Toronto’s Billy Bishop airport to host jets? Prospective PM takes on the ‘gatekeepers’

With Toronto's Pearson International Airport in total disarray, that airport being the world's worst for delays and fourth worst for flight cancellations, it should be of no surprise that the potential expansion of the inner city, island-located, Billy Bishop airport should come onto the political agenda.

The extension of the runway there and the consequential use of jet aircraft, within a few hundred metres of densely packed apartment buildings, has been considered before and rejected by the current government.

But that government is not exactly flavour of the month there, and a Conservative politician who could be the next prime minister is adamant that he will get the job done. Meanwhile, he is employing the sort of rhetoric that will raise the airport expansion debate to a whole new level - and not just in Canada.