@noel.semple7 Toronto Pearson airport is closer than you think! Let’s use the infrastructure we’ve already paid for, instead of wasting money paving over the waterfront and islands.
♬ original sound – Noel Semple
Transcript:
Expanding the Toronto Island airport for big jets is a bad idea for a bunch of reasons. But for me as an Etobicoke guy and a taxpayer, a big one is that it’s a waste of money, given that we’ve got Pearson airport right here with oodles of room to expand, and it’s a lot closer to downtown than a lot of people think.
So I took the 900 Express bus here from the Bloor line. It took me 20 minutes. And driving from Pearson Airport to Union Station downtown can be as quick as 24 minutes depending on traffic. More importantly, it’s only 28 minutes any time of the week on the Union Pearson Express.
The Ford government says we’ve got to expand the island airport to attract tourists and businesspeople to Toronto. But can you find me a single tourist or business person anywhere in the world who’s saying, I’m thinking of coming to Toronto, but you know what, 24 or 28 minutes is just too far from downtown, so I’m just gonna go to Chicago instead.
It doesn’t make sense.
Speaking of the Union Pearson Express, we, the taxpayers of Ontario, spent almost half a billion dollars building this train just 10 years ago to get that 28 minute guaranteed service from Pearson to union.
It’s very expensive to build public transit in Ontario. Once we built it, we should get the most out of it. We should use it, we should expand the capacity of this train. They could just run a few more cars on it, increase the frequency, it would be very cheap, and expand Pearson to meet whatever unmet demand there is for air travel in Toronto, instead of paving over more of the waterfront and destroying a beautiful spot on the Islands, just to replicate something that Pearson’s doing already very close to the city.
Premier Ford and his Minister of Infrastructure, Kinga Surma, represent the two Etobicoke ridings that are right next door to Pearson Airport. And there once was a time when cabinet ministers would kind of “bring home the bacon” a bit, and make sure that needed infrastructure projects in their home ridings were funded.
That’s definitely not happening in Etobicoke because the Premier is obsessed with building things on the downtown waterfront, whether it’s the luxury spa or this convention centre on the lake or the shrunken science centre, or now this idea of paving over the islands to put jet runways.
So if you want value for taxpayer money, and if you want what we’ve already built at such enormous expense to be used intelligently instead of more money being wasted on vanity projects, then demand a better provincial government.