Pearson Accountability Alliance

Who Generates the Demand?

For years, residents around Toronto Pearson have been told the same story: that the airport and its partners are simply “responding to demand” and are effectively agnostic to how much traffic passes over our homes.

On September 4, 2025, at St. Jude’s Church in Humber River–Black Creek, that story finally collapsed. NAV CANADA, the air navigation provider, admitted on the record that it does not drive growth at all. In doing so, it quietly stepped away from responsibility for the level of traffic and the harm it causes. The GTAA was left standing alone as the airport authority that deliberately pursues demand, while Transport Canada remained silent and refused to regulate it.

The Script: “We Just Serve Demand”

When communities ask why they face over 500 planes a day overhead, the answer is always the same:

• “We are simply responding to demand.”
• “These flights are driven by the market, not by us.”
• “We have a mandate to serve demand and keep the system moving.”

This script is used by all three major players in the Pearson system:

• GTAA – the airport operator;
• NAV CANADA – the air navigation provider; and
• Transport Canada – the federal regulator and lease holder.

The implication is that “demand” is something external, like the weather: unavoidable, neutral, and beyond anyone’s control. On September 4, 2025, that illusion broke.

The Moment the “Team” Fell Apart

At the St. Jude’s Church meeting, MP Judy Sgro hosted a closed-door session with representatives from the GTAA, NAV CANADA, and Transport Canada Toronto Region, all sitting at the same table with affected residents whose lives are dominated by aircraft noise and low-altitude overflights.

Under sustained questioning about who benefits from growth at Pearson, NAV CANADA’s representative Jonathan Bagg made a critical admission on the record. Bagg sat on one side of the table; opposite him were his colleague Ian Giesbrecht, GTAA officials, Transport Canada Toronto Region staff, and the local MP. No one challenged or qualified the statement.

With that single word — “agnostic” — NAV CANADA publicly severed itself from responsibility for:

• how many planes fly over surrounding neighbourhoods,
• how often they fly,
• how low they fly, and
• the noise and health harm communities suffer as a result.

NAV CANADA’s message to residents was effectively: “Don’t blame us for the level of traffic. We just move whatever the airport brings us.”

In practical terms, NAV CANADA described itself as a throughput machine. It designs and operates routes and procedures that enable traffic, but it disclaimed any role in deciding how much traffic there should be in the first place.

Winds Aloft, Secret Data & Throughput

When residents challenged the claim that “the wind” explains 95% east–west operations, Bagg introduced a new concept: winds aloft. He admitted that NAV relies on upper-air wind information that is not visible to the public.

The explanation was that this data is provided by airlines and that NAV CANADA “does not have a manner of publishing it.” Residents pointed out that if NAV can receive the data, NAV can also publish it — just as it publishes surface winds. The exchange confirmed that:

• NAV CANADA is using non-public wind inputs to justify runway choices; and
• The very data used to defend east–west operations is deliberately withheld from the people living under those flight paths.

When residents presented Environment Canada surface wind records showing entire months where winds were not a constraint, Bagg refused to engage with the analysis:

That refusal is not a technical nuance; it goes to the heart of accountability. Residents relied on the same surface wind data that underpins ICAO runway-selection practice, while NAV CANADA invoked non-public winds-aloft data that communities cannot see or independently verify. In plain language, the traffic pattern over people’s homes is being justified with secret inputs, rather than with the surface winds that are used everywhere else in the world to decide which runway is safe to use.

Conflict of Interest 101

Later, when pressed on responsibility for the overall volume of traffic, Bagg tried to step away from the consequences:

In the room, this landed as a shrug toward the GTAA sitting across from him: NAV CANADA claims it simply “moves” whatever the airport and airlines send. GTAA, in turn, points back to Transport Canada and the lease. The result is a closed loop of deniability where:

• NAV CANADA uses non-public wind data and throughput arguments to keep east–west operations in place;
• GTAA cites “demand” and “national connectivity” to justify growth; and
• No one at the table accepts responsibility for the health consequences of that traffic pattern on the ground.

In simple terms: the more flights there are, the more money NAV CANADA and the GTAA make — and the worse life becomes for the communities under the flight paths. The system rewards growth while assigning the same growth-chasing actors to look after the people being harmed. This is conflict of interest 101.

If NAV CANADA Is Agnostic, Who Drives Growth?

Once NAV CANADA publicly distances itself from growth, the question becomes unavoidable: who actually generates the “demand” that Pearson claims to serve?

In reality, “demand” at Pearson is not a mysterious force. It is the result of overlapping decisions by specific actors:

• Federal policy – open-skies agreements, tourism and trade targets, immigration and mobility policies that favour air travel through Toronto Pearson;
• Airlines – route planning, hub decisions, scheduling, and fleet choices that concentrate traffic at a single mega-hub rather than distributing it across the region;
• GTAA – long-term expansion plans, marketing of Pearson as a “global mega-hub,” infrastructure investments, and a business model centred on deliberately pursuing more traffic;
• NAV CANADA – designing the airspace and procedures that enable whatever volume the system chooses to send through Pearson; and
• Transport Canada – the regulator that could set limits, but instead chooses not to regulate demand or enforce meaningful environmental protections under the federal ground lease.

When you put these pieces together, the picture is clear: Pearson’s “demand” is created, amplified, and rewarded by policy and business choices. It is not something that “just happens.”

The GTAA’s Demand-Chasing Model

At the centre of this system is the GTAA, whose business model is to deliberately pursue demand. The GTAA:

• promotes Pearson as a dominant “mega-hub” for Southern Ontario and beyond;
• plans long-term growth from tens of millions of passengers to far higher volumes;
• designs terminals, gates, and runway usage for maximum throughput, not community protection;
• courts airlines and routes that increase connecting traffic and late-night operations; and
• benefits directly from higher movement counts through fees and commercial revenue.

The federal ground lease between the GTAA and the Government of Canada reinforces this growth-driven model in a structural way. It defines Pearson’s primary service area as a massive 75-kilometre catchment zone — an area covering nearly all of Southern Ontario. This lease-based catchment forces regional demand into a single facility, ensuring that traffic is concentrated at Pearson rather than distributed across multiple airports.

Thirty years ago, when the lease was signed, a 75-kilometre catchment might have looked reasonable on paper. But Southern Ontario has changed. The region has experienced an explosion of new housing and population growth, with formerly distant suburbs now dense cities in their own right. What might have seemed acceptable in the mid-1990s is unreasonable today for the millions of people now living inside that circle.

Airlines, Single Point of Failure & Engineered Demand

Airlines ultimately follow the incentives that the GTAA and federal policy create. When the airport is structured and marketed as a mega-hub with favourable conditions for high volume and tight scheduling, airlines concentrate their routes, fleets, and operations at a single location instead of distributing traffic across the region.

This creates a single point of failure for Southern Ontario: one airport, one airspace system, one set of runways, and one surrounding group of communities absorbing nearly all of the region’s aviation burden. If Pearson experiences delays, staff shortages, weather disruptions, or congestion, the entire system fails — and the recovery happens over the same neighbourhoods, hour after hour, day and night.

In a healthy, resilient transportation system, demand would be shared across multiple airports (Hamilton, Waterloo, London, Billy Bishop) and supported by modern rail options. Instead, because the GTAA deliberately pursues demand and federal policy rewards hub concentration, airlines naturally gravitate to Pearson — reinforcing a system where one airport becomes both the economic bottleneck and the public-health disaster zone.

The Missing Regulators: Toronto & York Region

One of the most striking absences in this story is the role of local public-health authorities. While NAV CANADA, GTAA, and Transport Canada point at each other, the bodies explicitly responsible for assessing community health risks around Pearson have treated chronic aircraft noise, sleep disruption, and air pollution as someone else’s problem.

Toronto Board of Health & Toronto Public Health

On May 5, 2025, the Toronto Board of Health unanimously adopted a motion on aircraft noise at Toronto Pearson — a motion that residents had helped draft for their councillor. The motion acknowledged the health consequences of excessive airplane noise, called for meaningful consultation with impacted communities, and urged the GTAA and Transport Canada to fund an independently overseen health study into the effects of Pearson’s operations.

Despite that formal recognition on the record, the follow-through was quietly outsourced. When concerns about chronic night-time overflights, crosswind operations, and noise-monitor gaps were brought directly to Toronto Public Health, staff acknowledged that the submissions would be read — but made it clear that they would not be engaging with the issue in any meaningful way.

In effect, the Board of Health acknowledged a health problem in principle, but the operational stance of the health authority was to deflect residents back to the airport and close the door to further engagement. A health risk affecting hundreds of thousands of people was treated as a correspondence management issue.

That combination — a formal motion on paper, followed by a commitment to “read but not respond” — is itself evidence of a public-health governance failure around Pearson.

York Region Public Health: Acknowledgement Without Action

In parallel to Toronto, York Region Public Health was formally notified that the Noise Exposure Forecast (NEF) underpinning its planning and environmental-health decisions is more than two decades out of date. In its correspondence, York Region confirmed that the GTAA had informed them that Transport Canada has initiated a review of the NEF system — meaning the Region is now explicitly aware that the federal dataset it has been relying on is under reconsideration.

Despite this, York Region repeatedly stated that it “does not have a specific mandate” to comment on the validity or age of the NEF, and referred residents back to the GTAA and Transport Canada — the same bodies whose inaction created the 25-year gap. In one response, York Region further suggested that “perceived noise can be subjective”, contradicting modern public-health guidance and decades of aircraft-noise research.

Residents made it clear that the NEF’s obsolescence has practical and legal impacts: misinformed land-use decisions, misdirected public-health surveillance, and the concealment of true exposure zones. York Region is now on documented notice that its environmental-health assessments have been based on outdated, federally prescribed data.

Despite being fully informed, the Region declined to initiate a situational assessment, declined to notify Transport Canada that a current NEF is required for regional planning, and declined to report the issue to Regional Council or the York Region Board of Health.

Note: Email exchanges with Toronto Public Health and York Region Public Health will be published in the Evidence Hub once personal names, email addresses, and other contact details have been redacted.

Primary Sources

The analysis on this page is grounded in primary documents that anyone can read and verify:

• 1. Transcript of the September 4, 2025 Meeting
  NAV CANADA’s “agnostic to growth” statements, the winds-aloft discussion, and the throughput admissions are captured in the follow-up email and full transcription from the community meeting at St. Jude’s Church:
  Download the September 4, 2025 Transcript (PDF)
• 2. GTAA Federal Ground Lease
  The GTAA’s mandate to accommodate capacity demands, the 75-kilometre catchment area, and the federal government’s oversight role are set out in the Pearson ground lease between the Crown and the GTAA:
  Download the Pearson Ground Lease (PDF)