Who's profiting from Bill 110 to expand Billy Bishop airport? We followed the money.

When most people picture Billy Bishop airport, they imagine one place owned by one entity. It is not. It is three separate things, owned by three separate parties.

This is important, because Bill 110 only changes one of them. And it is not the one most people would guess.

Every dollar of terminal revenue starts the same way. A passenger walks in, pays a $29 airport fee, buys a coffee, browses duty-free, takes the shuttle. Multiply that by 2 million passengers a year today, and 10 million tomorrow if Bill 110 passes.

The question is where the dollar ends up. The answer is four layers deep.

Here is the question Bill 110 doesn't answer: where do the extra 8 million passengers per year actually go?

Right now, Billy Bishop sees about 2 million passengers a year, roughly 5,500 a day. Bill 110 paves the way for 10 million a year, around 27,000 a day. That's a 5x increase in human traffic dropped into one of the most congested corners of any North American city.

The infrastructure that handles those passengers today is:

This is not an oversight. Bill 110 simply does not contain a plan for getting passengers to and from the expanded airport. The province has not published one. When asked, Transportation Minister Sarkaria's office has not responded.

An airport is not just runways. It is everything around it.

Bill 110 builds the runway. It does not build the roads, the transit, or the emergency response. Those are problems for someone else, later.

Downtown Toronto is home to roughly 240,000 residents and over half a million jobs packed into 16.6 square kilometres. By population density, this is one of the most densely populated places in North America. And the airport sits at the edge of it.

The Bathurst Quay neighbourhood, the closest residential community to the airport, is 120 metres from the runway. Four hundred feet. That is shorter than a CN Tower observation deck visit.

Inside that 120-metre buffer, and the blocks immediately behind it, you'll find:

This is not an industrial zone. It is not a rural runway. It is a real residential neighbourhood with elementary schools, daycares, playgrounds, seniors, and a wading pool, all within a few hundred metres of where Ford wants jets to take off and land.

The air the kids are already breathing.

In 2024, scientists at the University of Toronto's Transportation and Air Quality lab completed a three-year direct measurement study of air pollutants in the Bathurst Quay community. Their conclusion was specific: Billy Bishop Airport is the primary source of ultrafine particles in this community when the wind blows from the south, where the airport is located.

The study found that the highest ultrafine particle spikes were measured directly next to schools and children's playgrounds. Ultrafine particles are small enough to cross from lung tissue into the bloodstream. They are linked to cardiovascular disease, cognitive impairment in developing children, and premature death.

The noise that already breaks the law.

Toronto's municipal bylaw establishes 70 decibels as the residential noise limit. By PortsToronto's own monitoring, Billy Bishop regularly exceeds that. By Transport Canada's own Noise Exposure Forecast standards, the airport is already louder than the federal threshold above which residential development should not be permitted.

The community already exists. The airport is already too loud for it under federal standards. The bylaws are already being violated.

And the plan is to add jets.

The lake they want to pave.

Toronto Port Authority CEO RJ Steenstra confirmed to the Globe and Mail that the runway extension would require up to 900 metres of new landmass added into Lake Ontario. The new runway would be roughly 2 kilometres long, about the same distance as Yonge to Bathurst on the subway.

This is not a sketch on a napkin. The Port Authority's own CEO confirmed the number on the record. Most of the fill goes into the lake on the western side of Toronto Island.

The housing it will block.

A 2014 report concluded that an expanded Billy Bishop flight path would cap building heights on the western edge of the Port Lands at roughly 15 storeys. The towers currently planned for that precinct range from 19 to 46 storeys. Across the harbour, Waterfront Toronto is planning Ookwemin Minising, a new district designed to hold 12,000 homes.

Bill 110 puts those plans at risk. Ford has been explicit about it: "They want to block the runway, so they're building tall apartments and condos. That's not going to happen." The Premier said that out loud, on the record, about Toronto's housing plans.

The emergency response that doesn't exist.

The pedestrian tunnel under the harbour is too narrow for fire trucks. Emergency vehicles still have to cross via the 121-metre ferry. Today this handles 2 million passengers a year. The expansion target is 10 million.

There is no current plan to widen the tunnel, no plan for an emergency vehicle bridge, and no published fire and EMS response time analysis. Just more jets, more passengers, more cars, and the same narrow tunnel.

Two days before this investigation was published, Toronto Pearson International Airport broke ground on the largest airport expansion in Canadian history.

It is called Pearson LIFT. The first phase is a $3 billion investment. The full program will run for a decade. When complete, Pearson will handle 65 million passengers a year, up from 47.3 million in 2025. That is 18 million more passengers per year.

Here is the comparison nobody is putting side by side:

Pearson's expansion is already underway. It is paid for. It has a published plan. It will add more than twice the passenger capacity Billy Bishop is proposing, and it can absorb that traffic because it sits on a regional highway network, a rail corridor, and an existing transit line.

Billy Bishop's expansion has none of those things. The bill exists. The infrastructure does not.

If the problem is regional air capacity, Pearson is the answer. Bill 110 isn't about capacity. It's about clearing a path for a specific terminal owner to grow a specific asset.

If you have read this far, you probably have questions. So did we. Here are the four most common pushbacks, and the honest answers to each.

Bill 110 is not a one-off. It is part of a pattern that has played out across Ford's time in office. Same lobbyists, same beneficiaries, same losers.

If anyone tries to tell you this is a coincidence, here are the receipts.

So that is the story. Three layers of ownership. One foreign bank at the top. The same playbook running for seven years. A new law to hide the paper trail.

Now your name on a list.

Bill 110 is in second reading at the Ontario Legislature right now. Debate is ongoing. If enough people sign, MPPs notice. Petitions matter most when they are big and they are early. This is both.