Yesterday Doctor Sheela Basrur died after a long battle with cancer.  Dr. Basrur was Toronto's Medical Officer of Health and more recently Ontario's chief medical officer of health.  As the newspaper obituaries noted, she is chiefly remembered as the inspired leader of the medical efforts during the frightening SARS epidemic, but members of CommunityAIR remember another moment when she stood up against powerful interests and refused to be intimidated.

That moment was during the City Council debate of the bridge to the Island Airport in November 2002.  Mel Lastman was the mayor and the Lastman Council was loaded with councillors who favoured the bridge and the expansion of the airport.  Case Ootes, the Deputy Mayor, led an attack on Sheela Basrur because she had the courage to tell council that an expanded airport would lead to increased air pollution that would affect the health of hundreds of thousands of people.  That attack demonstrated that the council had reached a new leadership low, where bullying of city staff was the norm.  It illustrated that Ootes did not understand basic principles of science and had no respect for individuals or experts that did not support his point of view. 

This is John Barber's account of that debate written at the time.

By JOHN BARBER
Globe and Mail, Friday, November 29, 2002 – Print Edition, Page A26

I suppose the absolute lowest moment of the most shameful week of the most appalling city council Toronto has endured since 1969 came when Deputy Mayor Case Ootes yelled "Shut up!" at the top of his lungs so the whole world could hear him take a rhetorical club to the head of Dr. Sheela Basrur, the city's Medical Officer of Health.

By contrast, Mayor Mel Lastman a few hours later shouting "You are a bastard!" at Councillor Howard Moscoe, in full public session, was almost normal.

It's harder to characterize the Ootes attack because nothing like it has happened before.

Not even Tom Jakobek in his notorious heyday publicly attacked city staff, certainly not the MOH, so viciously.

But Mr. Ootes is no outrider; he's the strategic mastermind of the band of oafs that runs City Hall.

Nothing could demonstrate strategic stupidity and irredeemable oafishness better than his attempt to knock the MOH out of the island-airport debate by brute force.

Dr. Basrur barely reaches five feet in high heels, but she withstood the clumsy assault of the Big O with ease -- mainly by standing still with her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open while the politician attacked her professional credibility, railing incoherently about her alleged lack of concern over traffic congestion in East York.

Dr. Basrur's crime was a recommendation that city council make an effort to assess the public-health impact of a much-expanded airport before officially approving it.

For that radical position, which was backed up by a letter from the Ontario College of Family Physicians, Mr. Ootes attempted to tear her to pieces in public.

The politician was angry because Dr. Basrur matters -- and she had stepped out of line by expressing the wrong opinion.
That opinion will play a crucial role in determining whether an environmental assessment of the airport expansion is needed. Because the Lastmanites cannot abide any delay in that enterprise -- and because they don't much care about the health and safety of waterfront residents ("the privileged few," according to Mr. Ootes) -- they almost literally tried to beat her into submission.

It was ugly, but -- as we have come to learn over the past few years -- typical. Not since the late 1960s, when a majority earnestly believed in the great value of ramming expressways through every downtown neighbourhood, has city council been so pathetically woodenheaded.

In its eagerness to rush ahead, council brushed aside its chief administrator and chief planner, who had recommended capping the number of flights allowed at the airport. Not to mention concerns expressed by piles of informed citizens and urban experts, led by Jane Jacobs and David Crombie, who told it that airport expansion will ruin the city's hopes for a revitalized waterfront.

It even managed to find a way to make all Torontonians pay for the new bridge -- something it previously vowed never to do and something no private financiers have agreed to do (because the bridge is uneconomic; it will never pay for itself).
It did so by agreeing to pay the Toronto Port Authority $67-million in subsidies over the next 10 years to settle the authority's lawsuit against city taxpayers -- providing almost to the nickel the cash flow the TPA will need to build its bridge and a new terminal.

The fact that the port authoritarians deserve none of our money, and that city council showered them with tens of millions overnight -- in total secrecy -- becomes just another minor scandal along the way.

The real tragedy is that council is willing to jeopardize a historic opportunity to reclaim the central waterfront in order to prop up a bankrupt little airport that would have disappeared years ago if the free market had any say in the matter -- if it were a private enterprise, as opposed to a political football kept alive by entrenched vested interests with easy access to government subsidies.

"Thousands of cities would bend over backwards for an airport in the middle of their downtowns," Mel Lastman claimed.
How do you deal with something like that, knowing that the speaker sincerely believes it to be true?

It's hopeless.