Last week Transport Minister Anita Anand announced that the land the federal government expropriated half a century ago in Pickering, northeast of Toronto, for a second Toronto international airport would be transferred to Parks Canada to expand Rouge National Urban Park. With the news cycle dominated by the Trump tariffs, Liberal leadership campaign, and Ontario election, this story received little attention.

It is of more than academic interest to me, because the Pickering Airport proposal was a major part of my research program at the start of my academic career. I wrote a dissertation in transportation economics, analyzing whether it was better to expand operations at the existing Toronto International Airport (renamed after former Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson in 1984) or to build a new international airport at Pickering and divide operations between the two airports. And I also wrote about the factors that led the (Pierre) Trudeau Government to decide to build an airport in Pickering in 1972 and reverse course three years later. I will summarize my findings and discuss the relevance of the Pickering Airport story to contemporary transportation planning. I’ll also provide references for the academic papers at the end of this post.

Why a New Airport at Pickering?

The decision to build a new airport was a mix of political and bureaucratic factors. Air traffic was growing rapidly in Canada in the late Sixties. Operations at Pearson airport could be expanded by building an additional runway and terminal, but there was local opposition (Nimbyism) because of increased aircraft noise. The federal government had just built a second airport for Montreal (Mirabel). People in Toronto wanted a similar bright shiny object. Indeed, then Transport Minister Jean Marchand, said publicly that “he didn’t want to be the French Canadian who could be accused of not giving an airport to Ontario after having given one to Quebec.” Finally, the Transport Canada bureaucracy was very risk averse, and felt that a new exurban airport would enable it to handle very rapid growth in demand and increased aircraft noise. Transport Canada planners assumed that the noisiest planes at the time (Boeing 707s and DC-8s) would be phased out very slowly and the supersonic Concorde, which was twice as noisy, would be in full-scale operation, with six or eight takeoffs or landings in Toronto by 1980. Transport Canada examined several exurban sites, and chose Pickering, an area of farmland 30 miles northeast of downtown Toronto, which was much closer than the other alternatives.

The Tradeoff between Noise and Convenience

I re-read the article based on my thesis and recognized the work of a twenty-five year old trying to show off his technical chops, in this case by building a model involving twenty-one simultaneous non-linear equations, something that in the mid-Seventies could only be solved by running an esoteric computer program on a mainframe overnight. Abstracting from the quantitative razzle-dazzle, the tradeoff between expanding operations at Pearson and splitting operations between Pearson and Pickering turned on passenger convenience and aircraft noise. Pearson was more convenient because it was closer to airport users and operating two airports would force some users to travel some 40 miles between them. On the other hand, because of its exurban location fewer people would be disturbed by aircraft noise at Pickering. The model showed that the cost of inconveniencing passengers at Pickering was greater than the value of noise reduction at Pearson. With less pessimistic assumptions about aircraft noise, Pearson’s advantage over Pickering is enhanced.

Why did the Government Back Down?

Within three years, the factors supporting a second airport were reversed. The energy crisis and recession of 1973-74 led to a decline in air travel. It became clear that the Concorde would not be in regular service to Toronto. The Federal Aviation Administration’s requirements for noise reduction were leading to a faster phase out of the Boeing 707 and DC-8 than Transport Canada expected. The inconvenience to passengers caused by Mirabel Airport was becoming obvious. Finally, the residents of the Pickering area formed a lobbying group – People or Planes – and argued effectively that the new airport would destroy the last major agricultural area close to Toronto. In the 1975 provincial election, the Progressive Conservative Party was re-elected, but with only a minority. The leader of People or Planes was elected to the legislature for the New Democrats. Premier Bill Davis quickly understood the voters’ message and he told the federal government the province wouldn’t build access roads to the airport. The Pickering Airport proposal was dead for the time being, but the government retained ownership of the land if an airport would be needed in the future.

How it Evolved

In the fifty years since that decision, Pearson has expanded its operations far beyond the scale imagined by Transport Canada’s planners, and it now accommodates 50 million passengers, without any increase in its lands. It has five runways, three east-west (the prevailing wind direction) and two north-south, and two major terminals. Improved avionics has increased the number of flights the runways can accommodate. While the airport hasn’t implemented time-of-day landing fees, which I advocated in my thesis, administrative arrangements have reached a similar outcome, namely that high-value flights have priority during the busiest times of day. Ground access to the airport has improved with the opening of the Union-Pearson Express train from downtown Toronto in 2014. The expansion of Pearson has enabled the federal government to finally drop plans for a Pickering Airport and contribute the land to a national urban park that is a response to the GTA’s enormous population growth over the half-century.

What we can Learn

Pearson Airport is an important part of the GTA’s social capital, and the story of its growth is one of increasingly intensive use of that capital. And intensified use was a result of improved technology (avionics), better design (terminals and taxiways), substituting public transit for private access (Union-Pearson Express), and arrangements to give high-value users priority in allocating scarce resources. We need to think about applying those principles to other components of the GTA’s social capital, including its major highways and the road system downtown.

Postscript

Two academic papers that present my findings are available in the academic database JStor: “Pricing and investment in a transportation network: the case of Toronto Airport,” Canadian Journal of Economics 11:4 (November 1978), pp. 680-700 and “Organization without Environment: A Review of Walter Stewart’s Paper Juggernaut,” Canadian Public Policy 6:1 (Winter 1980), pp. 115-123. If you don’t have ready access to JStor through a university library, I’ll email you copies.