Mr. Lipton:

If you look at the northeast corner of Pearson Airport, at the intersection of Derry Road and Airport Road, you will see a small square area with roads at a 45 degree angle to the rest of the street grid. That area, a part of Malton, contains occupied dwellings and a school, the aptly named Our Lady of the Airways. The closest of these homes sits a little over 800 meters from end of the nearest Pearson runway. However, that has a misleading effect, because the jet paths actually come much closer to this neighbourhood: the flight path from Pearson 15L/33R comes within 250 meters of the nearest house, and 550 meters of Our Lady of the Airways school. and 747 jets fly on those paths, not relatively low-polluting, low-noise turboprop aircraft.

Torontonians like aviation. We like the ability to maintain a vibrant muti-cultural city; we like prosperity, we like the ability to travel, we like living in a large country with considerable resources, and we like having state of the art medical services. Aviation plays an essential role in our having each of these things. We have to decide whether we want to share the burdens with some degree of fairness, or whether we will insist on dumping all of the costs of aviation on the people of northwestern Toronto and northeastern Mississauga.

John Spragge