Mirabel is a lot like communism

Sophia Ir

Officially open for business in 1975, and expected to be under construction until 2025, Mirabel airport called upon the talent and ingenuity of famous architects. Papineau-Gérin-Lajoie and was hailed as an architectural victory of its time. An icon of the international style, prominent during the modern era of architecture, Mirabel is quite literally an ethereal, glass box stationed on sturdy concrete, an angular jungle of horizontal and vertical lines.

The city of Mirabel, 60 kilometers North-West of Montreal, would have been home to the world’s largest international airport, with a planned surface area made of glass, concrete and steel, projected to span close to 400 square kilometers.

But today, there is no chatter to be found in the halls of the airport, no one rolling overstuffed luggage, not a soul searching for a departure gate. Today, Mirabel is void of any commercial airline flights. The activity in what could have been one of the world’s largest international airports has for 6 years been reduced to cargo transportation and Bombardier factories.

In 1969, following the success of Montreal’s Expo ’67 and a tourist boom, the Canadian government announced plans for the construction of two major projects. The idea was to compensate for air traffic flow that New York, Boston, and Toronto would not be able to handle by creating additional city airports in Pickering, Ontario, and Mirabel, Quebec.

In many ways, the plans for airport construction in Pickering and Mirabel are similar: they both featured disjointed relationships between the federal and provincial governments. But while the citizens of Pickering managed to prevent the construction of an airport destined to fail, the people of Quebec weren’t so lucky.

Experts agreed that an expansion of both Dorval and Toronto airports would have been cheaper and better, but the federal government dropped the plans because of public outcry over noise pollution from residents of neighboring and more populated municipalities Dorval and Mississauga. Clearly, this was a bid for votes.

And so began the expropriating movement.

The federal government seized 18,000 acres in Pickering and 97,000 in Mirabel from local farmers (3,500 of which were from Mirabel), using a home-for-home compensation plan. Owners were given money equivalent to the value of their houses, and not their land acreage, meaning it did next to nothing for local residents with larger farms.

This is where the Quebec government becomes clearly distinct from its Ontarian counterpart. Quebec openly accepted the Mirabel project, and promised to construct highways linking Mirabel airport to Montreal and Ottawa. Conversely, Ontario, responding to demands from environmentalists and Pickering residents, refused to provide services such as access roads. To this day, though the project did not initially go through, the Canadian government has not returned expropriated Pickering land.

Unfortunately, both federal and provincial governments severely underestimated the amount of time and money it would take to build the airport and the infrastructure linking it to nearby cities. Publications across Canada, such as The Rotarian, were calling it Montreal’s white elephant by Mirabel’s inauguration year of 1975, describing it as overly costly and far behind ideal construction schedule (can you say Olympic Stadium?).

Flawed predictions by the federal government are another major factor in the failure of Mirabel. It was assumed that the growth of Montreal would only increase exponentially, with a projection of 17 million passengers per year passing through the Mirabel airport. However, due to a financial shift to Toronto and linguistic issues forcing businesses to move further west, by 1991, Toronto airport was receiving over double the amount of passengers per year than Mirabel.

But the government of Canada isn’t the only one to blame; only 60 kilometers of the Mirabel-Ottawa highway were actually built, and a mere 23 kilometers exist for the Mirabel-Montreal’s autoroute 13, the only evidence to show for Quebec’s promise to build infrastructure connecting Mirabel to other cities. The TRRAMM, a high speed railway system to be established between Montreal and Mirabel, never even passed the initial planning stage.

Naturally, despite high expectations for the newly built Mirabel, and the anticipated saturation of Dorval predicted by the federal government, Montrealers continued to demand flights from the latter for simple convenience; as there was no easy or cheap way of getting to and from Mirabel, the provincial government was forced to intervene on the airport’s behalf and shuffle all international flights to the Mirabel airport while keeping Dorval open for domestic and trans-border flights. This 2-airport system made Mirabel seem comparatively unattractive, and with good reason. Dorval is 20 kilometers away from Montreal, while Mirabel is 60. That’s three times the distance – who wouldn’t prefer Dorval?

Now the issue with a 2-airport system is that by the 1970’s, international airlines were merging and concentrating departures, arrivals, and connections to one airport. The constant shuttling of flights between Mirabel and Dorval resulted in airline shifts to either Toronto or Vancouver that kept travel business away from Montreal, a fact acknowledged by Quebec officials as early as 1977, but was (again, not surprisingly) ignored by the federal government.

It took 15 years for the government of Canada to privatize Montreal’s airport system; in 1992, Aeroports de Montréal was created, a self-declared not-for-profit corporation that has, not surprisingly, managed to do a better job handling Mirabel and Dorval than the government. Realistically, it became evident that the 2-airport system would have to be reduced to one, a fact that was recognized by the ADM, who, in 2004, closed Mirabel to commercial flights, bringing a larger focus on freight to the airport.

Now defunct and empty, with cargo for passengers and Bombardier test flights the only new planes to brandish the tarmac, the once grand Mirabel sits abandoned, still the white elephant it was in 1977.

Like communism, Mirabel, in theory, could have really worked. A super airport to cushion increased demand in air traffic? Great idea. Factor in a location far away from the city core to reduce residential disruptions and municipality pollution, and you have yourself an airport that’s swell and dandy for everyone.

But, similar to the failed applications of communism, Mirabel’s demise occurred in the hands of government officials, whose poor planning and misdirection resulted in a mash-up of flawed forecasts, angry and noise-disturbed residents, and an architecturally brilliant edifice that is on what can be assumed to be an indefinite hiatus from the public.