The 2003 Toronto municipal election included, among many different disputes, an argument about whether to expand the airport on Toronto Island. Then-councillor for High Park David Miller was against, he won the election, and his council killed a planned bridge to the island. The federal government announced soon after that it would respect the decision of council.
There was a renewed push in some quarters to try and expand the island airport in 2015, to allow for heavier jets. It was summarily killed after the Trudeau Liberals won the election that year in no small part because of the influence of former councillor and newly-elected MP Adam Vaughan.
Well, it’s 2026, there’s a municipal election campaign season approaching (candidates can register starting Friday), and in Toronto it looks like the fate of the island airport will once again be front and centre thanks to the recent machinations of Premier Doug Ford.
On Thursday, transportation minister Prabmeet Sarkaria introduced Bill 110, the Building Billy Bishop Airport Act. Ford has made no secret of his desire to expand Billy Bishop and those plans have not lost momentum just because he won’t have his own private jet. (Because this is Ontario, the opposition are demanding an auditor general investigation regardless.)
Doug Ford and Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow could, in theory, have found some live-and-let-live agreement about the island airport; Chow, after all, accepted the fate of Ontario Place in exchange for a substantial structural improvement to the city’s finances with the upload of the Gardiner Expressway. Whatever universe might have allowed that confluence of interests, it’s not the one we live in. Bill 110 asserts provincial control not only over the city-owned portions of the airport land itself, but also the entirety of the Toronto Islands and Little Norway Park on the waterfront.
Sarkaria’s office told The Trillium last week that the government is not looking to seize all of the islands, and Sarkaria separately has said Little Norway Park will continue to exist. (In some form?) This is, from the government’s perspective, simply passing a law that gives them maximum flexibility so they don’t have to come back to the legislature to fix some finnicky detail about land assembly in the future.
Whatever the government says, Chow has already condemned Bill 110, calling it a high-handed exercise of the province’s authority. And there are fair reasons for Chow to simply not trust the government on this file: it’s been years since Chow dropped her opposition to the Ontario Place redevelopment, but the Gardiner is still stubbornly on the city’s books, with the province claiming it’s conducting “due diligence” of a decision that’s already been announced. The delays haven’t stopped the province from repeatedly revising its intentions for Ontario Place, most recently announcing that, along with the private foreign-owned spa, the government will turn over some land to the OPP for a detachment to make it easier to patrol the Gardiner and Don Valley Parkway. This is naturally the highest and best use of waterfront land in the core of one of North America’s largest cities.
Finally, there’s Ford’s recent description of the residents of Toronto Island as “squatters,” referring to their protected legal status living in properties paying substantially below-market rates under a law passed by the Rae government in the 1990s. Ford can be careless with his words, but this insult has the effect of being almost precisely calibrated to offend people who might have otherwise sat on the fences because they imagined that jets will somehow be compatible with the island’s current bucolic state.
More importantly, given Chow’s personal connection to the islands — the ferry terminal is literally named after her late husband, and includes a statue of him — Ford’s behaviour has almost certainly foreclosed any chance of her acquiescing to this plan. Even if she were somehow inclined to go along and get along, progressive voters in this city are going to demand her firm opposition as the election campaign gets underway.
This is all a careless own goal by Ford and his government but, strictly speaking, it does not matter. Even if the election campaign in the provincial capital prominently includes a debate over the airport’s future, it won’t be the only issue under discussion. And even if Chow does fly a banner in opposition to jets at the airport, and even if she wins re-election, the fate of the airport has never actually been a municipal or even provincial matter, as the 2003 and 2015 decisions showed. This is ultimately a federal decision.
If Chow loses to a pro-jet candidate, then Ford’s plan will get as much of a green light from voters as politics ever provides. The city, province and federal government will be in alignment, for at least a little while. But if Chow wins as an anti-jet candidate, Prime Minister Mark Carney will have a problem or two. There’s the direct question of whether the federal government should actively pursue an airport expansion if it’s been explicitly rejected by the voters. Carney, like Ford, is fashioning himself a builder, and business-class Liberals are as fond of their Porter Airlines flights between Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal as anyone. Carney is riding high in the polls and if his cabinet believes an expanded airport has merit, they might decide this is the thing to spend some political capital on.
But there’s also going to be the political question of how closely Carney wants to tie himself to what appears to be a vanity project of an increasingly unpopular Ontario premier. In the aftermath of Ford’s private jet debacle, two polls in the last week from Pallas Data and Abacus Data both show the Tories in a public opinion danger zone — if an election were held today, the polls suggest, they might fall short of a majority. The Ontario Liberals, once again and still without a leader, are pulling even with the PCs as “time for a change” sentiment climbs higher.
Nothing about the coming election campaign formally obliges Carney and the federal Liberals to listen to Toronto voters. However, the PM and the people around him are political animals, and the smartest move for them right now is to wait for the next six months, see how the politics of this play out in Toronto, and see whether Doug Ford still has juice when 2026 turns into 2027.