Perhaps a pedestrian tunnel to the Island Airport – sorry, the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport (BBTCA) – isn’t such a bad idea after all.  

“It probably stops a bridge being built, and that’s a good thing,” says local Councillor Adam Vaughan, who opposes any expansion of the airport but now seems resigned to the idea of a tunnel. But about that bridge...

The 24-to-13 vote at council last week clearing the way for a pedestrian tunnel is being touted as a win-win for the city and Toronto Port Authority – a change, since the city is usually getting stiffed by the TPA. Under the so-called Master Agreement, the city gets to build a water main to the Island water treatment plant (needed to feed downtown development) for half the $22 million it would cost otherwise.

The TPA, meanwhile, gets the rights to a chunk of city-owned dock wall for a more direct route for its tunnel to the airport, as well as a three-year lease on some valuable waterfront real estate at the Canada Malting Site for a temporary parking lot at the bargain-basement rate of $3 per square foot.

More parking is welcome. Certainly, residents could do with a little less hacking from the exhaust of cabs queuing along Eireann Quay for fares at Billy Bishop – and without the sight of cab drivers relieving themselves in the nearby schoolyard.

Other parts of the Master Agreement, however, are not so clearly a win for the city or waterfront residents. 

There’s the $43 million in so-called “payments in lieu of taxes” the TPA owes the city. The TPA doesn’t seem anxious to settle that account, agreeing only to keep talking. 

Nor is the TPA willing to return to the city the 30-metre easement it owns underneath Little Norway Park. 

TPA president and CEO Geoff Wilson is noncommittal on the Little Norway front. “We’re not talking about that with the city,” Wilson says.  “I don’t think that concern is a broad concern.”

Well, not exactly. The fate of Little Norway should parking become an issue in the future is a lingering concern. 

The Canada Malting site has been slated for redevelopment (that much is known), so the TPA can’t use it for parking forever. Build Toronto is trying to sell investors on a mixed-use commercial hub with some low-rise residential. Other possibilities floated for the site include a hotel. 

But even if parking for Island Airport users could be accommodated underground in whatever is built on the Canada Malting site, it seems more likely that development of the site will only add to the traffic challenges in the area. 

Waterfront residents add that the agreement between the city and TPA doesn’t address greenhouse gases in airplane emissions or noise issues. 

The TPA plans to erect sound barriers that reportedly do nothing for residents who live more than five floors up, but that’s another issue. 

Tunnel opponents are betting that the $65 million needed to build the tunnel, a very conservative estimate according to Vancouver consultants brought in to assess the plan, can’t possibly be raised without jacking sky-high the $20 airport fee passengers now pay to fly out of BBTCA. Wilson says there is no plan to raise that fee, but P3s being what they are, there’s no guarantee it won’t go up. Think Highway 407.

The airport will have to attract far more than the 1 million or so passengers it’s drawing annually to raise the capital for the tunnel through airport fees alone. And the only way passenger numbers can go up is by lifting the current cap on the number of flights or the curfew on flights, or both. 

That would require changes to the Tripartite Agreement between the city, feds and TPA – not an overwhelming obstacle in the current political climate. But that still might not get the TPA to the $65 million mark. 

There’s no room to grow the airport by adding a runway. The economic potential of BBTCA is finite. Investors weren’t exactly flocking to put their money on Porter, the main airline on the island, when it made an initial public offering last year. That bid was eventually pulled by Porter.

The feds could always drop a bag of money on the TPA’s doorstep to get the tunnel built – not an inconceivable prospect given the millions past federal governments have spent propping up the Island Airport’s operations. 

But Vaughan is entertaining other theories before that one. 

Now that the federal regulation banning a “fixed link” between the mainland and BBTCA is slated to be changed by the feds to allow a tunnel, the bridge scenario does enter the realm of the possible, if, say, tunnel costs prove prohibitive.

Seems a stretch to think a bridge may still be in the TPA’s blue-skying. 

But stoking Vaughan’s fears is the proposed relocation of the TPA’s circa-1938 administrative building on the airport lands. The Authority has offered to contribute $250,000 toward dismantling the building, a national historic site, and reassembling it elsewhere. Discussions are under way for possible relocation to Downsview Park. Vaughan says removing the building does away with the only physical obstacle to a bridge to the airport. 

Wilson argues that a bridge would only drive more traffic and congestion to the airport, and that’s the last thing the TPA wants. 

But what if a willing partner can’t be found for a tunnel? 

Says Vaughan: “The awkward twist of fate in all of this is that whatever you do to improve the neighbourhood supports the airport.”