Our joke of a port authority keeps ripping us off

It has long been the opinion of The Bulletin that the Toronto Island airport should not exist. It’s a ludicrous intrusion on the city’s precious waterfront and surely isn’t needed in light of the soon-to-be rapid rail access to Pearson Airport from Downtown.

In the summer, outdoor concerts on Queens Quay are marred by the noise from aircraft the many residents of the area are bothered on an ongoing basis.

The auto and cab traffic is horrendous because of the airport.

Porter Airlines has established itself locally and must be moved to Pearson. The port authority itself should be disbanded. It wouldn’t have existed at all were it not for questionable action in Ottawa by former MP Dennis (“Chair-man”) Mills when shipping magnate Paul Martin was prime minister. Mills lobbied for a port authority and thus blighted our waterfront.

What his motives were are incomprehensible. Dennis Mills was in general a negative element in parliament.

Toronto is the smallest port authority in Canada. It oversees the Island airport, the sugar loading at Redpath and a few salt and sand dumps in the waterfront industrial lands. And that’s it.

We’ve done without a port authority for many decades and should do so again because it’s an expensive, utterly unnecessary, intrusion into the lives of people Downtown.

If the GTA eventually needs a second airport, it should be in a less-populous part of the GTA.

Fighting the good fight to free us from the Island airport and the arrogant mini-port authority that refuses even to pay its share of city taxes is CommunityAIR, a local activist group currently headed by lawyer Brian Iler.

He and Gene Cabral of the port authority recently exchanged communications which Iler has asked to share with our readers. — Frank Touby

 

From Geoffrey Wilson of the port authority:

I write this letter to you on behalf of Mark McQueen, PortsToronto Chairman; Gene Cabral, EVP of Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport; and the other PortsToronto staff who you have contacted in recent weeks. I am writing to you on the subject of emergency response and preparedness at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport. You may find the information in this letter somewhat repetitive as it is the same information that we have provided to you on several occasions over the last several weeks. I would also like to confirm that this is the last letter we will write to you on the subject, as what we have provided to you to date is comprehensive, detailed and the full extent of what can be said on the matter.

Over the last seven or more years you have made it very clear that you do not approve of the airport or support its operations. You are in fact the founding Chair of an organization dedicated to the airport’s closure, a position I might note that is clearly out of step with the sentiment of the vast majority of Toronto residents. You are, of course, entitled to your opinion regarding the airport. However, I do take issue with your transparent and repeated efforts to bring the airport into disrepute by questioning the emergency preparedness and safety of this airport. You have no specific expertise in this area and appear disinterested in the views of those who do. Specifically, experienced and accredited professional individuals such as Chief Jim Sales of the Toronto Fire Department who “is confident that we have the ability to mitigate an incident…”1 or Kim McKinnon from the Toronto Paramedic Services who has “no qualms about its ability to respond to any kind of incident…” 2 or PortsToronto’s Gene Cabral, who has more than 20 years of aviation industry experience – having worked at Pearson International Airport prior to coming to Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport in 2011 – and who has already and repeatedly provided you with answers to many of the questions you have asked in this regard.

You continue to reference a report that was written in 1993 that commented on access to the airport in the event of an emergency situation. At more than 20 years old, this report is no longer relevant as it was written in relation to the building of a bridge to the airport, and how such a project would facilitate access and emergency response. This bridge was obviously never built. PortsToronto (then Toronto Port Authority) has subsequently taken a variety of important steps to facilitate appropriate levels of emergency response and site access.

1 Ben Spurr, “Island Airport Safety Test”, NOW Magazine, February 25, 2015

2 Ben Spurr, “Island Airport Safety Test”, NOW Magazine, February 25, 2015

 

Iler’s reply:

Geoff, thanks for your letter.

A few minor corrections: Allan Sparrow was the founding chair of CommunityAIR, and it was he who led the successful fight to stop the bridge, as it was clearly stated at the time that stopping the bridge would stop expansion.

The Toronto Islands Fire Hall is located on Ward’s Island, not Algonquin Island, and is not “neighbouring” ‑ it is more than 4 1/2 kilometres away.

Certainly, in the absence of the necessary expertise, you would be entitled to criticize us for raising safety issues, as we are, as you note, not experts.

However, the 1993 report has now surfaced, and must be addressed.

The report was written by experts, not us.

Those experts included Transport Canada. One must therefore assume that its requirements include those set out in this report.

You still refuse to address the basic safety requirements set out by those experts.

The report includes this:

“the Committee established basic requirements.

“Any option must permit 64 emergency vehicles and 201 personnel to access an aircraft crash within 20 minutes.

“In addition, ambulances with the critically injured must be capable of· returning-to-the mainland-within a 30 minute period of time.

“Any option must be capable of permitting emergency response vehicles and personnel to access the Island Airport on a 24 hour basis”

If those experts have required that level of access in 1993, what has changed?

Notwithstanding the attention you have given this issue, current access doesn’t come close to this requirement.

While you may have the ability to respond to a minor incident, a crash of a 70‑passenger plane cannot be addressed without at least the 1993 access requirements being met.

We note that you your November 2014 “full-scale simulation” commenced with the few emergency vehicles present already on the Airport side close to one hour before the exercise commenced. The Wm. Lyon Mackensie was in fact docked at the airport side as the various emergency vehicles casually made their way across on the ferry. If you would like, we would be happy to share images of this.

Have you attempted a full-scale simulation with a 64 emergency vehicles?

The 1993 report did not address accessing a plane overshooting the runway and ending up in the water, as almost happened yesterday at LaGuardia. The fact that this almost happened on October 3, 2014 at your airport (CADORS Number: 2014O2878) and was not reported to the TDSB for almost one month is deeply troubling.

Fortunately, there, a berm which does not exist at the Island Airport, prevented it much more serious incident. The berm at LaGuardia was in fact build to prevent planes from ending up in the water in the event of such an accident.

Where is your capacity to address 70 passengers in the water, let alone 70 passengers rendered inaccessible by thick ice?

And although you now propose to permit a 110‑passenger aircraft to operate from the Airport, PortsToronto to date has refused to include emergency access considerations in the forthcoming environmental assessment. Why is that?

Finally, it is quite presumptuous of your organization to rely so heavily upon the City’s emergency response capability, when it has steadfastly refused to pay its fair share of property taxes.