Marcus Gee was wrong every day and in every way on the Iraq war. Now he is reprising his shop-worn neo-con nostrums on the Island Airport issue.

At least, in replacing the often-brilliant John Barber with Gee, the Globe has positioned itself well in the race among Toronto newspapers for the manna of Porter ad spending.

Not surprisingly, Marcus has not provided a very accurate or complete summary of all the reasons Island Airport expansion is a dumb idea, a few of which reasons include:

1) the airport is a heavy industrial use whose main activity is the combustion of millions of litres of jet fuel, and whose principal effect is to cover the densely populated waterfront in a deep layer of carcinogens and respiratory irritants;

2) there are major safety issues with the Island airport; its runways are unnaturally short and its runway safety zones are far below international standards;

3) the noise levels generated by the Q400 plane (and other issues) put the airport in contravention of the Tripartite Agreement, established to safeguard the development of the waterfront from airport operations;

4) to the extent the airport is a “success” (although we haven’t seen any Porter financials yet) it is thanks to an unheard-of monopoly over use of a public airport supplemented with well over $100-million in direct and indirect taxpayer subsidies; now the Port Authority is angling for another $31-million from taxpayers to build the tunnel so that a Rosedale millionaire and his kids can keep playing airplanes in the most important park in the GTA 

5) conservative ideology says that, wherever possible, decisions such as land planning should be made at the local level, but not if Marcus Gee likes the project I guess;

6) the Island airport expansion is elitist because it is targeted at helping a relative handful of fat cats, bureaucrats, lobbyists, journalists and other civically disengaged types shave a few minutes of travel time; the air and noise pollution created is at the expense of the immigrant families and others of the millions of Muskoka-challenged citizens who use the waterfront as their main getaway.

Jane Jacobs, the pre-eminent urbanist of our time, thought Island airport expansion was a civic planning evil on a level with the Spadina Expressway. Marcus Gee thinks it’s the greatest thing since George W. Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq. Gee I wonder who is right.

Morkerly