After their overwhelming public rejection, the proponents of expanding Billy Bishop Airport (BBA) are still in a state of denial. Ontario Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria blames the result of the consultation on “small fringe groups.” Doug Ford shared his disappointment about the outcome with Prime Minister Carney and later with the media. Ford thought he and Carney had a firm deal whereby Carney would support BBA expansion if he supported Alto high-speed rail. Finally, the Toronto Port Authority continues to work on the expansion plan. Each of these responses merits discussion.

A Fair Vote?

Sarkaria’s reaction to the consultation is disingenuous in the extreme. The supporters of expansion had the same opportunity to participate that the opponents had. They didn’t have the votes. If the results of the consultation had shown a large majority, or even a considerable minority, in support of expansion Sarkaria would have crowed that the consultation provided a strong mandate for moving full speed ahead. It seems to me that Sarkaria is emulating Trump, for whom there are two types of votes, those he wins and those he loses because the other side cheated. Opponents of expansion who respond to Sarkaria by saying that they aren’t a “small fringe group” are falling for his rhetorical trap.

Northern Logrolling

At first glance the Carney-Ford deal is a classic instance of what US legislators call logrolling: one legislator supports another legislator’s proposal which they are indifferent about if the other legislator will support their own, which they strongly favour.

The chronology is publicly available and easily reconstructed. On March 30, 2026, the Ontario and federal governments signed a partnership agreement rebating the HST for new homes, reducing development charges, and supporting transit projects, GO Transit, and Alto. The language regarding Alto in the Ontario Government’s news release is that “Canada and Ontario commit to collaborate … to move forward on planning and advancement of the Alto HSR initiative.” Despite Doug Ford’s announcement of his plan to expand BBA on March 23 a week before the partnership announcement, BBA is not mentioned in the partnership agreement. According to The Toronto Star, Ford and Carney had subsequent talks and reached a handshake agreement whereby Ford would support Alto if Carney supported BBA expansion. This was the logrolling.

In retrospect, it appears that the handshake agreement was conceived by the two first ministers as an anti-nimby accord. Within days of the Carney Government announcing it would not support BBA expansion “at this time” – in effect violating the accord – eleven PC MPPs from eastern Ontario who had previously been publicly silent about Alto piped up. They expressed concern about its impact on farmland and rural communities. We know Ford runs his government in a heavy-handed top-down way. The initial silence and subsequent expression of concern must have been orchestrated by the Premier’s Office.

Part of the MPPs’ statement reads “If Alto is to proceed, local voices impacted by this project deserve to see their feedback reflected in the project’s planning, route selection, and delivery. The federal government must ensure that any potential future rail project minimizes impact on farmland and is supported by the people affected.” Weren’t these concerns just as valid before the federal government violated the handshake accord as afterwards? Why weren’t the MPPs doing their job and representing their constituents at the outset? Logrolling is bad policymaking because it prevents legislators from evaluating proposals on their own merits, as the behaviour of the PC MPPs shows.

Major infrastructure proposals always require people or activities to be moved to accommodate a facility such as a road, train track, pipeline, or dam. The practice of expropriation with compensation based on market values is an attempt to do this fairly.

The collateral impact of Alto on rural communities and of BBA expansion on an urban community are analogous in principle. Empirically, I think the difference between the two is that the benefits of Alto are sufficient to allow the federal government to compensate rural communities while the benefits of expanding BBA are insufficient to compensate Torontonians for the permanent environmental damage, destruction of recreational and residential use of the waterfront, and increased congestion downtown it will cause.

There have been numerous planning studies for high-speed rail in general and specifically for Alto, The public consultation about the future of BBA has made it abundantly clear that the Ford Government and Toronto Port Authority have not yet produced studies about how BBA would be expanded or what the costs and benefits of expansion would be.

What the Billy Bishop Plan Will Likely Show

I will speculate while we wait for the Toronto Port Authority to produce an expansion plan for BBA. The opponents of expansion have produced copious evidence showing that the deleterious environmental and community impacts of BBA are enormous and the benefits in terms of passenger amenity are very modest. The TPA will try to contradict these findings. And it will fall back on its old chestnut, economic benefits, arguing that every passenger and every job at BBA, and some multiplier of the above, represent a gain to the economy. As I have argued numerous times and expect to continue arguing many more times in future months, this argument is specious. If these passengers didn’t use BBA, they would use Pearson, and the jobs serving them would be at Pearson. GDP for the Greater Toronto Area would be no different, only distributed differently. Stay tuned.