Picture a Blue Jays game. Twenty-eight thousand people, all trying to get in and out of one place, one road, one tunnel. Now picture that happening every single day. No off-season. No days off. And instead of baseball, jet exhaust.
That is Doug Ford’s vision for Billy Bishop Airport.
This Thursday, Toronto City Council is voting on a motion by Councillor Dianne Saxe, seconded by Councillor Josh Matlow, to put a single question on the October 26 municipal ballot:
Do you want the City of Toronto to support and cooperate in Premier Ford’s plan to turn Billy Bishop airport into a jet airport?
There is a narrow window before council votes to contact our city councillors.
Ballot questions may seem unusual in Canada, but Toronto has used them before. In 1956, the city put a question about expanding voting rights on the municipal ballot, it passed, and the province responded by passing the enabling legislation. That’s exactly the sequence Councillor Saxe’s motion is now proposing.
The mechanism has two steps: first, council can pass the motion on Thursday; then, the province would need to decide whether to amend the Municipal Elections Act to allow the question on the ballot in October. Queen’s Park could say no. But refusing to let Torontonians vote on what happens to their own waterfront would be a difficult position to defend.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has moved quickly and quietly on the airport. He has declared Billy Bishop a Special Economic Zone, seized City of Toronto land without consultation, and stripped away the environmental and planning approvals that would normally govern a project of this magnitude. He has handed our waterfront to the Toronto Port Authority and its business partners — chief among them Nieuport Aviation, the company that owns the airport terminal and is itself controlled by J.P. Morgan Asset Management, America’s largest bank.
This is Ontario Place all over again: a public asset on public waterfront land, reshaped through backroom deals, with Torontonians cut out of the conversation.
We’ve seen this movie. We know how it ends.
The numbers don’t add up
Ford’s economic justification for all of this — $8.5 billion in annual economic output by 2050 — comes entirely from Port Authority-commissioned consultants using undisclosed methodology. The Globe and Mail’s architecture critic called it “hooey.” No independent economist has validated it.
The number assumes that virtually every one of the projected 10 million passengers would have bypassed Toronto entirely if Billy Bishop didn’t exist — as though Pearson Airport isn’t 30 minutes away on the UP Express.
Putting aside the suspect economics, the assumptions strain credulity when you look at the physical reality of trying to fly 10 million passengers a year out of what would be North America’s smallest jet airport. The smallest jet airport in North America is currently San Diego, at 600 acres. Billy Bishop is 200. To move 10 million passengers through Billy Bishop, planes would need to land or take off every six minutes, for 18 straight hours, every day of the year.
There is a reason not a single city in North America has jets taking off and landing within 2 km of the city core — Billy Bishop is less than 2km from the CN Tower.
Toronto’s waterfront is the jewel of our city. What will it be worth if we compromise the harbour’s circulation by filling part of the lake, send a jet screaming by every six minutes spewing ultrafine particles, and throw the equivalent of a Blue Jays game worth of traffic — every single day — onto the existing logjam of waterfront roads, stealing hours from people’s lives as they sit in their cars?
Meanwhile, no credible independent analysis has been done of what expansion does to the waterfront property valuesAccording to the Toronto Region Board of Trade, Toronto’s waterfront contributes $13 billion annually to GDP, supports more than 100,000 jobs, and attracts 18 million visitors annually.
And then there’s what you breathe
No government body has ever commissioned independent public health research on ultrafine particle (UFP) emissions from Billy Bishop Airport. Toronto Public Health has both the mandate and the precedent, having studied UFP exposure near the Gardiner and other major highways. They just never did it here.
Into that void, a team led by Dr. Marianne Hatzopoulou, Canada Research Chair in Transport Decarbonization and Air Quality at the University of Toronto, spent three years doing the work the city wouldn’t. Published in peer-reviewed journals, the findings are stark: on 8 out of 10 days, UFP levels in Bathurst Quay reach concentrations five times what the World Health Organization recommends — and the science points clearly to the airport, particularly during takeoffs and landings when south winds carry the plume directly into the neighbourhood.
The Port Authority’s response? Their 2023 environmental, social and governance (ESG)report claimed the airport doesn’t contribute to UFP pollution at all — no data, no methodology, no peer review. When the Bathurst Quay Neighbourhood Association asked them to retract or substantiate, they did neither.
Ultrafine particles are not regulated anywhere in Canada. They are invisible, a thousand times thinner than a human hair, and small enough to pass through lung tissue directly into the bloodstream and into the brain. The broader scientific literature links chronic UFP exposure to increased risk of stroke, coronary heart disease, dementia and premature death. Jets produce more of them than turboprops. Neither the province, the feds nor the city has done any public health assessment of what 10 million passengers’ worth of jet traffic would mean for the people who live, work and go to school here.
What council can do this week
Councillor Saxe’s motion is simple and democratic. It asks the province to let Torontonians vote on this question in October. Ford can say no. But after seizing city land, overriding planning approvals, and declaring a Special Economic Zone without a single public consultation, refusing a majority council request to give the people a say in this transformative issue for the city would be one more blow to his democratic credibility. It would also be hard to ignore for the federal Liberals, who swept Toronto in the last election (and recent byelections).
The motion needs a majority of council to pass this Thursday. Every councillor from a waterfront or downtown ward needs to hear from constituents before that vote. This is not a question about whether you like airports. It is a question about who gets to decide what happens to one of the greatest public assets in Canada — our waterfront — and whether the answer is J.P. Morgan’s lobbyists, or the people who live here.
Toby Heaps is the CEO of Corporate Knights. He lives right across from Billy Bishop Airport.
CORRECTION, May 21, 2026: The article originally listed the wrong author. We apologize for the confusion.