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What’s Norm Kelly’s flight plan?

Last week, city staff delivered a thoughtful recommendation on Porter’s proposal to introduce jets to Billy Bishop Airport. The potential impact on our waterfront is so profound, staff’s report says, that much more study is needed.

Everyone from Waterfront Toronto to Toronto Public Health has since expressed their opposition (see sidebar) to the expansion, pointing out the havoc it would wreak on the waterfront.

But Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly has other ideas. The guy who’s in charge now that Rob Ford has been sidelined by scandal has made Island airport expansion a priority – his priority.

Kelly is planning to use what political capital he has to muster support for the expansion, starting at today’s (Thursday, December 5) Executive Committee meeting, the first he will preside over as deputy.

To understand the Scarborough councillor’s unusual interest in the airport, you have to travel back to his days as an MP to then PM Pierre Trudeau.

Elected as a Liberal MP for Scarborough Centre in 1980, he spent eight years in Ottawa, during which time the government passed Bill C-124, which reorganized Crown corporations and paved the way for the establishment of port authorities. Kelly steered the bill through the House of Commons and its committees.

After he returned to municipal politics in 1994, he was one of the three city-appointed sitting members of the Toronto Harbour Commission (THC).

In 1997 when the Liberal government was close to passing the Canada Marine Act legislation establishing port authorities, the then head of the THC, Harold Peerenboom, lobbied Liberal MP Dennis Mills to include Toronto’s port in spite of a recommendation against it from BMO Nesbitt Burns, the consultants looking at the financial self-sufficiency of Canada’s ports.

City council voted 36 to 1 to ask the federal government not to include Toronto in the national list of port authorities. Kelly cast the lone dissenting vote. The transition to a port authority removed control of our waterfront from the city?controlled THC and handed it over to the federal government.

Kelly was a Toronto Harbour Commissioner on Peerenboom’s watch when a spending scandal broke over Kelly’s running a $26,000 tab while travelling with his wife to London, Belfast, Boston, Baltimore and Chicago. The auditor recommended the city recover the $7,901 Kelly billed for his wife’s travel expenses.

It appears that even after the Toronto Port Authority took over operation of the Island airport and Kelly was neither a commissioner nor port authority board member, his contacts at Billy Bishop kept in touch, his election campaign contribution filings show.

Kelly taught history before entering politics. As a student of history, he may wish to ask himself why he would want to base today’s priorities on the past.

Brian Iler is chair of CommunityAIR.

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