Holding Pattern: the curious case of the Pickering airport
London has its Gatwick, Chicago its Midway. Few passengers arriving at Toronto's Pearson International Airport would suspect that, if not for a small yet vocal chorus of dissent, Toronto might boast a second major airport in the far north-east of the city.
The battle for (or, against) the Pickering Airport, as it came to be known, began during a heady period for the country. Expo '67 in Montreal heralded the arrival of a modern, progressive Canada on the world stage. The popularity of air travel was increasing nationwide, and for its part Montreal built a second airport to meet projected demand. Compounding Torontonians' malaise in the face of the attention and adulation heaped on Montreal's Expo, a brand new airport for that same rival city was seen in Toronto yet another slight, one could not be left unanswered.
It was in this political climate that the federal government set out to choose a site for an ultra-high tech complex that would relieve the overcrowding at the Toronto Airport, now known as Pearson International. After a number of sites were considered and rejected (including a fantastical scheme to locate the new airport on a series of pontoons anchored on Lake Ontario), bureaucrats settled on a location 23 miles from downtown. The 18,600-acre site was chosen for the minimal interference it would generate with existing approach routes to Pearson, not to mention its distance from heavily populated areas sure to actively oppose the noise, traffic congestion, and industry that would inevitably accompany an airport. The selected area north of the suburb of Pickering was by no means devoid of population, though: the area's farmers and other residents quickly organized to form a vocal opposition. Why, they asked, was this airport being built on ecologically significant farmland when comparatively simple improvements could expand the existing airport to accommodate even the government's absurdly high projections for future demand? Their objections went unheard by a bureaucracy fixated on the inevitability of growth and the opportunity to build a showcase for Canada's best and newest technologies. Seventy-five square kilometres of farmland and forest were expropriated from their incredulous owners.
A similar drama unfolded a few years earlier near Montreal. Ancestral farms were expropriated for a new airport, a project personally backed by then-Prime Minister Trudeau. Montreal's new Mirabel Airport would suffer a short, tortured existence before it closed to commercial airlines in 2004. A victim of technological changes in the airline industry, wildly inflated growth estimates, poor design decisions, and an interminable 37-mile, $70 taxi ride from downtown, Mirabel quickly became a white elephant.
The lessons of Mirabel would not become evident in time to stop the Pickering airport, which was cancelled due largely to the censures of environmentalists and local residents. But while similar protests to prevent the Spadina Expressway from slicing through downtown Toronto were successful in permanently killing the scheme, the Pickering activists were only able to achieve an uneasy stalemate. Although plans for the airport were shelved, the expropriated homesteads and farmlands were never returned. The land remains the property of the federal government to this day.
Thirty-five years after the Pickering protestors claimed victory, Pearson International is in the midst of a major redevelopment that will increase the airport's capacity to far above what was predicted would cause catastrophic congestion. The irony of the protracted tug-of-war over the airport lands is that the government's act of expropriation may ultimately save the farmlands and woods from encroaching suburbs, now less than 5 miles from the planned runway threshold. Perhaps the expropriations of 1972 will one day be set aside as a nature park or agricultural sanctuary amidst Toronto's ever-expanding suburbia.