Transport Committee on Nov. 29th, 2018

[The Chair (Hon. Judy A. Sgro (Humber River—Black Creek, Lib.)), Liberal, Judy Sgro]

I'm calling the meeting to order. This is the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities of the 42nd Parliament, meeting 123. That shows that we've had a lot of meetings in our session.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we are doing a study assessing the impact of aircraft noise in the vicinity of major Canadian airports.

As a witness today, we have, in person, Antonio Natalizio. Welcome.

From the Direction de santé publique de Montréal, we have David Kaiser, Medical Efficer, urban environment service and healthy lifestyle.

From Les Pollués de Montréal-Trudeau, by video conference, we have Pierre Lachapelle, President.

We will open by asking Mr. Natalizio to give us his comments. Please keep them to five minutes. Thank you very much.

[Antonio Natalizio, As an Individual]

Thank you, Madame Chair and committee members. I speak to you as a resident of Etobicoke Centre of 44 years, where planes fly over as low as 700 feet and their numbers increase yearly. I acknowledge the benefits of airports to our city and region, but there are negative impacts. The two need to be balanced. To achieve a balance, I urge you to consider three things: the health impacts of noise, the need for noise regulation and the need for a long-term plan.

Regarding health, there is now sufficient evidence linking environmental noise exposure to cardiovascular problems, mental health problems and cognitive learning difficulties in children. As parents and grandparents, we need to be concerned about these impacts on infants and adolescents, because they are vulnerable. Other countries, such as Australia, Germany and the U.K., have eliminated or curtailed night flights. I hope you will conclude that it's time for Canada to join them.

Regarding regulations, only three of the many civil aviation regulations pertain to noise. They are ineffective and insufficient to regulate the night sky. This deficiency has allowed Toronto Pearson to remove the old night curfew and reduce the restricted night period from eight hours to six hours. lt has also allowed it to double night flights in the past 20 years, and if nothing is done, they will double again in the next 20 years.

The night sky needs to be regulated. The old night curfew needs to be re-established so we can have uninterrupted sleep. It's a basic human right. We espouse human rights on the world stage but fail to look in our own backyard. Children are our most precious resource, but airports have ignored their right to sleep. Many airports have implemented night curfews and have continued to thrive. Contrary to industry predictions, the sky didn't fall. Airport night hours must be realigned to the body's need for eight hours of sleep, as we had prior to 1985. Six hours are inadequate, and the consequences are significant. Insufficient sleep costs Canadian businesses over $20 billion a year in lost productivity, and it costs society more than $30 billion in health costs.

The U.K. has regulated the night sky, and Heathrow is now a shining example. Although bigger than Pearson, it has an annual night flight limit of only 5,800, compared to Pearson's 19,000 and growing. The GTAA wants to make Pearson the biggest international airport on the continent, and to do that, it will keep increasing night flights. Airports such as Heathrow, Sydney, Zurich, Munich and Frankfurt are leaders in aviation noise management because of government regulation, not because it's in their corporate DNA. New regulations are a must.

Pearson communities are exposed to more than 460,000 flights per year, and this level of traffic generates many concerns. From January to July of this year, the GTAA received 81,000 noise complaints. The equivalent number for last year was 50,000, and it was 33,000 for 2016. How do they compare with other major Canadian airports? They are not even in the same ballpark.

Our growing concerns are not being addressed by the GTAA. Therefore, I urge you to recommend the creation of an independent watchdog. Countries that are concerned about community health impacts have an aviation noise ombudsman. Australia was one of the first, and the U.K. is the most recent. With your help, Canada can have one too.

Regarding the long term, we cannot rely on the aviation industry to find an equitable solution for the region. This is clearly a government responsibility. ln 1989, the government established an environmental assessment panel to address Pearson's expansion plans and the need for new airports to serve the long-term needs of the region.

When the panel recommended against Pearson's expansion, the government dissolved it and the long-term question was never addressed. Three decades later, our communities are paying the price for that decision. We now have an urgent need for a long-term solution.

I urge you to address the region's need for another airport and, in the interim, to recommend greater utilization and expansion of neighbouring ones.

In summary, Madam Chair, we need to address health impacts, because they are real and costly; regulate the night sky, because sleep is a basic human right; and study the long-term issue, because a solution is urgently needed.

Thank you for the opportunity to be here. I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much.

We move on to Mr. Kaiser for five minutes, please.

[David Kaiser, Medical Officer, Urban Environment Service and Healthy Lifestyle, Direction de santé publique de Montréal]

Thank you for inviting me. I think I'll speak in English, because I understand that that's the majority, but I'm happy to answer questions in English or French.

I'm a public health physician. I'm at the Montreal public health unit. I was invited here because we've done work on the health impacts of environmental noise, and more specifically airplane noise. I want to go through, from a public health perspective, how we see noise from aircraft as being an important issue and where we think there's work to be done in order to improve public health.

At Public Health, we've been working on this for about 10 years. It starts, actually, from community noise complaints. It comes from people who called us to say they think there's something going on here and they would like us to investigate. Building from that, we've been able to develop a lot of knowledge in Montreal about the real impacts.

At an international level, it's very clear. The World Health Organization just put out, actually, their new noise guidelines about a month ago. In the lead-up to that, they did a lot of scientific work over the last year, looking at the health impacts of various environmental noise sources. I want to focus specifically on what they found in terms of scientific evidence for aircraft noise.

There's high-quality evidence, which means many studies that go in the same direction, that indicates a link between noise from aircraft and what is called “annoyance”. Annoyance can maybe sound like something that isn't specifically a public health concern, but if you live in a place that is noisy and have lived there for a while, you know that annoyance over time is something that really does affect quality of life and is related to other health impacts.

Second is sleep disturbance. On this, there's what the WHO calls moderate-quality evidence. That means there are fewer studies, but they do go in the direction of a link between aircraft noise and disturbed sleep.

What's even more concerning is that, in the long term, there is now moderate-quality evidence that aircraft noise specifically has impacts on cardiovascular health. That includes hypertension, or high blood pressure. It includes stroke. It includes heart disease. Some of that is really being annoyed for 30 years by noise in the environment. It generates stress. It generates high blood pressure. It can lead to heart disease but also disturbed sleep. We know that disturbed sleep dysregulates the body and can result in hypertension and heart disease. Also, important in the current context is that it can lead to obesity. There's starting to be better evidence about the links between chronic noise exposure and obesity.

There's less good evidence about cognitive impacts—that includes in children but also in adults—as well as mental health and quality of life.

Just to put some numbers to it, we know that about 60% of the residents on the Island of Montreal are exposed to noise levels that may have impacts on their health. For aircraft noise, more specifically, we have almost 5,000 units with about 10,000 to 12,000 people who live inside what is called the NEF 25, or noise exposure forecast of 25. They're in a zone close to the airport, where we know there are likely to be impacts. About 6% of the people on the Island of Montreal, or one person in 15, say they are highly annoyed by noise, and about 2%, or one person in 50, report that they have their sleep disturbed by airplane noise. This is specifically for airplane noise.

Those numbers can seem small, until you think about how few people actually live close to the airport out of the 2 million people on the Island of Montreal. If you look at distance to the airport, about 40% of the people who live in that NEF 25 report being highly annoyed by noise, and 20% of the people live within two kilometres of the airport. So you're getting people who live pretty far from the airport reporting that they're highly annoyed.

From a public health perspective, that brings us to recommendations that we've put out for several years now. We put out a brief in 2014, and four years, as you know, is not that long for policy to change. A lot of those recommendations are still, I think, very relevant. I just want to highlight two that I think are most pertinent at your level.

The first is not a complicated recommendation; it is not based on extensive science. In order to better understand what's going on and to inform people of potential impacts to their health, we need to have access to data. At the present time, we don't have access to information about where planes are in the air, how many there are, and what types they are. We don't have access to the noise measurements. Access to data is recommendation one.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

I'm sorry, Mr. Kaiser. We're very tight for time.

[David Kaiser]

Okay.

The second recommendation is just to continue working on administrative and technical improvements to reduce noise at the source. I think those two things at the federal level are still very salient.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Lachapelle, you have five minutes, please.

[Pierre Lachapelle, President, Les Pollués de Montréal-Trudeau]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Let me make one point first.

Mr. Lachapelle has given us a graph, but it's in French only. Can I have permission from the committee to distribute it? The clerk did a little bit of innovative work here. Do I have permission to distribute it to the committee members?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you.

Go ahead, please, Mr. Lachapelle.

[Pierre Lachapelle]

Madam Chair, members of Parliament, thank you for your invitation to present to this committee.

Before I begin, I wanted to mention that I sent the committee clerk a dozen documents. I sincerely hope that these documents will be brought to the attention of the members of the committee. With regard to the data collected by our measuring stations, you already have in hand an example of the noise peaks. Very often, Aéroports de Montréal and public health authorities talk about average data, but it's important to look at the peaks that the public are subject to. I will now move on to my testimony.

I am honoured to present on behalf of the citizens group, Les Pollués de Montréal-Trudeau, concerning the noise pollution around Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau Airport. The noise is deplorable, and impacts thousands of citizens living on the Island of Montreal. This situation is in part the result of the strange decision made in 1996 by the airport authorities to close a modern airport, Mirabel, which resulted in a concentration of passenger traffic over the Island of Montreal.

I want to emphasize that, since the 1990s, citizens have been alerting Parliament to the problem. They have not been heard. Les Pollués de Montréal-Trudeau began their work informally in 2011, and the committee was officially formed in 2013. The objective of this presentation today, honourable members, is to convince you of the need to act, not only to improve the public health of thousands of Montrealers, but also to rebuild the confidence of citizens in the good faith of Parliament. In fact, Parliament has not maintained control over the management of international airports in Canada, nor has it sufficiently controlled the noise pollution caused by airplanes.

I will now go straight to the heart of the matter—namely, the requests made by hundreds of citizens since 2013 concerning the noise and air pollution at Montréal-Trudeau airport.

First, we ask for a complete ban on nighttime flights from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Being able to sleep at night without interruption from airplane noise is a fundamental need.

Second, last April 30, Aéroports de Montréal announced a $4.5-billion terminal project, a new terminal at Pierre Elliott Trudeau airport. We ask for the immediate freeze and end to this project and the preparatory work that has started.

As our third request, we ask for an economic, environmental, social and health evaluation of the current situation and of the impact of the project announced on April 30. The absence of suitable legislation in Canada allows for the creation of this sort of airport terminal project without adequate public evaluation.

Four, we ask that a public evaluation be carried out by an independent and scientifically competent group, which would include public hearings on the airport situation.

Five, since Aéroports de Montréal began to rent the airport, the management of noise and air pollution has been inadequate. We ask that responsibility for the assessment of its environmental impacts be transferred to an independent and transparent organization that makes its findings public.

Six, we ask Parliament to take back control and monitoring of the international airports in Canada, a role that was relinquished in 1992, when this was taken over by private organizations. Hundreds of citizens consider that the increased noise due to airplanes is a result of Parliament relinquishing its oversight. This change created negative impacts on the health and quality of life of thousands of people in Canada and on the Island of Montreal.

Seven, we ask that you take into consideration the analysis of Canada's international airports by Michel Nadeau and Jacques Roy, of the Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organizations. I provided a copy of their work to the committee clerk in both official languages. This study is very revealing of the situation and is accompanied by recommendations that are full of common sense.

These observations and recommendations are the fruit of thousands of hours of work since 2013 provided by volunteers living on the Island of Montreal and coming from all walks of life. These volunteers deplore the noise and air pollution created by the low-flying airplanes over the cities and boroughs of the Island of Montreal.

I will summarize my remaining points because my time is limited.

One of the many actions that led to these requests is a petition of 3,000 names that was tabled in the House of Commons in 2013. The Minister of Transport at the time, the Hon. Lisa Raitt, swept it aside.

We have installed noise measuring stations. This morning, you got an example of the graph they produce. Our stations are public and permanently measure airborne noise at about ten locations in Montreal.

We have tried, together with the citizens of the Papineau riding, to raise awareness of the Right Hon. Justin Trudeau. Our request for an appointment was refused: it seems that the member for Papineau does not want to meet his constituents.

In May, we wrote to the Hon. Catherine McKenna, Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, requesting public hearings on this $4.5 billion project. We have not received any response. I even followed up by phone.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Mr. Lachapelle, I'm sorry to interrupt, but we're over your time limit, and I can assure you that the committee has many questions for you. I'm just going to have to move on to the committee members and their questions.

Mr. Lachapelle has sent in, in French only, a lot of recommendations. There are over 400 pages of what appears, based on his testimony, to be some very important information. Would the committee like the 400 pages translated and distributed, or should we give it all to the analysts to include in the report? Would that be the better thing, to give it all to the analysts so they can review those recommendations and insert them into the report?

Mr. Wrzesnewskyj, go ahead.

[Borys Wrzesnewskyj, Liberal, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Madam Chair, just for clarity, are the 400 pages all recommendations, or is it a report with recommendations? If the recommendations are a smaller portion of this report, I wouldn't mind having just the recommendations part translated, but if it's 400 pages of recommendations....

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

It's 400 pages of various reports that are here, so the suggestion is to take the recommendations specifically and have them translated into both official languages. All that additional information in the 400 pages will then be sent to the analyst for inclusion in her report.

Is everybody good with that?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

All right, thank you. We'll make sure everybody gets the recommendations, Mr. Lachapelle.

Now we're going to move on to questions from the committee members.

Mrs. Block, go ahead.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I want to thank our witnesses for joining us today. We're probably nearing the end of our study, and it's been a very good study on the issue of noise around our airports and the effects on communities.

Mr. Kaiser, my first question is for you. Other witnesses have testified that the negative health effects of aviation noise are related to noise annoyance, and you started to get into that a little more. Would you take some time to answer that a bit more fully? Do you agree with that?

[David Kaiser]

Clearly, annoyance is part of the impact. Annoyance is the most studied impact of environmental noise internationally. It's been studied for many years in Europe and now to some extent in North America. It's most common. For example, the studies we've done in Montreal show that about 20% of people say they're highly annoyed by at least one source of environmental noise.

Annoyance is common; it's present and it does have an impact on the quality of life and health. I think what's important from a public health perspective is to make sure we don't see it as just an annoyance problem. Annoyance is real, and it's problematic, but sleep disturbance is quite separate from annoyance, and I'll explain why.

From a health perspective, the problem with sleep disturbance is not so much annoyance or waking up and realizing an airplane went overhead and it's annoying to wake up; the body's response to noise at night is physiological. We know from many laboratory studies, calibrated studies of sleep disturbance, that you don't need to be waking up to have that impact on long-term cardiovascular health and obesity.

Annoyance is an issue, but sleep disturbance is a separate issue. It's much more tied to the long-term effects of heart health. We need to make sure that we have both of those together. From a regulatory and public health perspective, the strategies for dealing with annoyance are not necessarily the same as those dealing with sleep disturbance, because sleep disturbance is really a nighttime issue for the majority of the population. I think it's important to have both.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

Thank you.

We've also had many witnesses suggest that public health organizations like Health Canada should develop noise standards based on human health. Do you think this would be an effective initiative? If you do, what factors would need to be included in this kind of standard, and who would need to be at the table?

[David Kaiser]

In terms of noise standards, there is already a very good starting point, which is the WHO guidelines. They were just renewed, and they are based on the best available evidence. We know what we should be aiming for; we have that information. The recommendation for aircraft noise is 45 decibels of an indicator they call Lden. It's a weighted indicator that penalizes noise in the evening and at night.

The issue of standards is important, but we have a very good idea of what we should be aiming for. After that, should public health organizations have a role in that? Absolutely, but the issue is really how we get there. Who needs to be around the table at every level, from the local/regional level to provincial and federal? It's the agencies responsible for zoning and planning, which means municipalities and ministries of planning and development, and the agencies responsible for transport, which means different types of transport at every level. I also think citizen participation is really important.

Who should be around the table? Health should be at the table, clearly, but it's more to bring the information. We already know what we need to do and where we should be aiming. The people who actually do something are much more in planning and transport, and the people who are impacted need to be there too. I think those are the essential building blocks.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

How much time do I have?

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

You have almost two minutes.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

All right.

Mr. Lachapelle, how would you propose that airport authorities balance the concerns of citizens and communities surrounding night flights with the economic benefits that are offered by these flights?

[Pierre Lachapelle]

I'll answer in French, if I may.

Until now, I believe that the airport authorities have failed in their responsibilities to be good neighbours, at least with respect to Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport.

This is a very broad question you are asking, and it concerns the balance between the economy and public health. Montrealers affected by noise pollution, particularly aircraft noise, are certainly seeing their productivity decline. Indeed, unable to sleep, they enter the workplace tired or call in to inform their boss that they won't be in to work. This has an economic impact.

We can't go back to the Middle Ages, when people died at age 30. We are in the 21st century, and airport authorities in Canada are behaving as if we were in the Middle Ages. It is up to Parliament to bring these people to their senses. There is an imbalance at the moment, not on the economic side, but on the environmental and public health side. These people affected by aircraft noise and suffering from psychiatric problems will need to be treated. You will therefore have to increase taxes to add beds in hospitals.