, the beaches, which, as you can imagine, caused some people to lose it. The legislation also allows them to take about a third of a park that's right across from the airport on the mainland. Little Norway park.

The little Norway park. And the plan there was to make the terminal on the mainland bigger to accommodate. to accommodate all these extra passengers that they're anticipating if they were able to get jets in there. So the provincial government took over the city spot in this tripartite agreement. Yeah. The city's gone. It's now the province. That's right. Okay.

Can we talk about what exactly the expansion plan was proposing? Like you talked about a third of a park being taken over for a terminal. Like what exactly were they proposing with this expansion? Well, I mean, that's the other weird thing about all of this is that we had this extraordinary action by the premier to cut the city out. of this 43-year agreement about an airport that's right in the middle of the city's waterfront. And we didn't have any details. The government, when I asked them, how long is the runway need to be for the jets? Don't know.

In the press materials they put out when they did this, they did cite this figure, 10 million passengers, which there's less than 2 million a year there now. So that's a big increase. A huge increase, yeah. And that was all the information we had initially. We knew how long runway they wanted back about a dozen years ago when Porter was pushing to allow jets at the airport. But eventually, I was able to sit down with the head of the Port Authority. And he told me that they want to add 600 meters to their 1,200-odd meter runway.

That's in addition to the extra 300 meters and safety zones. So quick math, that's 900 meters of. artificial peninsula created with dirt right in front of the city's waterfront that's going to be needed to accommodate this longer runway. And then later, RJ Steinsra, who's the head of the Port Authority, also spoke to a legislative committee when he told them that it would cost up to $5 billion to do this, a big expansion. He also told me the piece of the park on the mainland that that's needed for a big terminal that would handle all these extra passengers. So that is basically all we know about the plan. And the Port Authority admits there's no actual plan that's been finalized. They've made presentations to governments, and I don't know how much detail they've provided.

This plan is not going to be finished or made public for months. We'll be right back. Okay, Jeff, what did Doug Ford say about why he wanted to expand the airport? Why was he so excited about this? So the premier and other proponents of the airport expansion say a bunch of things. So one is building a bigger airport would be good for the economy. Creates jobs. You'd have more people working there.

You have people you need to hire to build it. They also say things like it's more convenient than going only up to Pearson. Great for the city to have another airport, competition, all those kinds of things. Okay. So then what are the arguments against it? So for years, there have been activists and activist groups and local politicians who point out a whole bunch of problems with expanding an airport and allowing jets. And there is a debate about how loud these new jets would be. There's evidence that they might even be quieter slightly or as loud anyway as the current turboprops.

But leave that aside, noise, air pollution, the hundreds of thousands, millions of visitors. that go to the islands and the beaches there, people are worried about the impact on that experience. The waterfront itself, we've spent all this money revitalizing the waterfront over decades, including most recently, I was a billion and a half, maybe, probably more than that,

to re-naturalize the mouth of the Don River and open up a whole bunch of land for development, the city's building new parks and new housing developments along the waterfront. So there were concerns that flight paths, for example, make it harder to build tall buildings. There's a lot of people living along the waterfront that there weren't in generations past. And then there's a process concern, which is, you know, the reason the city was in the tri-partite

agreement was because the city has legitimate concerns about the middle of its waterfront and the impact of an airport there and needs to mitigate those with, you know, rules about noise and curfews for flights and whatever it is. That's why the city was at that table. Up until recently. Up until recently. Can we talk about the federal government's role in this agreement and in this expansion proposal? Because they have the final say, as I understand, right?

Yeah, I mean, all three parties of the tri-aparitan agreement have to agree. So we know the Port Authority wants to expand the airport. We now have the city replaced by the province, which wants to expand the airport. So everybody was asking the federal government, what do you think? And over the last few months, we got a variety of different answers. We were told by the premier himself and the head of the port authority that the federal government was on board with this. But then we started to hear from liberal MPs in Toronto who had started to hear from people emailing them and calling them and at town hall meetings and so on, who were upset about the possibility of the expansion.

And then at some point, I think in June, the prime minister said that, having said earlier, interesting vision, I think was this phrase for his. It's an interesting idea or something. He then said, I don't have an opinion on this. And we're going to do public consultations. And before we go ahead. And then they did very quickly launch this online consultation, which was very weird process, done super quickly. And as we learned last week, they say they got 87,000 responses, the vast, vast majority of them, negative. And the day that consultation was to finish late on that Friday evening, the transport minister said, we're not doing this anymore.

At this stage was one of the phrases that people have picked up on, but that was the end of it. Can we talk a little bit about what the federal government would be weighing in making that decision? Obviously, they were waiting for the public consultations, but are there political factors in there for the federal government and making that decision? So, I mean, they must have been hearing from liberal MPs. Who are hearing from their constituents. And they must have had their eye on the by-election that's going to happen in Beaches, East York, where Nadereskin Smith is stepped away. And the liberals who have a narrow majority would like to hang on to that seat. And that is a waterfront riding.

I mean, I think some people would look at what happened and sort of say, isn't it strange that the federal government, which had the same thing happen last time when Toronto liberal MPs in 2015 around there and then new prime minister Justin Trudeau said, we're not doing this. It's going to make people upset. although we also know that the people who own the terminal, which is called Newport Aviation, which is controlled by J.P. Morgan asset management, we know that they had hired lobbyists and talked to all three governments about a vision for expanding this thing. And for sure, lots of people in the business world, people use this airport, it is popular. There are polls that the Ford government tells us it's done that show that the idea of spending of the airport is popular on a broad scale. Those were the two sides of the debate. And clearly, at the moment, the liberal government realized that it maybe had kicked over

Hornets Nest and better to focus its efforts elsewhere. And what does this whole saga tell us about the relationship between Ontario and Toronto itself? I mean, the province just kind of booted them out of this agreement. Yeah, I mean, that has been the way that Doug Ford has done things from the beginning. right after he got elected, he decided that there were too many city councillors in Toronto, and he cut the number of them almost in half, even though an election campaign was already underway, and people had signed up to run for positions that no longer existed. And of course, Doug Ford was a city counselor when his brother, Rob Ford, was mayor.

And so he has his own personal opinions about the dysfunction or function of council and the city. and his opponents often point to this sort of as a, they say, oh, you know, do you think you're mayor of Toronto? He's got a lot of things on the go, particularly on the waterfront of the city where he used to be a counselor, the airport. He's also talked about having an island where a two million square foot convention center could be built. So an artificial island for that. And he even talked about wouldn't it be great? You could land in a jet at the airport. And then a boat would take it to the convention.

and then you could also go to the water park at Ontario Place. And he's got a lot of ideas about the waterfront. And so the opposition, which another advantage he has, the opposition is a bit weak. We have Mara Stiles leader to the NDP, who has been leader for a while and has had trouble gaining traction and getting back to where the NDP was. And we don't have a permanent liberal leader.

Some polls, despite that, put the liberals ahead of Doug Ford. So he's shown no, he has no, um, qualms about sticking his fingers into the city's business. And so this didn't surprise anyone. And of course, the city does not have a lot of cards at this table. They're completely a creature of the province. The province can do basically whatever it wants to the city. And so Olivia Chow, um, the mayor of Toronto has, you know, on this one, she's spoken up. But, uh, it's not easy being mayor of Toronto when there's a premier like,

Doug Ford just up the road. Is there a way that the city of Toronto could get back into this tripartite agreement? Or are they just out of it forever? Again, they are at the mercy of the province. But Olivia Chow has put forward a motion or sponsored a motion for city council to vote on this week, asking the province to put things back the way they were. Bring us back into this agreement. I'm not holding my breath for that to occur anytime soon.

Doug Ford's transportation minister, Prabmeet Zakaria, just this week, when asked about this, said that the federal government had bowed to the desires of a small fringe group. And so, and he said there's no way that they're going to give the airport back to the city. So the federal government has said, we're not doing this for now, we're at this moment. And like you said, in the tripartite agreement, they all have to agree. So is it over? Is this the, if you'll allow me one pun? Is this the end of the runway for this expansion project?

Has it crashed and burned? So I don't think that you can ever say that it's over for efforts to expand the airport. It comes up every few years. The provinces said we're not going to give it back to the city. We're going to stay in this agreement. And we're going to keep pushing. and the port authority is still going to produce, we're told, this plan that will hopefully provide some more detail about how this would all come about, how it would all work, how the traffic nightmare that people predict that what could happen on the other side, on the mainland, people getting to the airport, how that all could happen, and what it would be like, how many jets, all the details that we don't have, that that plan will come out and be made public. And, I mean, in some ways, once you know all those details, maybe there'll be another effort to revive the expansion at that point.

You also might have a different federal government one day. Conservative leader, Pierre Palethev, has said he likes the airport expansion plan, but you also might have a different provincial government. I mean, you know, the airport is still there and there is this sort of fundamental problem, which is the planes that flies now, these turboprops, aren't being. being made new anymore. That doesn't mean necessarily that they couldn't be made new or you couldn't keep flying them or refurbishing them or so or someone else could make them or whatever. But the argument that the Port Authority makes is look, the business is changing, the aviation has changed. We need the flexibility to have other kinds of planes to land here if we're going to keep this thing going. And the obvious plane they want to land there is it is one of these

are single aisle smaller jets that would, they carry a hundred 30, 150 people, something like that, that they say are quiet. And so I don't think that pressure is ever going to go away. As long as there's an airport there, the people who run it are going to seek to make it larger. There were some headlines from the Toronto Star and the CBC over the last couple days about an agreement between the federal government and the province that sounded like some sort of quid pro quo. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Yeah, there's been some reporting that the airport reversal here from the federal government

And that them saying no, we don't want to do this. That they had said to the Premier will support this airport expansion in return for you sitting on your hands when it comes to the high speed rail project, the Alto project, which is requiring expropriations and has caused some people in farm communities in eastern Ontario. So you get upset. And so now there's reporting that the provincial government may be reconsidering its support of the federal government's high-speed rail project. This is from Toronto to Quebec City. Yeah. So, I mean, I don't know to what extent that's a deal that's written down. That sounds like a strange deal to make to me on the face of it.

We'll do this thing that will make people mad if you don't do, if you do this thing. I mean, it doesn't make sense to me, but it could be one of the considerations. Of course, high-speed rail and an airport that flies people short distances are going to be competitors if we ever see this high-speed rail thing. And high-speed rail is going to be better for the environment. So, you know, you could fly to Montreal from Bill and Bishop, or you could just take the high-speed rail to Montreal from Toronto. that calls into question the future of the island airport, as does the plans to expand Pearson and add whatever it is,

20 million more passengers a year to Pearson, there are people who look at that and say, why do we need this little airport anymore? As we've been talking about, you've been reporting on this for decades. I'm curious what you make of this moment in this saga, how all this has played out, kind of taking a big step back.

What are you thinking about? You know, in this job, I think you, Everything old is new again. And so it's a lot of the same discussion that comes back around every few years, the same politics kind of around it. Although there are people who this time around sort of suggested that, you know, the consensus is that there should be an airport there for a lot of people in Toronto. It's a busy, big city. You know, there are more people who live closer to the airport than there were 20 years ago.

And you'd think that, well, that maybe would create more concern about the airport. the noise, but it also, the people who now live there may be more interested in hopping on a plane than they are worried about some of the other impacts of the airport. So that was some of the calculation. I think that some people were thinking that it could be different this time around. But obviously, the impact on the waterfront still is a big, big concern for many, many Torontoians. Jeff, always great to have you on. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. That was Jeff Gray, an Ontario politics reporter for the global That's it for today.

I'm Rachel Levy McLaughlin, in for Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Madeline White, Mihal Stein, and me. Our editor is David Crosby. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.