(Brian Iler wrote this note to a CommunityAIR member explaining what the group has been focusing on over that last year.  editor's note)

Thanks for your e-mail.

You make a good point – CAIR hasn’t been too visible the last year or so. Part of that has stemmed from the sense that we had done what we could, without much success, and that new opportunities to address the airport would only occur with a change in the federal government, or a Porter bankruptcy or crash – god forbid, or, perhaps, David Miller finally demonstrating some backbone.

I attach our brief to David from last July, that he’s almost entirely ignored – notwithstanding a lot of pressure from us and others. We have likely been too patient to date, as he is supportive of us in what he says, but has failed utterly in action. We greatly appreciate your writing to him.

We’ve continued to pressure David behind the scenes, and have kept the TPA on their toes.  We recently managed to stop most of Porter’s flagrant curfew breaches – a few months ago the Porter flight that was diverted to Pearson on Friday night, landing at 11:10 p.m., would have landed at the Island Airport. We’ve new research on health effects of airports, have finally got the City to ask Transport Canada for a new noise study – it’s entitled to one very year, and has never asked for one before.

We’ve not understood clearly how best to deal with Porter’s apparent success – our fight isn’t with Porter in any event,– but with the TPA that allows Porter to get away with so much. Porter makes much more sense at Pearson, and part of what we’ll be doing is showing Porter that Pearson is much preferable from a business perspective – the Island Airport market is quite limited, as both City Express and Air Canada Jazz discovered. Free booze and leather seats are great marketing tools, but won’t bring in passengers who aren’t there. We’re not convinced Porter’s getting that much business as it is.

The TPA is likely to continue to shoot itself in the feet – it’s board is in complete disarray, with its slim 5-4 staunch-Tory majority recently ramming through the $5 million purchase of a second ferry for Porter after its lawyers advised that at least one of the five could not vote due to conflict of interest.

The fact that Porter and the TPA are so closely identified with the Harper Tories can’t help either, of them in the hip downtown market they’re targeting so aggressively,  and can cause significant damage to the Porter brand, as more of this comes out.

Out task for the next while is to be far more publically visible, finding creative ways to demonstrate just how bad the expansion is for the waterfront, and for the thousand who live there. We’re finding that lots of our potential supporters just don’t know.

There has also been a sense that until those residents find that it’s bad enough to start speaking out about their experience, neither politicians or the media will pay much attention to us. That’s now well underway, since our demonstration last week.

Take a look at our website, and sign up for our blog – there’s been a lot of action on the blog over the past six months, and it will only increase – it’s our most effective way, at this point, to keep people up to speed.

I entirely agree with your comments on the message – we are struggling a bit without the expertise in messaging that we would like. I attach the piece that was distributed at the demo last week, as a first attempt to get at the issue.

Finally – we’re quite limited in our capacity to get things done as we are all volunteers, and most of us have day jobs. If you’d like to engage with us, please let me know. The more time and energy that is devoted to this, the more effective we’ll be.

Again, thanks for taking the time to write.

Brian Iler, chair
CommunityAIR