Pickering airport fight takes off again

Pickering airport opponents dust off protest signs as Ottawa asks GTAA to assess need for facility

Sep 07, 2007 04:30 AM Theresa Boyle Staff reporter

For a man who flies every day, Michael Robertson is an unlikely opponent to a new airport in his hometown of Pickering.
But the 65-year-old says it's precisely because he takes to the skies so frequently over north Pickering that he sees the need to protect this swath of rolling countryside from such development.
"It's the last, best farmland, the most beautiful farmland in Canada. I see the incredible environmental disaster that could happen if an airport is built here," he said.
Robertson is the owner and operator of the High Precision gliding school. The hang-gliding operation is located on the so-called airport lands, as is his home, in which he has lived for more than 35 years.
Robertson is also one of the founders of Land over Landings (LOL), which represents residents opposed to the airport.
"It's just so wrong. It's not needed and it will be too expensive, just like Mirabel was," he said, referring the white elephant airport built near Montreal.
The on-again-off-again plans for the airport were put back on the rails in May when the federal government asked the Greater Toronto Airport Authority to assess the need for an airport in Pickering. A final decision isn't expect until at least 2009.
LOL says that the GTAA has a blatant conflict, in having previously tried to push the airport ahead. Indeed, three years ago the GTAA completed a draft plan for a Pickering airport and this week it told Toronto councillors that a Pickering airport is needed to keep Toronto economically viable.
The debate over whether to build an airport in Pickering dates back to 1972, when the federal government expropriated 7,500 hectares to build the facility.
A major outcry ensued and plans were eventually derailed. But every few years, the issue resurfaces.
The piece of countryside in question, meantime, remains stuck in time. There used to be 700 homes here; today there are fewer than 300. Of those, more than 100 are boarded up. The others are rented out to residents by Transport Canada, the Ontario Realty Corp. and the Toronto Region Conservation Authority.
Durham Region chair Roger Anderson, a long-time proponent of the airport, is confident that one day it will be built there.
"Not only will it be there but you'll need it there," he said.
"Toronto and the GTA are going to double in size by 2030. Traffic will be so big that Pearson won't be able to handle it all."
He contends that local resistance to the plan isn't as great as it once was.
"Until the government moves ahead, we're still going to have people fighting a battle that's 30 years old," he said.
But Liberal MP Mark Holland (Ajax-Pickering) accused the Conservative government in Ottawa of trying to squelch opposition to the airport by literally getting rid of it.
"The government has undertaken a policy of not re-tenanting homes. They're boarding them up, allowing them to deteriorate because they are trying to de-populate northern Pickering," he charged.
"They have destroyed a community that was there and are getting rid of homes."
Robertson says there's one upside to the years of indecision about the land – it's been preserved.
"There's no question, it would have been developed," he said, had it not been in limbo.
Meantime, the new provincial body in charge of transportation planning in the region doesn't have an official position on the Pickering airport yet, said Rob MacIsaac, chair of the Greater Toronto Transportation Authority.
But the GTTA is mandated by law to create a plan that conforms with Ontario's official growth plan, which mentions downtown Pickering as a growth hub.
Still, MacIsaac said, "We're not going to build major infrastructure until we know (the airport) is a go. In the interim we've got lots to keep us busy in properly servicing Pearson and Hamilton," he said.