Adam Vaughan

[Business of Supply, March 8th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, in three years at five public meetings, at each juncture the City of Toronto could have approved this project and refused to do so, in large part because its conditions were not met. The port authority has said that it cannot meet the conditions imposed by the City of Toronto and expand this airport. It has said that explicitly, as has the operator of Porter Airlines. In light of the fact that it cannot meet local conditions, would you not agree that expansion is impossible?

[Business of Supply, March 8th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest and appreciated the comments about how important Bombardier is, not just to the Quebec economy, but right across the country, from coast to coast to coast. That includes, of course, Ontario, in Toronto at Downsview, as well as in Thunder Bay, where trains are built.

I am sure the hon. member opposite is aware that the future of Bombardier rests on more than one plane and one airport; it rests across its entire platform. I wonder if he could perhaps help to explain this. The previous government, when presented with an opportunity to purchase LRT streetcars for Toronto and source them specifically from Bombardier, specifically from workers in Thunder Bay, chose not to. His party told the City of Toronto, and I cannot use the words—they are words more properly spoken by Donald Trump than by me—to basically get lost and for that contract not to be pursued; it would not be funded by the previous government.

If Bombardier is such an important component of the Canadian economy and the future of Bombardier is so critically important to workers right across the country, why did the previous government not support the purchase agreement for the City of Toronto's streetcars?

[Business of Supply, March 8th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, the Province of Quebec will be interested in the member's arguments about local control of all decisions by the federal government. I hesitate to wonder what that means for pipelines and the position of the member's party on that issue.

The member said that the people of Toronto should be allowed to make the decision. City council has had this issue in front of it five times since the initial request was made by the one airline, and five times it has layered on more conditions and gone further away from making decisions on it. In those five opportunities to approve this project, each time it has declined to do so. That is the voting record of the City of Toronto.

As for the notion that private sector stimulus is better than public sector stimulus, is the member opposite aware that this project would require close to $1.6 billion of public money to reconfigure the airport to accommodate the proposal and that the money has to come, according to Mr. Deluce, the proponent, from the federal government if this project is going to fly?

With his perspective that no money should come from the federal government or that federal money is bad for economic stimulus, is the member aware that this project cannot fly without $1.6 billion in new taxes and infrastructure investment, a decision that your previous government had the opportunity to make and declined?

[Business of Supply, March 8th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, perhaps I am the only one asking questions because I am the only one who has actually read the reports.

There have been ample reports tabled on this issue over three years, and they are definitive. One of my favourites was a report that was the groundwork for the formal request to get someone to do a full environmental assessment, not by the port authority but under the provincial laws, because the lake is actually a provincial park. The bed of the lake where the airport wants to expand is actually owned by the Province of Ontario as a provincial park, yet the provincial environmental assessment process is forbidden from kicking in. The federal one trumps it.

The foundation report made a very interesting finding. One of the proponents said that we could extend the runways by half a kilometre into the lake and we could build new fish habitats at the end of each runway. We would do this because we found that when we studied the existing airport, there was no fish habitat in the Toronto harbour next to the airport. When we asked why there was no fish habitat there, the report said it was because the island airport dumps all of the runway snow into the lake and has killed the fish habitat, so what the proposal actually said we were going to do was to extend the runway and kill more fish habitat as we create it.

The environmental assessment, though, did not take into account the impact on the natural environment, because the scope of the environmental assessment did not do that.

Would the member opposite agree that an environmental assessment that was not authorized and did not meet the threshold of consultation that is defined by the Province of Ontario and the City of Toronto, an environmental assessment that does not take into consideration the existing law, is in fact not really an environmental assessment at all?

[Business of Supply, March 8th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, the City of Toronto requested an environmental assessment be done, but only after the port authority agreed to put a cap on the current operation of the airport, because the current operation of the airport is overwhelming the transportation infrastructure in the community, including transit, the intersection of Bathurst and Lake Shore, and that of Eireann Quay and Bathurst.

With the current configuration, the airport is already too big for the land mass it currently occupies, and the ground transportation infrastructure is inadequate for an airport of the current configuration of 2.4 million passengers per year. The port authority refused to put the cap in place and proceeded with an environmental assessment that it configured, to which it set the terms of reference, and for which it would have the sole decision as to whether it would be approved or not. Therefore, the City of Toronto was at the point of walking away from this process because of the lack of co-operation from PortsToronto.

[Business of Supply, March 8th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, the member opposite referred to an incident when an early flight of a Q400, just coming out of development, had a problem with the rubber ring around the nose cone landing configuration that caused several of them to fail and crash, particularly when they flew over water and landed at maritime airports. It was subsequently fixed. There was a recall on that part and it was reconfigured to be more safe. In fact, it flies safely now; and I have no problem with the Q400 as it is currently configured, because it was fixed.

She raised the issue about due process. One of the conditions of the tripartite agreement requires the port authority to build a sewer system to distribute the de-icing fluids back to the city's sewage system so that they are not dumped directly into the lake. The member opposite, who used to run the port authority, knows that sewer system was never built in compliance with the port authority's regulations or the tripartite agreements.

If due process, proper environmental stewardship, and living up to the letter of the law in the agreement were so important, why did the member opposite, when she had control of the authority, not build the appropriate sewer system to protect the lake and the drinking water of millions of Torontonians from known carcinogens that were being shovelled into Lake Ontario? If the party opposite wants to lecture this side of the House on due process and natural justice, it ought to take a good look at its own behaviour over the last 20 years in relation to this issue.

[Business of Supply, March 8th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, the report from the Board of Health identifies the island airport as the single largest source of pollution in the entire GTA. That has very serious implications for the low-income community that surrounds the airport, in particular the building that is closest to the end of the runway, which is a supportive environment home to people with significant disabilities.

We are also seeing a spike in childhood asthma at the local school. The local school sits on one side of the street, a two-lane road to a park in this community, and the entire access to the airport runs between a school in the community and the community centre. There are no plans and no capacity to expand that roadway, even though they want to jam an airport the size of the Ottawa International Airport into one-seventh the land mass.

There are other issues as well. The issue we have to turn our attention to is what is the right balance. The member opposite referred to two different tripartite agreements that govern the city's waterfront. Those tripartite agreements strike a balance and allow a small airport to operate. It has operated successfully and has allowed the waterfront investment to proceed in a way that has generated more jobs, has more economic impact, and has more work to be done. Those two tripartite agreements work in concert with each other. They were developed and are governed in concert with one another.

The agency that has governance over this issue is focused on building a great waterfront, not just a road and an airport for a single operator. We have complexities to deal with here, and the movers of the motion opposite have not even begun to do the research, let alone read the reports or talk to the stakeholders. The only person they have spoken to is the operator at the airport. Even then, it is not the operator at the airport but the main airline at the airport. That is the only stakeholder they have spoken to.

[Business of Supply, March 8th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, there is an astonishing record of poor public administration at the port authority. It does not follow the rules. The proponents of this project are not following the lobbyist registration rules. They have not registered yet. A complaint has been filed and received.

It is shocking that, in the midst of all of this poor governance, one individual has convinced the party opposite to come forward with a motion from which he alone would profit. It is just an abysmal process. To suggest that we are going to sit here today and overrule a decision we made, a promise we committed to and kept, which is to protect the waterfront, the balance, and the airport as it is currently configured, and move forward in a coordinated and consensual way, to say that we are going to throw all of that aside for the rights of one individual who will not play by the rules is just not the way good governance is conducted. It is not the way good public policy is pursued.

In terms of consultation, I would suggest the party opposite consult more widely. Perhaps if it did, it would not be shut out in the city of Toronto every time there is a federal election.

[Business of Supply, March 8th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I have to thank the party opposite for the opportunity to address the House on this issue, which defines some of the challenges facing the riding I represent.

The riding I represent is the Toronto waterfront and the inner harbour that stretches from the CNE grounds right across to the Don River, encompassing the Toronto island and the island airport, as well as the communities that are impacted by it.

One of the great things about this part of the city is the fact that there has been an extraordinary transformation over the last 25 years of the waterfront, led in large part by another tripartite agreement that was referenced earlier, the waterfront tripartite agreement signed by Prime Minister Chrétien, Premier Mike Harris, as well as the mayor of the day, Mel Lastman, which set in motion close to $3.5 billion in investments to transform the waterfront from an industrial port that had gone by the wayside into a new community that embraced all of the elements that make a city successful.

As for industry, we have Lafarge still shipping there, and Red Path Sugar using the port actively. We also have an airport defined by a separate agreement, called the Billy Bishop airport but known in the city as the island airport.

This investment also triggered huge private investment, much more private investment than any benefit calculated to have flowed from the island airport. We have new post-secondary institutions on the waterfront. Harbourfront Centre has more than tripled in size and is now one of the cultural centres for the city and the country.

In addition to that, we have new transit lines, new hotels, new condominiums and residences, and we also have the largest concentration of public housing in my riding 500 metres from the end of the airport.

This is the context in which the island airport is situated. I urge members to look at even one of the 25 reports that have been tabled on this file, and to look at the proposition and the configuration of the land being asked to accommodate this particular facility. The proposition is absurd, once we look at the maps and look at the falsehoods being propagated.

This idea comes from Mr. Deluce and Porter Airlines in a private communication to Mayor Ford, and was given six weeks for approval. The city has six weeks to approve this or else the deal will fall through. When it came to council, the questions that sprung from that ridiculous proposition were so serious and of such magnitude that the city has struggled through five public meetings of council, numerous consultation meetings, as well as 25 reports tabled by economic consultants, planning consultants, aeronautic consultants, and everyone else trying to figure out why this idea would even get to see the light of day, let alone be put on the order paper at city council.

We would have to ask Mayor Ford—and maybe the former Prime Minister could have done that when he had him on stage during the campaign. However, we have no idea why this idea ever came forward. PortsToronto did not promote the idea. The City of Toronto did not promote the idea. The Government of Canada did not promote the idea. None of the signatories to the tripartite agreement have ever agreed to this proposition. We are studying it to try to figure out if it makes sense.

All that the studies have done is to result in more questions. What happens to the marine exclusion zone? Does it get extended and block off the port to commercial traffic? We cannot get an answer. The airport was originally only going to have to lengthen its runway into the lake by 80 metres. That later turned out to be closer to 300 metres on each end, which means paving over and filling a half-kilometre of the lake, cutting off access to the islands and of the island ferry to Hanlan's Point, as well as potentially choking the airport at the pinch point near Ontario Place, shutting down one of the main channels to get in and out of the harbour for commercial ships.

We could not get an answer as to whether that was the right configuration of the airport, the wrong configuration of the airport, how wide it would be, and whether taxiways would be involved. There was no design. In fact, there was no business case ever advanced by anyone around this entire process.

The city has tried to study it. It put some very serious conditions in place before it would ever even consider approving this project. Those conditions have never been met. In fact, the port authority said it could not meet them, which meant that when this eventually did get to the floor of council, it was dead in the water.

The reality is that the proposition requires a half a kilometre of lakefill on either end of the runway. It cannot be moved one way or the other, because it would choke off development of the port lands or it would run into Ontario Place. It requires the marine exclusion zones to be expanded, and we cannot figure out by how much because Transport Canada will not tell us because there is no plan or design or project in front of it.

The other thing that became quite obvious is that the blast from the jets turning at the end of the runway would be so powerful that it would knock over small craft and destroy boating and recreational yachting in the Toronto harbour.

The port authority then proposed building a six-metre wall the entire length of the runway, from Bay Street to Dufferin, for blast control. An entire blast wall would have to be built to protect boating in the area, but even then there was no business case to pay for it.

As a result, we end up with a situation where the project just keeps expanding in scope and cost and undermines the very good work that has been done to revitalize the waterfront, the amazing investment, which is about to be doubled again and has had far greater economic impact, far greater public support, and far greater study and collection of data to prove its value. Instead, what we have is this crazy idea from one individual who wants to further the airline.

Has WestJet or Air Canada come in support of this? No.

Has the port authority ever signed off on it? No.

Has the City of Toronto, in five public council meetings, ever said yes? No. It has had five chances to sign off on it and has always said no, unless the following conditions could be met. Those conditions, as he just outlined, have never been met.

However, the real mystery behind this proposition is the notion that it is market-based.

One of the proposals to make this idea work involved building a cloverleaf out over Lake Ontario to circle traffic in the inner harbour, around the silos, and back into the airport terminal. The cost of that alone was $600 million, which Mr. Deluce said the federal government would pay for. The federal government had an opportunity last term to pay for that, and it chose to spend the money on transit in Scarborough. It was a wise decision.

The port authority then said that it would raise all the fees to passenger fees. Except there is a problem. The letters patent of the port authority does not allow it to spend dollars that it raises on property that it does not own or are not contained in the letters patent. Therefore, it cannot reconfigure the south end of the city to its liking because it is not allowed to spend money on property it does not own, and it agreed and said yes, the city should ask the federal government for the money.

The federal government could have put that money on the table in its last three budgets. It chose not to do so. In fact, what it chose to do was to redouble its efforts and go back into the waterfront Toronto plan, the appropriate plan, supported by the City of Toronto, the people of Toronto, the business community of Toronto, and the planners of Toronto.

What we have ended up here today debating is this crazy notion that has been put forth by a single business proponent to reconfigure the entire city of Toronto to his liking, to abandon the plans of a $3.2-billion federal investment on the waterfront, to turn our backs on Harbourfront Centre, turn our backs on the residents who live there—not the residents of the condominium, but residents of public housing. The public housing residents are the closest people to the end of this runway. They live 500 metres from it. The communities around there have said, “No, we were given a promise, a promise that there would be no jets and no runway expansion, signed by the City of Toronto, the port authority, and the federal government. We want you to honour that promise.”

Therefore, during the campaign, we said that we would honour that promise, and we have delivered on that promise as we committed to do in the election campaign.

However, the real concern I have about this is that when we ask the party opposite whom it has spoken to, the only people it has admitted to speaking to is the airline operator. They have met with Mr. Deluce. Mr. Deluce and his lobby organization, the Sussex Strategy Group, have been lobbying on Parliament Hill for well over a month. If we were to check the lobbyists' register, we would find that they have not registered.

The party opposite is acting on behalf of lobbyists who have not obeyed the rules and have brought to the House a motion to further the private interests of a single airline at the expense of all the other public investments.

At the very least, we would expect this operator to follow the rules for once, to follow the rules and register as a lobbyist before talking to parliamentarians about these business interests, but that has not happened. That is shocking. It is not surprising from the party opposite, but still shocking.

What we have seen time and again with the Conservative Party and the port authority of Toronto is a relationship that is profoundly secretive. It appointed people to that port authority who were the college roommates and fundraisers of some former cabinet ministers.

There has been an astonishing—

[Business of Supply, March 8th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, the member opposite talks about a market-based solution. Is he aware that it will require about $1.6 billion in federal funding to reconfigure the land mass to accommodate this project, if it is even conceivably possible?

Putting that aside, we have consulted in the city of Toronto for three years on this issue. There have been more than 25 reports put on the table at city council. City council has had five opportunities to approve this and not once has it ever done so. There was an election held in which a promise was made to protect the tripartite agreement. There was one party in that election that promised to open the tripartite agreement and expand the airport regardless of cost, and that was the party opposite. That party received zero seats in the election and less than 10% of the vote in the precinct surrounding this airport. There was no public support for the position advocated by that party.

We talk about the need to support Bombardier. When the city of Toronto came forward, with the support of the Province of Ontario, to purchase Bombardier streetcars in Thunder Bay and to facilitate the expansion of the transit system in this city, the member, Mr. Baird at the time, told the city in rude and juvenile language that I cannot recite because it barred to do so in Parliament, to get lost, that there was no basis to support Bombardier and build a transit system in Toronto.

If economic development and the health of Bombardier are central to this argument, why did the party opposite refuse to support the city of Toronto's request to buy Bombardier streetcars for the city of Toronto?