Pearson Accountability Alliance

Open Letter to the Prime Minister: Canada’s Pearson Failure — Complicity, Consequences, and a Way Out

To: The Right Honourable Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada
Date: January 10, 2026
From: Pearson Accountability Alliance (PAA)

The “Pearson Strategy”: Expansion First, Accountability Never

For decades, federal policy has allowed Toronto Pearson International Airport to expand without meaningful limits while communities absorb the growing harm. The unwritten “Pearson Strategy” is straightforward: expand at all costs, obscure the health impacts, and hide behind the technical complexity of NAV CANADA’s airspace system.

The imbalance becomes obvious when we compare how Canada regulates a transport truck versus how we fail to regulate aircraft noise and operations:

The Moment the “Team” Narrative Fell Apart — September 4, 2025

On September 4, 2025, at St. Jude’s Church, the industry’s long-standing “team” narrative finally cracked. Representatives from NAV CANADA, the GTAA, Transport Canada, and our Member of Parliament were in the room when NAV CANADA publicly distanced itself from responsibility for Pearson’s growth.

Under sustained questioning about who benefits from growth at Pearson, NAV CANADA’s representative Jonathan Bagg stated that the company is “agnostic to growth… we don’t drive growth… we don’t have a mission to increase traffic in the sky.”

In the same exchange, NAV CANADA acknowledged that it financially benefits when traffic volumes are higher. No one at the table — not the GTAA, not Transport Canada, not the MP’s office — challenged, qualified, or corrected this. In that moment, the carefully maintained image of a unified “team” dissolved.

The Pre-Election Warning: You Knew Before You Asked for Our Votes

Prime Minister Carney, this crisis was not “inherited” in silence. You were already Prime Minister when I wrote to your office on March 11, 2025. I detailed evidence of “altered reports,” “lack of transparency,” and potential “breach of lease obligations” at the GTAA.

This was before the election. Your government had a clear choice: investigate the corruption warnings immediately, or sweep them under the rug. Your office chose to deflect.

Below is the full record of that correspondence.

You were notified. You responded. You did nothing. And then you went to the polls.

The Consequences: A System Impossible to Defend

• Around 500 flights per day over the same residential corridors;
• Night-time operations that conflict with global health guidance on sleep and noise;
• Noise monitors offline for months at a time, without clear public reporting;
• 1970s-era NEF models used to mask the real-world expansion of noise footprints;
• No meaningful regional distribution of aviation demand;
• Documented health impacts, including chronic sleep disruption, cardiovascular strain, and stress.

What is happening in the skies over Southern Ontario is not lawful, it is not justified, and it cannot be left unanswered.

What the Go-Around Pattern Reveals About System Instability

The instability shown in go-around data is not random turbulence in an otherwise healthy system. It is what happens when NAV CANADA’s staffing and routing decisions collide with the GTAA’s refusal to match traffic volumes to reality.

NAV CANADA’s Staffing and Training Collapse

NAV CANADA’s own decisions created a brittle system: controllers were cut, training units were reduced or closed, and recruitment pipelines stalled. Veteran controllers are being stretched across more traffic with less support, while trainees remain stuck in limbo. When the workforce is hollowed out, the margin for error disappears and go-arounds become a routine side-effect of overload.

Pandemic-Era Route Concentration

Instead of rebuilding resilience after the pandemic, NAV CANADA doubled down on concentrated routing: fewer active runways, fewer arrival streams, and highly compressed “arrival banks.” This forces too many aircraft into narrow windows and over the same neighbourhoods, creating the high-workload conflicts that trigger go-arounds in the first place.

GTAA’s Refusal to Match Capacity to Reality

At the same time, GTAA has refused to meaningfully reduce traffic volume or smooth demand. The airport continues to pursue pre-pandemic throughput on a post-pandemic, understaffed ATC system. That is a policy choice, not an accident.

• Safety erosion: As go-arounds become more frequent, the statistical risk of a serious separation or runway event increases.
• Community health: Every go-around is a high-thrust climb over populated areas, adding avoidable noise and emissions to neighbourhoods that are already over-exposed.

In other words: the instability shown in these tables is not “just how aviation works.” It is the direct result of NAV CANADA’s staffing and routing decisions, and GTAA’s willingness to keep pushing volume into a system that cannot safely and fairly handle it.

The Way Out: What a Responsible Federal Response Looks Like

None of this is inevitable. The federal government has the tools — legal, financial, and policy — to stop treating Pearson’s expansion as untouchable and to align operations with basic public-health standards.

• Immediate protections: Impose a mandatory night curfew from 23:00 to 07:00, with only narrow safety exemptions, and cap daily movements until staffing and monitoring are demonstrably safe.
• Real transparency and oversight: Restore independent noise monitoring, require continuous public reporting of go-arounds and runway incidents, and treat chronic ATI obstruction as a governance failure, not a paperwork issue.
• Structural change, not spin: Commit to regional distribution of demand and accelerated High-Speed Rail so Pearson is no longer treated as the only option for Southern Ontario.

These are not radical asks. They are the minimum steps a government would take if it truly accepted that the people under Pearson’s flight paths are entitled to the same safety, rest, and health protections as everyone else.

On behalf of residents living under Pearson’s flight paths and communities across Southern Ontario,

Pearson Accountability Alliance (PAA)
Fabio Ovettini, Founder
info@pearsonaccountabilityalliance.org
pearsonaccountabilityalliance.org

Take Action: Write to the Prime Minister

It is time to bypass the “team” that failed us. Send this letter directly to Prime Minister Carney and Transport Minister MacKinnon.

Step 2: Turn this open letter into your own message