Mirabel airport taxiing for
final takeoff
The Globe and Mail - October 12, 2004
By BERTRAND MAROTTE
MONTREAL -- On Oct. 31, the last passenger flight is scheduled to take off from Mirabel International Airport, marking the end for a monument to grandiose, unfulfilled dreams.
Opened with great fanfare in 1975 as the airport of the 21st century -- in the bright afterglow of Expo 67, with the Olympic Games around the corner and in a spirit of unbridled optimism for Montreal's economic future -- Mirabel will go out with barely a whimper.
Even before its unveiling, concerns were raised as to Mirabel's ability to live up to its billing as the "gateway" to air travel in Canada.
The sleek, black-glass passenger terminal -- about 50 kilometres northwest of Montreal -- has for years been a cavernous, near-empty space, with only modest charter passenger and cargo traffic.
The foreign media have characterized it as "one of the great white elephants of aeronautics history."
There was to be capacity for up to 50 million passengers a year; at its peak Mirabel had only 2.8 million.
"It was doomed to fail almost from the get-go," says James Cherry, head of Aéroports de Montréal (ADM), the non-profit authority that runs Mirabel and Pierre Elliot Trudeau International Airport on the West Island of Montreal.
"It had a couple of strikes against it right from the beginning," he said, namely the decision to split flights between Mirabel and Trudeau (then known as Dorval), and the failure to build the necessary road and rail links from remote Mirabel to Montreal.
Jacques Roy, professor of transport management at HEC Montréal business school, says a set of assumptions made by planners in the heady 1960s never came close to panning out. "There were forecasts based on 1960s economic optimism" and on the airline fundamentals of the day, he said. Those factors included noisy, environmentally unfriendly jets better suited to remote runways away from urban centres, as well as planes coming from Europe that didn't have the range to fly directly into places such as Toronto.
Jets became quieter, cleaner and capable of longer ranges -- thus able to bypass Mirabel altogether. And there was big lobbying by Montreal's business community, as well as some residents, to keep Dorval -- a 20-minutes car ride from downtown Montreal -- open to domestic traffic, Mr. Roy said.
Meanwhile, 1976 brought not only the Olympics but the election of the separatist Parti Québécois, which dealt a blow to the province's economic fortunes, and prompted an exodus of residents and corporate head offices.
Rival Toronto continued to steal Montreal's thunder, with its airport reaping benefits and thriving.
Montreal has bounced back economically over the past few years, but in a modest fashion that belies the grand dreams of 30 years ago.
There is another bitter legacy: the expropriation of more than 36,000 hectares of prime agricultural land from 3,000 property owners to make way for Mirabel, at huge expense and amid allegations of political patronage and corruption.
ADM is entertaining a series of proposals from a handful of bidders for alternate uses of the modernist passenger terminal. Some of the ideas being talked about include a casino, manufacturing space, a shopping/entertainment complex and a training centre.
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