Were you compared to a Nazi today?

The emails and Tweets are coming in, both for and against the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport. And some of them are definitely angry in the wake of the Toronto City Council’s decision to turn down the advice of their own City Solicitor and City Treasurer regarding a PILT fee to be paid by Air Canada and Porter passengers at the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport (see prior post “You can’t have your cake and eat it too, unless you’re on Toronto City Council” Apr. 4-13).

One airport user called the Council’s flip-flop vote and ultimate 19-18 decision “disgraceful”, while another said it was “sad”. A third pointed out that “even friends living at King’s Landing & opposed to @BBishopAirport in 2003 now embrace it.”

The veil of the internet allows people who hide behind Twitter handles like @catfish8888 to snipe with the protection of anonymity; if they want to attack some personally, they should tell us who they are. Someone who goes by the Twitter handle of “@btravennt” was tickled that Council “just voted against the gravy plane”. Not that the “gravy plane” line hadn’t been used previously by anti-airport lobbyists, but their creativity always brings a smile to my face just the same. This Tweeter came across my blog on the vote, and said that I “was pissed that the council voted against his sweetheart deal. Buck up and pay your taxes.”

This opponent’s Tweets continued with the claim that “councillors were not ‘playing games’ [when four Councillors switched their votes in the space of four minutes from being in favour of their City Staff’s advice to opposed,] but doing their fiduciary duty to protect the City.”

Given the strange way that a few people on Social Media can spin an issue off into left field, I asked this person if they were saying that the City Solicitor and City Treasurer were acting against their fiduciary obligations to the City by negotiating and recommending the BBTCA passenger PILT deal to their political masters in the first place. The City Staff proposal that would have BBTCA passengers pay the same $0.94/passenger fee that Pearson passengers pay to that airport’s host municipality?

@btravennt came back to defend City Staff, saying that I “have successfully bullied them into this bad deal for the city”. Now, this “Bully” line is the go-to epithet that the anti-airport group Community Air has used since at least 2009, when they suggested that the airport be re-named “Bully Bishop Airport”.

What @btravennt didn’t know, and probably doesn’t care about if he hates the TPA even half as much as it seems, is that it was the City’s own staff who wanted to negotiate this per passenger fee, rather than have both the concept and figure referred once again to a new independent Federal Dispute Advisory Panel. The TPA called for a PILT new panel in 2012 to provide the City and TPA advice on each and every TPA property (which heard evidence in January 2013), but the City Staff wanted the airport to be done separately. This was fine by all, and the most sensible approach given the airport’s importance to Toronto’s economy.

The single negative comment on our blog about last week’s City vote post came from someone with an IP address in Paris, France:

Resign. Move to another city. Going to continue to whine about your “volunteer work” then resign. That simple….You have all the bad luck….. Rob Ford this… Great Mayor that.. nobody listens to me… Tough. Move. Resign.

Ms. Keele was kind enough to leave her name and a real email, so I wrote back to ask why someone in Paris cared about a City of Toronto Council vote, and with such strong opinions, too. I’ve not heard back yet, but its only been a couple of days. Perhaps she’s on an extended tour of the gourgeous Renoirs and Monets at Musée de l’Orangerie, assuming its renovations are over at long last. Or maybe she’s surprised at the accuracy of simple DNS tools.

It seems that I’m having a hard time piercing the veneer of the haters, however. A Tweet goes something like: “pay your taxes, the deadbeat Toronto Port is more than just the airport”. I’ll reply with a reminder that the TPA has already paid 100% of the PILTs recommended by the independent 2009 Federal DAP Advisory Panel, which amounts to more than $13 million between 1999 and 2012.

But I often don’t hear back. The Twitter attacks from some of the airport’s opponents remind me of many of Billy Bishop VC’s kills. He’d swoop in from the sun, focus on a single plane, shoot it down from maybe 10 or 15 yards away, and then go into a quick dive to slip away and get back to base.

Or, better yet, I’ll ask what MPAC tax rate they recommend for the airport if Toronto Council would never actually allow a car plant, condo site or co-gen power plant to be built on the BBTCA site. Silence.

Sometimes, one will reply to my rhetorical condo development point: “What a load of BS! not one councillor has said that. Just pay your taxes!!!” It appears as though logic isn’t allowed to enter the discussion.

The simple point is that if Beaches-East York Councillor Mary-Margaret McMahon would never allow a condo project, gas power plant or Magna auto parts factory to be built where the current BBTCA site is, why does she believe it is fair to tax the site using MPAC industrial tax values, when Pearson is taxed on a per passenger fee basis? When I asked her on the telephone earlier today, she said she didn’t want to get into it, beyond making it clear that she definitely believes that you BBTCA passengers owe the additional ~$25 million in PILTs that MPAC is seeking, above and beyond the $5 million in cash PILTs that airport passengers have already forwarded to the City in keeping with the independent advice of the 2009 Federal DAP PILT Panel. If Councillor McMahon’s view prevails, this would mean an increase of between $4 – $11 to your existing $20 Airport Improvement Fees.

There’s obviously some work to do so as to better understand the logic behind this thinking, particularly when Torontonians are 89% in favour of the BBTCA. We would never let you built condos there, but want to tax you at that industrial rate just the same.

Since today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, I thought you should know just how venomous and lacking perspective some of the anti-airport / anti-TPA people are.

This excerpt of an email came to a few of us late last month from a BBTCA neighbour along the Queen’s Quay, who wrote to complain about the noise being generated by PCL’s construction of the BBTCA pedestrian tunnel and City of Toronto water and sewer main utility project. The TPA doesn’t get very many different complaints in a month (three people traditionally account for about 40% of all airport noise complaints), but I won’t soon forget this one:

I don’t think you realize how inhumane and evil you appear, in doing this. You think it’s all right to inflict this much pain, because you have legal authority to do so. Hitler’s troops had authority to kill innocent people. That didn’t make it right. There is no humanity in what you’re doing, and it’s slowly killing me.

MRM
(disclosure – the post, like all blogs, is an Opinion Piece and a personal view and does not reflect the views of the TPA board or staff, or the Federal government.)