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// There's a war of words going on—largely in the editorial pages of The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail—about Ontario premier Doug Ford's plans to expand the Toronto Islands airport, more properly known as the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport. For many people, Billy Bishop is a convenient alternative to the much busier Pearson Airport. The latter handles 47 million passengers a year, and is 27 kilometers from Union Station, the unofficial navel of Toronto; the former handles about 2 million passengers a year, and is just two kilometers from Union Station.
I've flown in and out of Billy Bishop a handful of times over the years. It's located on an island, which used to mean taking a laughably short ride on a tiny ferry to get to and from the terminal. (Since 2015, you've been able to access it via a six-minute walk through a pedestrian tunnel.) It's a small airport, usually not very crowded, which sometimes felt to me more like one big business lounge than a major, bustling terminal. I used to find Billy Bishop very convenient if I had business in downtown Toronto; you could get there by streetcar, or on foot. Getting to Pearson involved a long bus ride or a very costly taxi ride, more often than not in awful traffic.
On the other hand, I was conscious that, by flying into an airport located on an island in Lake Ontario, I wasn't exactly doing the residents of downtown Toronto and the cottagers on Toronto Island a favour. Airplanes are noisy, and they pollute. Though the planes that serve Billy Bishop are small, and propeller-powered, they're responsible for a massive injection of PM2.5 pollutants and other particulates, right where you don't want more air pollution: in the downtown of Canada's most populous metropolis. At a certain point, I started making it a policy that I'd travel by train rather than plane whenever I could.
And then there was the fact that Pearson Airport became a lot easier to get to. This started with the launch of the Union Pearson (UP) Express, a rail connection from Union Station to the international airport; prices were high when the train started running, but a decade ago, they were cut in half, and now sit at $9.25 if you have a PRESTO card.
The few times I did fly into Pearson, often on an international flight, or because of some awkward homebound routing from Vancouver, it was easy, convenient, and cheap to hop on a train downtown. That killed the major advantage of Billy Bishop, a terminal I'd always felt bad about using anyway. A trip to Toronto Island—preferably you'll take a bike onto one of the ferries—is like a getaway to cottage country, but the experience is marred by the regular roar of planes touching down and taking off.
Now Doug Ford (see above), who never met a fossil-fuelled-vehicle he didn't just absolutely looooove, wants to not only expand Billy Bishop Airport, but also to open it up to jets.
