Mirabel

This page is dedicated to Mirabel, a large airport built just outside Montreal in the early 1970’s at a cost of 500 million dollars. It opened in 1975, and on November 1, 2004, the remaining charter passenger flights in and out of Mirabel Airport were transferred to Trudeau (Dorval) Airport and the terminal was closed to passenger traffic.

                         AirOdyssey.net “Mirabel: The Airport Where The Future Is Past” Article                                       “It was meant to be a thing of beauty and prosperity. Now, it is nothing more than a white elephant.

             GCW Consulting “Montreal’s Airport Of The Future Closes to Passenger Flights” Article                 Nearly thirty years after its site was inaugurated in 1975, Montréal's Mirabel International Airport has closed its doors. What  comes next for the airport -- hailed as the "airport of the future" by Canadian Prime Minister Pierre-Elliott Trudeau when it was created -- remains uncertain. The airport's failure? The airport is located in a mostly rural area 60 km north of the city (decidedly in the direction of Ottawa) while its much-closer predecessor kept domestic and U.S. flights, effectively wiping out Montréal's viability as a hub.

                               Black Hole of Conservation “Pickering would be another Mirabel” Page                                     Now that the billion-dollar Mirabel Airport boondoggle has finally been admitted by everyone involved and the airport      was finally closed, our beloved politicians in Markham and surrounding areas like to make us believe a Pickering airport was the best thing that could ever happen to us people living close to it.

                                          Britannia Travel Forum “Like Tryweryn, like Mirabel” Article                                           In the early seventies the Canadian government of the day expropriated 126 square miles of prime farmland in Quebec , and 6.25 square miles were utilized to build the huge Mirabel airport. In the process, no less than 10,000 people were forced out of their homes! The airport was opened with a huge fanfare in the late seventies but it soon became evident that  it was a complete fiasco as it was vastly underused because of its distance outside metropolitan Montreal. True to the usual behavior of governments who have erred in their calculations, various Canadian governments have turned a blind eye to the dismal failure of the airport staring them in the face day after day, and now, nearly thirty years later, the closure of the airport is being effected with little fanfare.