A busy airport with hundreds of thousands of passengers annually right in the middle of downtown Toronto?
Not a good idea. We need a clean, green waterfront.
There has been a long and active string earlier about the length of the runway.
Let’s shift the discussion to positive uses for the island site.
Of course, there’s the “big picture” – the Greater Toronto area needs adequate air facilities (even while remembering that air travel is environmentally bad). That’s the 10,000 metre perspective.
Let’s drop down to 10 metres – and focus on the Toronto island airport conversion project.
What’s best for the site:
– more urgently needed parkland to link with Hanlan’s and other nearby sites;
– other kinds of recreational space;
– housing or community services;
– or, what?
Toronto’s waterfront is too valuable to be wasted on a money-losing airport.
Community Air is raising important objections to the island airport, and to the activities of the Toronto Port Authority.
– Michael Shapcott
Stayin\' awake - Michael Shapcott\'s blog 
John Spragge said
Mr. Shapcott, if we ignore the large perspective, we’ll inevitably get the decisions we make on the smaller perspective badly wrong. In fact, in today’s Toronto, we do that all the time. Bob Kinnear looks at his “10 meter perspective”, sees a chance to improve the position of the TTC workers with a wildcat strike, and goes for it. Transit in Toronto takes a hit. If my neighbourhood (and the Annex, and Young and Eg) offer any guide, people all over Toronto take aim at the intensification provisions of the official plan, the only way we can hope to avoid sprawl, from the 10 meter perspective of someone who sees only the effect of a taller building on their neighbourhood, their street, their backyard. If we go on promoting the ten meter perspective, we’ll have a grim city in a lousy region thirty years from now.
So the ten meter perspective by itself won’t cut it. Let’s take another look from the 10,000 meter perspective. When and how do you plan to address the issue of environmental fairness? Because sometime in the future just won’t do. Malton has kids growing up right now. If Bob Deluce succeeds, he can take up to 10% of the noise spikes away from their schools, starting in a month. Do you have a solution? If so, when does it kick in? A lot of the people I speak to tell me the solution comes from high speed rail. Even if I agreed with that, even the SNCF doesn’t run a train fast enough to take a kid back to grade 1. Now, you can have an answer, from any perspective, which doesn’t involve keeping Toronto City Centre open and letting Bob Deluce go ahead. But you need a real answer, one that doesn’t leave the people of Rexdale and Malton off to the side. Look at it from another perspective: the Toronto Islands will probably still exist in a century, or two, or ten, but the kids in Malton only get fifteen years, give or take, of childhood. So in the point of time, the kids in Malton have to come first. We have plenty of time to talk about what (if anything) we’d like to see on the Island; it won’t go anywhere.
And let’s talk about another 10,000 meter perspective: medical services. Like it or not, you still have to deal with those 3000+ medical flights a year. Patient transfers, blood, organs, all have to land somewhere. You have yet to tell us what you propose to do about the impending closure of Buttonville. Again, you say: hold on a minute, let’s look at the small picture; that won’t won’t work here. The GTAA already has plans under way to build the Pickering Airport. They’ve set up offices, produced plans, held hearings. Do you support that airport construction project Mr. Shapcott? If you do, shame on you, because you’ll give up the sweetest little villages in the GTA to airport traffic and noise, along with some of the last remaining decent agricultural land in the area.
Sometime in 2011, a plane will probably come in from Phoenix AZ or Yorktown SK, or Managua Nicaragua, with a heart for a ten year old kid in Sick Kids. The parents of that child will have a 10-meter perspective, too; having that plane land will mean more to them than anything in the world. If you tear up the runways at City Centre Airport, if (as the GTAA projects) Buttonville succumbs to development pressures, where does that plane with its vital cargo land? It has to land somewhere, Mr. Shapcott; you can’t put “someplace other than CYTZ” on a flight plan. And if you ask to deal with this question “later”, the “later” will come after GTAA crews have poured concrete for the runways for Pickering Airport; it takes lead time to build these things. If you promise to work it out later, you really mean to let the GTAA build Pickering Airport, pave the farmland, pollute the Rouge Valley, and the heck with Green River and Whitevale.
They have a 10-meter perspective in Whitevale, too. They have a really beautiful village in the Rouge River Valley. By my perspective, 10 meter, 10,000 meter, or 10E+34 meter, wrecking that would amount to senseless, expensive vandalism.