A Bumpy Landing: Airports and the Making of Jet Age

by

Bret Joel Edwards

A Thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of History University of

© Copyright by Bret Joel Edwards 2017

Abstract

A Bumpy Landing: Airports and the Making of Jet Age Canada

Bret Joel Edwards

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of History

2017

This dissertation examines changes at and around Canada’s major airports in the early jet age. It traces how airports in major Canadian cities evolved into mass transport hubs between the 1950s and 1980s and also materialized as complex technical systems that connected aviation to wider contemporary issues. During this period these airports assumed a dual role, operating in the background to help move people and planes and emerging at key times to occupy public consciousness. Historical changes there can thus help explain how airports grew increasingly visible as fixed, but active, modern infrastructure that both facilitated jet age mobility and were deeply embedded in the postwar order.

This dissertation links the transformation of major airports to the rise of mass air travel, postwar change, and federal stewardship. Aviation’s rapid growth and technological advances beginning in the 1950s invariably transformed how these airports looked, worked, and were experienced by different groups of people. Various central developments in postwar Canada beyond aviation also migrated to these airports and made them more visible as public infrastructure that were both imagined in the national

ii sphere and part of globalization. Moreover, airports were federally operated until the early 1990s and thus a state infrastructure project. The federal government and its partners used a combination of anticipatory and reactive strategies to manage airports that emphasized national interests, but also cared about cities and capital. This approach blended multiple scales and dynamics and constantly shifted as conditions changed, generating problems and tensions along the way that shaped the particular trajectory of airport development between the 1950s and 1980s.

Taken together, this dissertation strengthens and advances historical knowledge about airports and aviation in Canada. It also contributes to the history of and mobility and its relationship to social and cultural change. Lastly, it contributes to the political, social, and cultural history of postwar Canada by bringing air travel into the narrative. In so doing, it shows how airports helped to make jet age Canada, a process that encompassed the local, national, and global arena and stretched well into the late twentieth century.

iii Acknowledgements

I’ll just start by saying that I’m no aviation enthusiast. In fact, I’m not fond of flying, so airports aren’t exactly my favourite place either. But that hasn’t stopped me from spending more time than I ever thought possible thinking and writing about them. Go figure. I could never, ever have written this dissertation without many different forms of generous support. Financially, I owe an enormous thanks to the Jeanne Armour fund and am also appreciative of support from the University of Toronto graduate fellowship, University College Canadian Studies fellowship, and Dictionary of Canadian Biography public history fellowship, the latter of which has provided some timely late funding. Meanwhile, librarians and archivists at Library and Archives Canada, the City of Vancouver Archives, the City of Richmond Archives, and the City of Toronto Archives were extremely helpful and pointed me in fruitful directions. I also can’t forget the Canadian Association of Air Traffic Controllers, which generously opened its private archives in Ottawa to me. I’m very fortunate it did. I owe intellectual debts to many people as well. Early in graduate school, seminars with Elspeth Brown and Paul Rutherford piqued my interest in space and place and in cultural theory, themes that pop up in this dissertation. Once I began writing, Caleb Wellum and Sarah Tracy read several of my chapters and gave thoughtful feedback that kept the wheels turning. Now at the end, I want to thank Tim Sayle and Rebecca Woods for coming on board as internal reviewers, and Dimitry Anastakis for agreeing to serve as my external reviewer. Along the way, I have been very lucky to have Michelle Murphy and Sean Mills on my committee. Each has offered so much to this project by challenging me to sharpen my analysis and consider the stakes of my topic from multiple angles. Finally, Steve Penfold has been a pretty awesome supervisor. He has not forgotten that grad school can sometimes be hard, and has made time to listen to and deal with my many questions, issues, and concerns even when he probably didn’t want to. He has never hesitated to tell me what he really thinks (even though, as he would add, it’s my dissertation and I can do what I want). And he has believed in me and in this project from day one, reminding me of that when I most needed to hear it. For all that and more, thanks Steve.

iv My friends, meanwhile, have helped me get out of my head and away from my dissertation, something that is critical for surviving graduate school. I’ve met many wonderful people at the University of Toronto while completing this degree who have enriched my life. I clicked with Jared Toney and Peter Mersereau almost immediately, and they are responsible for some of my fondest memories of the last few years. Beth Jewett always made time to have tea and chat about all things life and became a great friend in the process. Meaghan Marian, too, has been there at some important times and is one of the strongest people I know. I also want to thank Dale Barbour, Seth Bernstein, Brandon Corcoran, Rachel Freedman-Stapleton, Jodi Giesbrecht, Nadia Jones-Gailani, Brandon King, Ryan Masters, Jonathan McQuarrie, Julia Rady-Shaw, Lindsay Sidders, Lilia Topouzova, and Mike Wilcox, with whom I have shared many laughs, and the odd karaoke song or three, on more than a few occasions. Anand Bhatt, Doug Jones, Steve Joza, and Jeff Weingarten were there before graduate school and I always enjoy catching up with them. And Jesse Morimoto has been and will continue to be my lifelong pal. It’s not a stretch to say that things could have turned out differently if not for some other special people. Sylvia Gaspari has witnessed the latter stages of this project. She has patiently endured my long work hours, especially towards the end, but has also reminded me to switch off now and then, offering me in the process the kind of love, affection, and emotional support that only she can. She makes me smile each and every day, and I’m incredibly grateful for how much she has lightened my life. Marjorie Predovich, my Baba, has been the rock of my family and a constant source of comfort over the years. And my sister, Jaymi, too, deserves thanks for often asking why I’m still in school, and thus motivating me to finish sooner than later. Finally, I dedicate this dissertation to my parents, Mary Ann and Dave. I don’t know where I would be without them. I really don’t. They have been extraordinary role models whose endless love, generosity, and encouragement have shaped me in innumerable ways to this day. Through their words and deeds, they have inspired me to keep plowing ahead, a philosophy that is particularly helpful when writing a dissertation. I am who I am in no small part because of them, and never fail to draw strength from knowing that they are in my corner, no matter what.

v Table of Contents

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….iv

List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………....vii

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter 1: “The problems which now exist…are self-inflicted”: Canada’s Airports, Megaproject Development, and Jet Age Planning to the 1970s……………….21

Chapter 2: Noisy Neighbours: Airports and Communities in the 1960s and 1970s………………………………………………………………………………...... 79

Chapter 3: “We’re cracking up down here”: The Airport Workplace, Labour Alienation, and Language Politics in the 1970s………………………………..129

Chapter 4: In But Not Of Canada: Airports, Citizenship, and Border Security in the 1970s and 1980s………………………………………………………………………...185

Chapter 5: “There are areas that have to be covered that have not been covered”: Airport Security and Surveillance, Air Terrorism, and Risk Prevention in the 1970s and 1980s………………………………………………………………………...236

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...288

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………295

vi List of Figures

Figure 1: Stairs to observation deck at Vancouver International Airport, 1959…………35

Figure 2: Imagining the future airport as congestion-free……………………………….46

Figure 3: Downtowner Motor Inn advertisement………………………………………..50

Figure 4: Male expertise and the jet age mega-airport…………………………………..62

Figure 5: Mirabel airport – and – firmly embedded within the global circuitry of jet travel……………………………………………………………………..70

Figure 6: Mirabel airport Phase I access road…………………………………………...75

Figure 7: Vancouver International Airport, the proposed parallel runway, and surrounding environs, including Richmond………………………………………...94

Figure 8: Acoustical Engineering employee measures noise on top of mobile “Noise Measurement Vehicle” near Vancouver International Airport………………….97

Figure 9: Newspaper anti-noise cartoon……………………………………………….110

Figure 10: John and Alice Tiles at their Richmond home as an airplane passes Overhead……………………………………………………………………………….111

vii Introduction

In the mid-1980s, Toronto-Pearson International Airport’s Operations Control Centre, located in the basement of Terminal One, was abuzz with activity.1 Surrounded by phones, radios, and television screens, the Centre’s staff of 24 people received around 200 calls a day. By this time Pearson had become the country’s primary air hub, handling almost 15 million passengers annually, and staff were aware that any situation that reached their office had to be dealt with swiftly to keep the airport running smoothly. They were trained to handle everything from crashes to hijackings and bomb threats to “complaints about cold toilet seats in the terminal washrooms and heart attacks” and coordinated response efforts using the vast technological resources at their disposal. In short, while hidden deep in the basement, the Control Centre staff were Pearson’s “trouble-shooters”, always keeping watch in the airport’s “nerve-centre” and emerging from there to manage specific incidents.2 They were only really visible, in other words, when Pearson experienced a disruption. Pearson’s Operations Control Centre constitutes a useful metaphor for this dissertation on airports in jet age Canada. Airports, too, emerged as a critical part of a larger system, in this case a mass air transport network that stretched across Canada and around the world by the late twentieth century. Moreover, like the Centre’s staff, airports often hid in plain sight as vital elements of this network, but could also suddenly materialize, grow more visible, or see their role dramatically shift during moments of internal or external crisis. This dissertation uses this premise as a springboard to examine changes to and around Canada’s airports. Airports evolved into hubs of mass air travel as air travel’s popularity soared in the jet age. They also materialized as complex technical systems that connected aviation to wider contemporary issues. Airports thus assumed a role that was somewhat analogous to Pearson’s Operations Control Centre: they simultaneously operated in the background to help move people and planes and emerged at key times to occupy public consciousness. Airports, in other words, were both fixed

1 Formerly Malton Airport until 1958, Toronto International Airport was renamed Lester B. Pearson International Airport in 1984. I will refer to it simply as Toronto or, on occasion and when applicable, Toronto-Pearson, since almost the entirely of my analysis concerns the period after the name was first changed. 2 “Our airport trouble-shooters handle 200 crises a day”, Toronto Star, 11 November 1984, A18.

1 and active infrastructure that became embedded within the nation’s political, social, and cultural fabric. To explain this radical transformation, this dissertation focuses on the jet age, specifically the period between the 1950s and 1980s, a time of rapid growth and significant advances in air travel. I situate airport development in relation to the rise of mass air travel, postwar change, and federal stewardship. On the one hand, places like Pearson’s Operations Control Centre were products of the jet age. In the early 1950s a commercial variation of the jet engine was developed, a development that enabled passenger planes to fly faster and more powerfully by producing greater thrust from jet propulsion. Air travel officially entered the jet age in the late 1950s led by first- generation jets like the ; they were followed in the ensuing decades by successively larger and more powerful aircraft. Jets fundamentally reshaped the possibilities of movement; they were faster and safer than older aircraft, carried more people, and could fly longer distances before refueling, and over time they became cheaper travel options. These changes combined to generate meteoric growth over the following decades; between 1946 and 1975, for example, annual passenger traffic in Canada jumped from 836,000 to 25.6 million3. As this dissertation will show, these changes invariably transformed airports into mass transport hubs during the late twentieth century. But only some airports actually had an Operations Control Centre, or at least one as sophisticated as Pearson’s. Indeed, some airports changed far more substantively than others during the jet age. As air travel became more popular, specific cities, like Toronto, handled the majority of air and passenger traffic that flowed through Canada, becoming major domestic and international aviation centres in the process. With that in mind, this dissertation focuses mainly on airports in eight major national cities – Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Halifax, Calgary, , and Ottawa – that evolved into the nation’s air hubs and came to feel the effects of the jet age most acutely.4 This is not to

3 For 1960-69 statistics, see Statistics Canada, Civil Aviation (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, Transport Division, 1969), annual issue. For 1970-75, see Statistics Canada, Air Carrier Operations in Canada (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, Transport Divison, 1975), October-December annual issue. 4 Gander International Airport in Newfoundland represents a special case. Initially one of Canada’s primary jet age airports as a primary trans-Atlantic refueling stop, its role arguably declined from the 1960s onwards as newer jets, able to fly further without refueling, bypassed it before or after crossing the ocean. I

2 say that the state did not care about smaller and quieter airports or that these airports failed to transform in some ways themselves. However, as this dissertation will show, major airports experienced far greater change that played out across multiple scales and drew in not only the state but other actors as well. Therefore, I seek to explore how a series of seemingly banal developments in the age of mass air travel – more planes in the air, many more people in those planes, and greater technological advancement across the system – shifted and enlarged, literally and figuratively, the place of a key group of airports in late twentieth century Canada. At the same time, however, a host of broader developments beyond aviation made Canada’s major airports more visible between the 1950s and 1980s. As mentioned, Pearson’s Operations Control Centre staff was trained to handle security breaches and incidents of air terrorism and violence, a more pressing issue by this time. Depending on the calls that came in, they might also have had to field complaints from local residents unhappy with jet noise over their homes, or dispatch people to detain international travellers suspected of entering the country illegally, or even navigate labour stoppages that had national and even international repercussions, particularly during the 1976 pilots’ strike over French in air traffic control towers. The themes that defined these issues – noise, technology, and modernity; labour alienation and bilingualism; immigration, borders, and citizenship; and security, risk, and terrorism – were all central developments in postwar Canada that gradually migrated to airports undergoing the most growth and change. This dissertation reveals how each of these issues fundamentally shaped and was shaped by changes to and around airports, linking airport development not only to wider political, social, and cultural change in the local and national arena, but also to conversations involving Canada’s place in the world. As such, many of the calls that reached the Centre helped to pull Toronto-Pearson and other airports out of the background, transforming them into very public infrastructure that were both imagined in the national sphere and part of globalization. The people stationed at Pearson’s Operations Control Centre were also federal employees with the Department of Transport, and their presence reflected the

discuss Gander on occasion in this dissertation, but do not conceive it in the same way I do other major airports that received more air and passenger traffic over this period and whose role grew accordingly.

3 government’s enormous postwar involvement in airports. Not long after the end of the Second World War, the federal government had assumed ownership of most Canadian airports, as well as the responsibility for airport building, maintenance, upgrades, and expansions, all of which grew more urgent and became more politicized as time passed.5 Airports were thus a state infrastructure project, and different groups like the Centre’s staff became key parts of it. This dissertation illustrates different episodes of the state’s airport project, one that was governed by the pressures of bringing airport infrastructures into the jet age and fashioning them to the postwar order. Federal officials and bureaucrats largely took responsibility for airports, but they got help from planners, engineers, and workers, as well as provincial and municipal institutions, each of which participated at different points in this project. Together they pursued a combination of anticipatory and reactive strategies towards airports, working to bring them into the jet and keep them sustainable going forward, while also grappling with air travel’s rapid growth and various postwar changes that affected airport development in some way. The various chapters in this dissertation elucidate the problems and tensions that resulted from this dual approach. The state developed major airports with national interests in mind, but also cared about cities and capital. When Pearson’s Operations Control Centre staff was told about a bomb threat, they might have perceived it as a challenge to federal authority and a danger to public safety; national security was threatened by incidents like these. At the same time, they might have considered the delays and congestion that could ensue at Pearson, around Toronto, and across the national and international air transport network simply from grounding planes and holding people longer in the terminal until the threat abated. These different concerns reflected the state’s approach to the jet age airport project. On a basic level the federal government and its partners saw airports as mechanisms of state power and modern infrastructure of mobility. Airports had to operate effectively as people and plane movers to showcase Canada’s technological excellence and commitment to the jet age, while also constituting environments where federal authority was absolute. But at a deeper level these concerns dovetailed with the knowledge that jet

5 Elliot J. Feldman, The Politics of Canadian Airport Development (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983), chapter 1.

4 age airports were fast becoming urban hubs that were part of capitalism, tied to their host cities and to wider economies through their emerging role as conduits for the aerial circulation of people, goods, and things. As such, airport infrastructure breakdowns and other interruptions could reverberate more broadly and harm local and global supply chains. The chapters here show how the state’s jet age airport project contained both of these ideological signposts, where different imperatives that crossed multiple scales shaped airport strategies to varying degrees. Taken together, then, this dissertation has four arguments. First, in jet age Canada a key group of major national airports came to look, work, and be experienced and understood differently in a variety of ways in relation to mass air travel and broader forces of change. Second, the process of airport development was a state project, one that was driven by both anticipatory and reactive strategies as conditions constantly shifted. Third, the state’s jet age airport project blended multiple scales and dynamics, framed in some ways by the nation, but also sometimes by cities, capital, and the world, forces that were often in tension but never mutually exclusive. And lastly, these airports grew increasingly visible as modern infrastructure that both facilitated jet age mobility and were deeply embedded in the postwar order.

Airports, Infrastructure and Mobility The common thread running through this dissertation’s arguments and chapters are the themes of infrastructure and mobility. Infrastructure has become a popular topic of scholarship in recent years. Many scholars have begun to conceive infrastructure as an active and unstable socio-technical system rather than a thing that is simply built and maintained over time and largely hidden in the background.6 I draw from these works to define infrastructure as a system that cuts across nature, society, and technology and changes as it interacts and is intertwined with larger systems and processes that also change. This idea gestures to established historiographies of science and technology that

6 Paul Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems,” in Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg, eds., Modernity and Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 185-226.

5 stress the social production of technical systems.7 At the same time, it paves the way for a closer look at the specific meanings and practices that shape and animate infrastructure in relation to broader organizational and social webs in order to show how infrastructure is “fundamentally relational” and never “a thing stripped of use”.8 This scholarly intervention represents a form of what Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star call “infrastructural inversion”, which is to “look closely at and arrangements that…tend to fade into the woodwork” and to recognize “the depths of interdependence of technical networks and standards, on the one hand, and the real work of politics and knowledge production, on the other”.9 In this dissertation, I offer an infrastructural inversion with respect to airports to show how they constituted what Gillian Fuller and Ross Harley call “metastable” urban forms, or places that constantly change while appearing the same, in jet age Canada.10 How infrastructure forms, grows, and fails helps explain why airports became more visible at this time. Generally speaking, infrastructure has to be built for the moment but also maintained and sustained into the future, an approach that David Ribes and Thomas A. Finholt call the “long now”.11 The long now is largely a technocratic enterprise, but it can also be imbued with politico-national significance. As Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox argue, states use infrastructural projects like roads to make its work more visible to its citizens and remind them that the state contributes significantly to nation building. Along the way, the public becomes invested in the project and develops infrastructure “enchantment”, attracted by the promise of social and economic advancement that the project offers.12 Infrastructure breakdowns or failures during the long now, however, challenge the state’s power and render infrastructure and its

7 Thomas Parke Hughes, “The Evolution of Large Technological Systems,” in W. Bijker, T. P. Hughes, and T. Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 51- 82. 8 Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder, “Step Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces,” Information Systems Research 7, 1 (1996), 113. 9 Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 34. 10 Gillian Fuller and Ross Harley, Aviopolis: A Book About Airports (London: Black Dog Pub., 2004). 11 David Ribes and Thomas A Finholt, “The Long Now of Technology Infrastructure: Articulating Tensions in Development,” Journal of the Association for Information Systems 10, 5 (2009), 377. 12 Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox, “The Enchantments of Infrastructure,” Mobilities 7, 4 (2012), 521-536.

6 weaknesses more visible to the people who interact with and use it.13 This dissertation shows that the long now never really ended in jet age Canada with respect to airports. Airports rapidly grew under the state’s care, but also experienced setbacks with travellers and local communities, tensions in their workplaces, and challenges to and failures in governance, all of which thrust airports into the national spotlight and rendered them unfinished modern infrastructure projects that were both technical and political creations. Mobility also deeply informed the trajectory of airport development in jet age Canada. I draw on recent scholarship in mobilities that brings research on transportation and research on society and culture into conversation. This body of work broadly conceives mobility not as simple movement from one point to another but, to quote Tim Cresswell, as “socially produced motion” that is highly complex, unstable, and laden with meaning.14 The “new mobilities paradigm” thus seeks to trace and capture the ways in which movement happens (or fails to) and the geometries and relations of power that shape this process.15 Air travel has not been immune from this shift, with geographers, sociologists and political scientists particularly interested in unpacking different “aeromobilities”, which can be taken to mean the constellation of practices, objects, spaces, images, meanings, and experiences of air travel.16 Accordingly, I use “mass aeromobility” in this dissertation when examining one or more of these elements in the postwar decades; the rest of the time I simply use “mass air travel” to refer to that period of commercial aviation as a whole. Airports can shed much light on mass aeromobility even though they are fixed in place. Along with developing a new theoretical approach to movement, mobilities research looks closely at places of movement, positioning the environments at and through which people move as active sites in the construction of mobility.17 Scholars

13 Harvey and Knox, “The Enchantments of Infrastructure,” 530; Star and Ruhleder, “Step Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces.” 14 Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006), 3. 15 Mimi Sheller and John Urry, “The new mobilities paradigm,” Environment and Planning A 38, 2 (2006), 207-26; John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). Doreen Massey coined the term ‘power geometry’ to describe the different relationships that people have to movement. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 16 Saulo Cwerner, Sven Kesselring and John Urry, eds., Aeromobilities (New York: Routledge, 2009); Peter Adey, Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). 17 Kevin Hannam, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry, “Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities, and Moorings,” Mobilities 1, 1 (2005), 1-22.

7 assert that the how, why, and when of movement cannot be separated from the where, or the “necessary spatial, infrastructural and institutional moorings that configure and enable mobilities”.18 In other words, one must turn to the immobile structures that enable, control, and redefine different modes of movement to better understand how place shapes mobility and how its meanings, discourses, and practices take shape and evolve. Airports are one such example, fastening the circuitry of aviation to particular places and taking on a more important role in air travel in the latter half of the twentieth century.19 For that reason, one can look to airports to assess some of the ways in which mass air travel reshaped policies and experiences of mobility, which played out across these environments in highly complex and ambiguous ways. Scholarship on airports has ballooned in recent years. Geographers, political scientists, and sociologists have been particularly interested in theorizing the airport and exploring it in relation to contemporary themes that stretch across nations and borders. One useful strand for my purposes is scholarship that connects airports to capitalism. David Harvey argues that capitalist activity is always “grounded somewhere”, relying on fixed sites, or spatial fixtures, to facilitate the easy spatial movement of other forms of capital and labour.20 As spatial fixtures, airports operate strategically within this economic logic, constituting spaces and places that allow capital accumulation to take place and expand, a function that became evident at times in jet age Canada.21 Another meaningful discussion concerns how scholars conceive the airport and assign value to it. Some, notably Marc Auge, argue that airports are non-places of transiency and anonymity, environments that are “non-relational, non-historical, and not concerned with identity” and through which people pass on their way to somewhere else.22 Others, however, challenge this view; instead, they see airports as places where meanings and discourses of movement (or non-movement) take shape and go on to resonate in and

18 Hannam, Sheller, and Urry, “Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities, and Moorings,” 3. 19 Urry, Mobilities, 135-56; Sven Kesselring, “Global transfer points,” in Cwerner, Kesselring and Urry, eds., Aeromobilities, 39-59. 20 David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (London: Verso, 2006), 78. 21 David Harvey, “The geopolitics of capitalism,” in D. Gregory and J. Urry, eds., Social Relations and Spatial Structures (London: Macmillan, 1985), 128-163. 22 Marc Auge, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995), 77-78.

8 intersect with broader imaginaries.23 Work in this vein is particularly concerned with exploring questions of power at airports and the various functions they perform as a microcosm of the relationship between state and society.24 I draw from this latter interpretation to historicize airport development in jet age Canada and critically explore the many different things that state-sponsored airports came to represent in the late twentieth century: troubled mega-projects, disruptive neighbours, volatile workplaces, mobile borders, and security zones, all at different times in different places. Viewed this way, airports offer a useful case study for examining some ways in which mass air travel, like other modern transport and mobility systems, has shaped and been shaped by wider political, social, and cultural change. This story, then, is not just about the transformation of airports as infrastructure, but also about the people and ideas that circulated through and intersected with them in jet age Canada.

Airports, Historiography, and Sources Thinking about airports in terms of infrastructure and mobility and in relation to other themes and issues breaks new ground in a number of ways. First, this dissertation strengthens and advances historical knowledge about airports and aviation in Canada. For the most part, scholarship on these topics has been uneven, fragmented, and insular, neglecting to relate airports or aviation to broader historical processes. With respect to airports, most of the existing literature is made up of general historical surveys of one or more airports that are written mainly with public audiences in mind.25 Moreover, scholarship on aviation has generally focused more on the period before mass air travel. These works have explored the development of early flying in Canada, whether from the standpoint of the origins of federal and international regulation, aerial surveying, , or wartime aviation.26 Encouragingly, there is scholarship on the postwar era that

23 Alastair Gordon, The Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004); David Pascoe, Airspaces (London: Reaktion, 2001); Hugh Pearman, Airports: A Century of Architecture (London: Laurence King, 2004), 212-233. 24 Debbie Lisle, “Site Specific: Medi(t)ations at the Airport,” in Francois Debrix and Cynthia Weber, eds., Rituals of Mediation: International Politics and Social Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2003), 3-29; 25 T.M. McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 2nd edition (Toronto: Lugas, 1992); Peter Pigott, Gateways: Airports of Canada (Lawrencetown, N.S.: Pottersfield Press, 1996). 26 Examples include Sean Seyer, “Walking the Line: The International Origins of Civil Aviation Regulation in Canada,” Scientia Canadensis: Canadian Journal of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine

9 deals with commercial air travel in some way, but these works are narrowly conceived as transportation histories above all else.27 The historiography on airports and aviation has thus generally lacked critical focus or direction and failed to engage with wider themes, an oversight that I seek to resolve here. Furthermore, this dissertation contributes to the and mobility and its relationship to social and cultural change in Canada. On the one hand, it engages with longstanding conversations about transportation technologies, like the train and car, and their relationship to both nature and culture.28 On the other, it adds greater depth to recent scholarship on mobility that overlaps with historiography on technology and society but also looks more closely at the cultural meanings of movement.29 I advance these respective discussions into the jet age to consider the ways in which changes to and around airports can shed light on how mass air travel played out on different terrains – not only in the corridors of the state, but also in political culture, everyday life, and in discourse about the nation and its place in the world – during the late twentieth century. In this regard, this dissertation also contributes to the political, social, and cultural history of postwar Canada. The historiography of this period is fast growing and

38, 2 (2015), 79-89; David Mackenzie, Canada and International Civil Aviation, 1932-1948 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989); William Wheeler, Skippers of the Sky: The Early Years of Bush Flying (Calgary: Fifth House Publishers, 2000); Jonathan Vance, High Flight: Aviation and the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Penguin, 2002). 27 Examples include Peter Pigott, Flying Colours: A History of Commercial Aviation in Canada (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1997); J.R.K. Main, Voyageurs of the Air: A History of Civil Aviation in Canada, 1858-1967 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1967); Peter Pigott, Wingwalkers: A Story of International (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Pub., 1998); Peter Pigott, : The History (Toronto: Dundurn, 2014); John Condit, Wings over the West: Russ Baker and the Rise of (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Pub., 1984); Larry Milberry, Air Transport in Canada (Toronto: CANAV Books, 1997); Philip Smith, It seems like only yesterday: Air Canada, the first 50 years (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986). Some aviation topics that do branch out in some way include: Feldman, The Politics of Canadian Airport Development; Jean Helms Mills, “Employment Practices and the Gendering of Air Canada’s Culture during its Trans Canada Airlines Days,” Culture and Organization 8, 2 (2002), 117-128. 28 For a non-Canadian study of the train, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkley: University of California Press, 1986). On the train in Canada, see Andy Den Otter, The Philosophy of Railways: The Transcontinental Railway Idea in British North America (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). On the car in Canada, see Dimitry Anastakis, Car Nation: An Illustrated History of Canada’s Transformation Behind the Wheel (Toronto: Lorimer, 2008). 29 Ben Bradley, Jay Young, and Colin M. Coates, eds., Moving Natures: Mobility and the Environment in Canadian History (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2016); Ben Bradley, “By The Road: Fordism, Automobility, and Landscape Experience in the British Columbia Interior, 1920-1970,” PhD dissertation, Queen’s University, 2012.

10 thematically diverse.30 Many topics engage with postwar modernity, outlining how specific notions of based on pro-growth politics, technocratic expertise, human control of the environment, risk management, and social engineering informed political developments and social experiences.31 Another burgeoning strand of scholarship, meanwhile, is more oriented towards globalization and the international arena.32 These works integrate Canada into transnational and global histories of circulation and exchange that took shape or intensified at this time.33 Modernity and globalization are, of course, not mutually exclusive, and some of the work on this period engages with and reflects both trends. I adopt a similar approach in this dissertation in order to show how the state’s jet age airport project played out against multiple backdrops at different times in different parts of the country. With some exceptions, historians have been slow to extend analyses of postwar Canada past the 1960s, focusing on the years in and around that decade as a time of particularly intensive political and social upheaval and countercultural activism.34 Moving

30 This can be seen in the various essays that comprise Magda Fahrni and Robert Rutherdale’s volume on postwar Canada. See Fahrni and Rutherdale, eds., Creating Postwar Canada: Community, Diversity, and Dissent, 1945-1975 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008). 31 Key works include Tina Loo, “People in the Way: Modernity, Environment, and Society on the Arrow Lakes,” BC Studies 142/143 (2004), 161-196; Mona Gleason, Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Schooling, and the Family in Postwar Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Christopher Dummitt, The Manly Modern: Masculinity in Postwar Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007); Danielle Robinson, “Modernism at a Crossroad: The Spadina Expressway Controversy in Toronto, ca. 1960-1971,” Canadian Historical Review 92, 2 (2011), 295-322; Joy Parr, Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in the Postwar Years (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Joy Parr, Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953-2003 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010); Tina Loo and Meg Stanley, “An Environmental History of Progress: Damning the Peace and Columbia Rivers,” Canadian Historical Review 92, 3 (2011), 399-427; Steve Penfold, “Are we to go literally to the hot dogs? Parking Lots, Drive-ins, and the Critique of Progress in Toronto’s Suburbs, 1965- 1975,” Urban History Review 33, 1 (2004), 8-23. 32 I follow David Held and Anthony McGrew in arguing that while globalization is an historical process involving the growth of transcontinental and transregional networks of activity that dates back several centuries, the speed and scope of change accelerated and intensified in the late twentieth century. David Held and Anthony McGrew, eds., Globalization Theory: Approaches and Controversies (Oxford: Polity, 2007). 33 Key works include Sean Mills, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010); David Meren, With Friends Like These: Entangled Nationalisms and the Canada--France Triangle, 1944-1970 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012); Karen Dubinsky, Sean Mills, and Scott Rutherford, eds., Canada and the Third World: Overlapping Histories (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016); Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry, and Henry Yu, eds., Within and without the nation: Canadian history as transnational history (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), introduction and last two chapters. 34 For examples, see Bryan Palmer, Canada’s 1960’s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); Dimitry Anastakis, ed., The Sixties: Passion, Politics, and Style

11 forward is nevertheless critical, however, for integrating the events of the 1970s and 1980s into different historiographical conversations to better understand how these decades compliment or complicate existing postwar narratives.35 This dissertation takes a step in this direction, offering a new set of narrative signposts that situates the state’s airport project within a number of significant historical processes – mega-project development, suburbanization, unionization and language politics, immigration and citizenship, and surveillance and terrorism – spanning the early decades of the jet age between the 1950s and 1980s. In the process, it shows how airports and mass air travel were fundamentally part of the making of jet age Canada, a process that encompassed the local, national, and global arena and stretched well past the 1960s into the late twentieth century. Airports do not have their own archives, but nevertheless turn up regularly in the historical record. The choice to primarily focus on a key actor, the Canadian state, offers multiple archival possibilities for not only studying official attitudes and strategies towards airports in the jet age. It also offers a window into the interactions that politicians, civil servants, planners, and other parts of the state had with other social actors, including domestic and international air travellers, neighbouring communities, and the wider public, as changes at and around airports played out. Consequently, I draw from multi-level government archives and documents, union records, private collections,

(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008); Lara Campbell, Dominique Clement, and Gregory S. Kealey, eds., Debating dissent: Canada and the sixties (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Ian Milligan, Rebel Youth: 1960s Labour Unrest, Young Workers, and New Leftists in English Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014); Karen Dubinsky, Catherine Krull, Susan Lord, Sean Mills, and Scott Rutherford, eds., New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2009); Stuart Henderson, Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). One new work that extends the 1960s themes of social and cultural change into the 1970s and 1980s is Colin Coates, ed., Canadian countercultures and the environment (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2016). 35 This is not to say that Canadian historians have completely ignored the 1970s, 1980s, or even the 1990s, only that the historiography, particularly in English, on these decades is far less developed than the 1960s and the early postwar era more generally. One reason might be the unavailability of key archival sources, which has led many who have written about the late twentieth century to rely more on oral histories instead, but this is beginning to change as more material is released or discovered. Some recent notable works that engage with both written and oral sources include Steven High, Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt, 1969-1984 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); Steve Penfold, The Donut: A Canadian History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); Matthew Hayday, So They Want Us To Learn French: Promoting and Opposing Bilingualism in English-Speaking Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2015); Sean Mills, A Place in the Sun: Haiti, Haitians, and the Remaking of Quebec (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016).

12 mass and specialized trade publications, and local and national newspapers to trace the story of the state’s airport project and the evolution of airports as modern infrastructure in jet age Canada. Noticeably absent on the list is oral interviews, which might seem surprising for a study that focuses heavily on the late twentieth century. I made a conscious decision, however, not to interview people because doing so would have enlarged the scope of an already large project. Nevertheless, oral histories of airports and air travel can and will surely be written. In the meantime, I have made every effort in this dissertation to use written sources to tell the stories of people who could have been interviewed – including homeowners, air traffic controllers, immigrants and refugees, and security guards – and highlight how they were implicated in and experienced the state’s jet age airport project.

Airports and Aviation Before the Jet Age This dissertation is about the jet age, but airports and air travel have a longer history. The country’s earliest airports were built to serve an amateur flight where planes were far lighter and smaller than they later became. In Canada the first flight of a biplane, the Silver Dart, had occurred at Baddeck Bay, Nova Scotia in 1909, and for the next twenty- five years the skies were filled with rudimentary solo or two-seat aircraft, such as the IV and the D.H.9C, that did bush flying, offered limited and localized commercial services, or conducted aerial surveys in the North.36 During subsequent decades, the planes in service grew more complex as aircraft manufacturers and the nascent civil aviation industry looked to capitalize on rising public interest in flying and build larger and stronger planes. Between 1921 and 1931, passenger air traffic increased ten-fold, rising from 10,000 to 100,000 annually.37 Newer generations of planes subsequently had longer fuselages to accommodate more passengers, as well as enhanced safety features, like a completely enclosed cockpit and, later, a pressurized passenger cabin. Notable arrivals included the ten-seat Boeing 247, which took to the skies in 1933, the forty-three seat Lockheed Constellation, introduced in 1946 as one of the first

36 K.M. Molson, Pioneering in Canadian Air Transport (Winnipeg: K.M. Molson, 1974), 1-74. On early aerial surveys in the North, see Marionne Cronin, “Northern Visions: Aerial Surveying and the Canadian Mining Industry, 1919–1928,” Technology and Culture 48, 2 (2007), 303–30. 37 Cited in Pigott, Gateways, 28.

13 pressurized commercial , and the fifty-to-sixty seat Canadair North Star, which also entered service in 1946.38 These planes dwarfed their predecessors not only in size, but weight too. The North Star, for instance, weighed over 22,600 kilograms empty and more than 36,000 kilograms when fully loaded.39 Radical technological advances to aircraft also meant equally substantial changes to ground infrastructure, since planes became larger and carried more people.40 Before 1927, municipalities built and oversaw most Canadian airfields; the federal government had little interest in civil aviation at the time and did not want to shoulder the financial risks associated with airport development.41 Most of these early airfields were modest landing strips usually located on small, flat parcels of land around ninety acres in size. There was a surfaced runway, usually no more than 2,500 to 3,000 feet long, but there was not usually a terminal building, technical infrastructure, or other facilities, aside from a farmhouse that might be attached to the property.42 This set-up was more than enough to accommodate the occasional one or two-seat aircraft in the early decades of aviation, but completely unfeasible for handling regular passenger flights. The federal government’s growing interest in civil aviation in the late 1920s altered how it approached airport development. In 1927, the Civil Aviation Branch was created as a separate branch under the Deputy Minister of National Defence and divided into separate divisions, Air Regulations and Airways, one year later. Airways was responsible for airports and a national air route system, indicating that the government now saw itself playing a key role in the process.43 The implications of this shift became clear in the early 1930s when the Bennett government, keen to reduce unemployment

38 Pigott, Flying Colours, 60-61, 129-133. 39 Larry Milberry, The Canadair North Star (Toronto: CANAV Books, 1982), 62. Figure converted from pounds in original source. 40 As early as the mid-nineteenth century, crude, temporary landing fields had existed to accommodate air balloon flying. These landing fields lasted through the early twentieth century, and were usually located in one of four places: cow pastures, racetracks, polo parks, and exhibition grounds. The first permanent airfields emerged during the First World War, when Canada allowed the United States and Britain to train pilots for the Royal Flying Corps on Canadian soil. Companies that oversaw pilot training often built the airfields, which Canada then took over after the war; the American Curtiss Aeroplane & Motor Company, for example, constructed six airfields in . See Pigott, Gateways, 15, 19; McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 2,6. 41 McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 13-16. 42 Pigott, Gateways, 21-23; McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 1-50. On the situation in the United States, see Janet Bednarek, America’s Airports: Airfield Development, 1918-1947 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001). 43 McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 15-16.

14 during the Depression, mobilized nearly 10,000 men to construct the Trans-Canada Airway, a national system of fifty airports and ninety-eight airfields.44 The Airway was finished in 1939, following completion of the eastern section between Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montreal.45 The Trans-Canada Airway represented a step forward in federal construction and development of airports as well as the establishment of a national transcontinental air network. New airports had longer runways, which were a minimum of 500 feet wide by 3,000 feet long, as well as some basic infrastructure like a radio beacon and perimeter lightning to guide pilots from the air and an airplane hangar for aircraft maintenance.46 Some also had a basic passenger terminal, which took its architectural cue from existing railway stations and seaports both aesthetically and functionally.47 The federal government also reversed course and offered funding to municipalities for airports, enabling some cities, including Toronto and Ottawa, to purchase land and build new airports.48 The arrival of mid-sized aircraft in the 1940s and, later, in the early 1950s, such as the DC-3, Canadair North Star, and Super-Constellation precipitated further upgrades.49 Runways, in particular, had to be lengthened to give the heavier new planes more space to generate enough lift to take off, leading the International Civil Aviation Organization to recommend 8,000 feet runways and significant pavement upgrades for international airports in 1946.50 By this time, the postwar boom had begun to reshape aviation and airports. Air travel trips in Canada had begun to rise, both in real numbers and in relation to other modes of transport, even before the jet engine was developed in the 1950s.51 Postwar

44 Pigott, Flying Colours, 68. On the Trans-Canada Airway and its impact on particular places, see also Ian MacLachlan and Bruce MacKay, “Lethbridge and the Trans-Canada Airway,” History 48, 3 (2000), 2-13. 45 McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 32-33. 46 McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 33. 47 Pearman, Airports: A Century of Architecture, 126-130. 48 Pigott, Gateways, 31. Toronto built Malton and Island Airport, while Ottawa built Uplands Airport. 49 The DC-3, Canadair North Star, and Super-Constellation began flying in Canada in 1945, 1946, and 1954 respectively. 50 On the general principles of aerodynamic lift, see Henk Tennekes, The Simple Science of Flight: From Insects to Jumbo Jets (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009). The ICAO made this change in response to aircraft like the North Star, which required a runway of at least 6,000 feet, and newer turbo-prop aircraft like the Super-Constellation, which needed 7,000 to 7,500 feet. See McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 51. 51 The jet engine was first invented in the early 1930s and used solely for military purposes until the 1950s. The was the first jet prototype for civil aviation, but it never became commercially

15 economic growth, technological advances in aircraft and air safety and convenience, an increase in disposable income, and a gradual lowering of airfares all served to stimulate public interest in air travel.52 In 1957, Trans-Canada Airlines, for the first time ever, earned more revenue than that of Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Rail combined. In another first, air travel replaced steam travel in 1959 as the principal option for transoceanic travel by .53 Between 1948 and 1958, aircraft take offs and landings increased more than 400%, and in 1960 Canadian commercial airlines carried over 5.5 million passengers, an increase of more than 300% over the previous ten years.54 Traffic at specific airports was similarly impressive. Between 1946 and 1956, passenger volume at Montreal-Dorval International Airport and Toronto International Airport rose from 246,359 travellers to nearly 1.1 million and 180,307 to 900,000 respectively.55 These various developments thus set the tone for the coming decades, signaling the Canadian state’s growing interest in air travel and the beginning stages of substantial change at and around airports.

My story begins against this fast-changing historical backdrop. The five chapters in this dissertation highlight different episodes of the emergence and evolution of airports as modern infrastructure in jet age Canada. Generally speaking, they proceed chronologically and gradually expand the scale of analysis, but also sometimes overlap or move back and forth in time and scale. This reflects the fact that the transformation of airports between the 1950s and 1980s saw different issues and developments converge, making it far from a neat and tidy process and one that often played out at multiple scales at once. Each chapter accordingly stresses that these changes resonated across the local, successful and was scrapped after a series of technical failures. See J. Graham Cowell, D.H. Comet: the world’s first jet (Hounslaw: Airline Publications and Sales Ltd., 1976). 52 For a global historical overview of mass air travel, see Kenneth Hudson, Diamonds in the Sky: a Social History of Air Travel (London: Bodley Head : British Broadcasting Corp., 1979), 152-167; Marc Dierikx, Clipping the Clouds: How Air Travel Changed the World (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2008); and Peter Lyth and Marc Dierikx, “From Privilege to Popularity: The Growth of Leisure Air Travel since 1945,” Journal of Transport History 15, 2 (1994), 97-116. On economic prosperity in postwar Canada and the growth of the middle class, see Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: a History of the Baby-boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). 53 A. Jaworski, “Indexes of Air Transport Progress in North America – 1948 to 1958,” Canadian Aeronautical Journal, November 1960, 380-82. 54 B.W. Torell, “Transportation – Catalyst to Progress,” Canadian Aeronautical Journal, September 1960, 249. 55 Pigott, Flying Colours, 169.

16 national, and global arena in highly complex, ambiguous, and unstable ways. To map them, each chapter examines a different aspect of this process, focusing on one part or function of the airport that took shape or radically shifted because of (or in spite of) state actions and wider, systematic change. Covering the most ground chronologically, Chapter 1 outlines the rise of airports as modern infrastructure and as troubled megaprojects up to the early 1970s. It surveys two phases of development that saw the federal government and its partners try to bring airports into the jet age by investing enormous amounts of money, expertise, and resources into airport building, upgrades, and expansion across the country. It shows how during the first phase through much of the 1960s, the basic infrastructure and services that came to define major airports in the late twentieth century – massive air terminals, lengthier runways, wider access roads, larger parking lots, and more amenities – took shape, but also routinely broke down or failed altogether. It then turns to the second phase, which was marked by a radical planning shift in the late 1960s that led the government to embrace new mega-airports in Montreal and Toronto as a partial solution for fixing existing airports and planning ahead for new growth. The federal planning struggles and specific trajectory of these developments revealed that airports in early jet age Canada did not always function as the modern infrastructure megaprojects that officials intended them to be. Chapter 2 explores conflicts between airports and communities beginning in the late 1960s and intensifying through much of the 1970s. In particular it considers the ways in which jet age airport development – especially noise from aircraft – disrupted everyday life for local homeowners at this time and led to a rise in noise complaints at this time. Focusing on events in Vancouver, where noise complaints were numerous, it first links both postwar suburbanization and the jet age to noise complaints and the emerging perception that larger and busier airports were becoming “bad neighbours”. It then explores the differing positions that authorities and locals took on how to mitigate the noise. On the one hand, it looks at the federal response to noise disputes, which saw officials largely embrace techno-scientific and pro-growth ideas for measuring and mapping noise around airports and for handling individual complaints. On the other, it examines the critiques of aggrieved residents, who argued that noise threatened local

17 notions of place and came to associate the roar of jets with greater noise pollution across modern society. These various disruptions in the 1960s and 1970s underlined the active and disruptive role that airports now played within wider environments. Chapter 3 shifts to the airport as workplace, examining the relationship between jet age labour and language politics in the 1970s. It focuses specifically on air traffic control towers. Air traffic controllers were civil servants and thus part of the state, but they were also deeply affected by government policies over this period. They saw their workplace, and its place in the national imaginary, shift accordingly. This chapter first traces the history of air traffic control in Canada up to the 1970s, showing how air traffic controllers gradually became more alienated from their labour in the jet age even as they acquired greater bargaining power as white-collar workers. It then turns to the relationship between worker alienation and bilingualism, exploring the ways in which the federal decision to mandate French as a language of air traffic control in certain parts of Quebec amplified the grievances of some controllers and soon swept across Canada and through the aviation world. This culminated in the 1976 ten-day strike by Canadian airline pilots, many of whom saw English as aviation’s global language and French as a safety danger, as well as a surge in anti-bilingualism sentiment nationwide. Mass air travel and federal bilingualism thus combined to elevate the stakes in airport workplaces and insert airport workers into national conversations about language rights. Chapter 4 uncovers the links between airports, immigration, and citizenship in the 1970s and 1980s. It explores the rise of airports as national borders against international air traffic, and unpacks the state’s different strategies for screening incoming travellers as well as the national discourse around this process. Airports, particularly in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, became contested and often racialized entry points to national space where federal officials sought to govern and restrict the movement of increasing numbers of non-nationals from parts of the Global South. This chapter first looks at how the airport as border emerged during federal encounters with landed immigrants. It then turns to refugees, detailing the various ways in which government actions thickened the airport border against asylum seekers, many more of whom applied to stay in Canada during the 1980s. Federal officials increasingly relied on disciplinary tools like visas, deportation, and detention to govern the movement of refugee claimants once they

18 arrived at airports. These moves were part of a larger push to reassert national control over immigration and to calm public xenophobia at a time when mass air travel brought globalization to the attention of more Canadians. Chapter 5 looks at airports, security, and terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s. It traces the rise of a state surveillance regime at Canadian airports in the 1970s and also details some of the ideological developments that began to modify and weaken the regime in the following decade. The federal government’s push to bolster security was based on a desire to control mobile risk and to identify and contain people on the move. At key times, however, federal actions actually made national airports unsafe places as a result of surveillance breakdowns and failures. This chapter first examines the new security program that the government installed at airports in the early 1970s in response to a new wave of air terrorism. The program represented both a material and cultural transformation of airport infrastructure to sterilize airports against risk, operating as an extension of the national security state and as one component of a larger international air surveillance project. It then explores some of the setbacks that began to plague security at Canadian airports through the 1970s and 1980s as people, baggage, and items sometimes slipped through the screening process. These incidents not only revealed growing security gaps, but also signaled that neoliberal attitudes – particularly an interest in greater efficiency and less cost – had begun to reshape the state’s attitudes about airport security. This shift culminated in the 1985 Air India 182 bombing, where lax regulatory oversight and screening mishaps played a key role, and brought airports to national attention as regulatory infrastructures that were nevertheless vulnerable to risk. Canada’s jet age airports entered a new era in the early 1990s when the federal government relinquished day-to-day control over airports to private entities, a significant development that the conclusion briefly discusses. The government’s move did not mean the end of the state’s jet age airport project, but rather a new chapter of development in which a more purely capitalist impulse came to shape airport infrastructures as the twenty-first century dawned. Nevertheless, recent events show that there is evidence of continuity alongside change, as many of the issues and themes that informed the trajectory of airport development between the 1950s and 1980s remain salient today. This dissertation, then, examines the radical transformation that airports underwent during the

19 formative decades of the state’s airport project, a period that saw federal stewardship, the meteoric rise of mass air travel, and shifting postwar conditions combine to make jet age Canada.

20 Chapter 1

“The problems which now exist…are self-inflicted”: Canada’s Airports, Megaproject Development, and Jet Age Planning to the 1970s

In 1971, Angus Kinnear blasted the congestion at Toronto International Airport, Canada’s largest and busiest airport. “Passengers and airlines”, he complained, “are subjected to the necessity of using airports which have failed to keep up with public demand.” As the manager of a busy Canadian charter airline, Kinnear knew the hazards of trying to move passengers through Toronto’s over-used facilities, and he pinned the blame squarely on planning failures. “[Airports] are attempting to gloss over problems of capacity with makeshift schemes which are hurriedly instituted in the hope of “getting by” for another year,” he said. “The problems which now exist…are self-inflicted.”1 Kinnear’s complaint flagged several of the key issues of Canadian airport development in the early jet age that often made them troubled mega-projects: volume, congestion, planning, and infrastructure. This chapter explores these issues through the two key phases of airport development: the initial period, which saw a wave of improvements to basic airport infrastructure after the mid-1950s, and the era of the mega- airport beginning in the late 1960s. The chapter begins with the first phase, which lasted up to the late 1960s, when federal authorities invested enormous amounts of time, money, expertise, and resources to upgrade, expand, and improve the nation’s largest airports. In reality, however, redeveloped airports did not work as advertised, leading to infrastructure failures, civic disputes, and more unhappy travellers. The chapter then turns to the second phase, one defined by even larger mega-projects as the state embraced mega-airports in Montreal and Toronto in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Federal officials and their partners conceived these mega-airports, particularly Mirabel, as a progressive response to jet age growth, but as part of this embraced a more destructive planning vision that emphasized enlarged scale, extraordinary cost, and restructured local landscapes to enable these airports to operate unencumbered well into the future. In both phases, state airport planning, although far from entirely successful, not only helped to redefine jet age airports as spaces and reconceive their relationship in space with other people, things, and systems. It also showed that federal officials and their partners had

1 “Letter to the editor: chaos at airport,” Globe and Mail, 8 July 1971, 6.

21 become aware of the mobility and business implications of improving airports for a busier era of air travel, pursuing various strategies that reflected these different but reconcilable tendencies. Taken together, early jet age development saw the rise of airports as modern, but flawed, infrastructure and marked the bumpy beginning of jet age Canada.

Airport Mega-Projects in the Early Jet Age Jet age airports were largely public mega-projects. The federal government and its partners fashioned renovations at key national airports as mega-projects whose immense scale would guarantee their future growth and viability to different interest groups. Urban planning scholars generally note that the state oversaw most mega-project development in the twentieth century, providing primary financing and strictly controlling the planning process through regulatory measures like land grants, expropriations, and loan guarantees.2 Mega-projects have also been distinguished by type of building, scale, and cost, specifically meaning the “creation of structures, equipment, prepared development sites, or some combination thereof” at a cost of at least $250 million.3 Others, meanwhile, point out that another recent characteristic of mega-projects has been significant cost overruns and widespread inefficiencies, largely because of accountability and transparency problems.4 Many postwar airport upgrades, expansions, and building thus typified public mega-projects in the purest sense, having been federally financed and regulated projects that were saddled with a lofty price tag, failed to be completed on time, and, in Mirabel’s case, developed on expropriated land. Postwar pro-growth ideology motivated officials and planners to approach airports as mega-projects. Prevalent by the 1950s, this vision combined Keynesian ideas about the state and economic development with a techno-scientific planning gaze based

2 Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff, Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment (Washington: Brookings Press, 2003), 2; Oren Yiftachel, “Planning and Social Control: Exploring the Dark Side,” Journal of Planning Literature 12, 4 (May 1998), 395-406. 3 Altshuler and Luberoff, The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment, 2. The amount is in 2002 dollars. 4 Bent Flyvbjerg, Nils Bruzelius, and Werner Rothengatter, Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3; Bent Flyvbjerg, Mette Skamris Holm, and Soren Buhl, “Underestimating costs in public works projects: error or lie?” Journal of the American Planning Association 68, 3 (2002), 290.

22 on objectivity and rationality. More specifically, it conceived large-scale public investment, guided by expert knowledge and harnessed by the power of science and technology, as the key to socio-economic progress and prosperity.5 During this period, Canadian governments at all levels embraced pro-growth techno-politics, financing numerous mega-projects, including hydroelectric dams and expressways, thought to be socially desirable and economically attractive, and relying on a cadre of experts to help plan and build them.6 To some extent, pro-growth sentiments expressed by officials and planners overlapped with postwar high-modernism, which similarly emphasized links between the role of expertise, controlling nature through science and technology, and progress and prosperity.7 The particular connection of airports to high-modernism, however, was more tenuous because the ideas guiding development in this respect lacked a clear social engineering component, something that generally typified the high- modernist ethos.8 Instead, the shift to airport mega-projects above all else reflected the dominant position of pro-growth ideology in postwar Canada. The federal government took a greater interest in airport mega-projects as air travel’s postwar growth imposed substantial pressures on airport facilities, particularly passenger terminals. Early terminals had been not equipped for mass air travel, which became the subject of public conversation in the 1950s. In 1957, the Globe and Mail called Toronto’s Malton Airport “a national disgrace” that “looks more than anything else like a second-rate bus station…a hot, crowded, ill-kept, ill-equipped pen which is good neither for the people who use it nor for the airlines who try to run their solicitous services out of it.”9 It also characterized Montreal-Dorval as “tight, tawdry, and

5 Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002), 1-15; Altshuler and Luberoff, The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment, 5-8. 6 For example, see David Monaghan, Canada’s “New Main Street”: The Trans-Canada Highway as Idea and Reality, 1912-1956 (Ottawa: Canada Science and Technology Museum, 2002); Stephen Booking, “Constructing Urban Expertise: Professional and Political Authority in Toronto, 1940-1970,” Journal of Urban History 33, 1 (2006), 51-76; James L. Kenny and Andrew G. Secord, “Engineering Modernity: Hydroelectric Development in New Brunswick, 1945-1970,” Acadiensis 39, 1 (2010), 3-26. 7 Tina Loo, “People In The Way: Modernity, Environment, and Society on the Arrow Lakes,” BC Studies, 142/143 (Summer 2004), 161-196; Will Langford, “Gerald Sutton Brown and the Discourse of City Planning Expertise in Vancouver, 1953-59,” Urban History Review 41, 2 (2013), 30-41. 8 James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Press, 1998), 4-5. 9 As the introduction noted, Malton Airport was renamed Toronto International Airport in 1958.

23 tumultuous” and Winnipeg International Airport as a “totally inadequate waiting place”.10 In 1959, The Canadian Architect noted how “civil aviation is expanding so rapidly and so unpredictably that all terminals must be capable of easy and low-cost expansion in four directions, without interruption of the 24-hours-a-day, 365-days-a-year service which characterizes their operation”.11 The location of federal airport mega-projects was influenced by the air transport system of hubs and spokes that began to take shape in the early 1960s and accelerate thereafter.12 The hub-and-spoke model could apply to any type of network with traffic that had to be routed from one place to another.13 In an aviation context, hubs were “major airports with a lot of their own connections radiating from them” whereas spokes had “only a few connections”.14 As flying grew more popular, the airline industry concluded that it was not economically feasible to connect every airport and sought to instead concentrate air routes through a select number of airports to reduce the number of unprofitable flights. The concentration of air traffic in this way enabled hubs to significantly increase their share of air traffic and, in the process, cement their position as vital transport nodes. The hub-and-spoke system also fostered more intimate political and economic connections between hubs that were directly linked by frequent air service from multiple airlines. Hubs, and their cities, entered into a new spatial relationship governed by transoceanic aeromobile “lines of flight” that negated vast land and water divides.15 Planners around the world encouraged and strengthened this relationship by referring to hubs as “isolated islands” that had more in common with one another than with their

10 “Minding Your Business,” Globe and Mail, 23 July 1957, 6. 11 “The Jet Age,” The Canadian Architect, January 1959, 33. 12 The hub-and-spoke system emerged slowly in Canada because federal regulation restricted the number of airlines that could fly between hubs until the late 1970s. The process accelerated once the government moved to deregulate aspects of the air industry, including lifting domestic and international route restrictions for national airlines. The United States, which enacted the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978, followed a similar trajectory. On the American context, see Dipasis Bhadra and David Hechtman, “Determinants of airport hubbing in the United States: an empirical framework,” Public Works Management and Policy 9, 1 (2004), 26-50. 13 Morton E. O’Kelly, “A geographer’s analysis of hub-and-spoke networks,” Journal of Transport Geography 6, 3 (1998), 171. 14 Mika Aaltola, “The international airport: the hub-and-spoke pedagogy of the American empire,” Global Networks 5, 3 (2005), 266-67. 15 John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 149-154.

24 immediate environment.16 As a result, hubs acquired global power and prestige and entered into new international networks of movement and exchange.17 Spokes, in turn, were relegated to a peripheral position on the global aviation map, frequently overlooked by airlines in favour of more lucrative routes.18 This phenomenon had its roots in older modes of transport, such as the railroad, which had led politicians and elites to measure transcontinental movement by speed and time instead of distance.19 Aviation nevertheless accelerated this process by expanding the measurement of mobility to a larger scale as planes became larger, faster, safer, and able to fly long-distance routes. In Canada, federal airport renovations mirrored these developments, favouring cities that had emerged as national air hubs in spite of a lack of physical proximity while skipping over other regions to a great extent or even altogether. This pattern built upon the concentration of air traffic in key Canadian cities that began in the 1950s and deepened in the jet age. In 1956, eight airports in Canada handled 68.6% of Canada’s total number of air passengers that year, a number that rose to more than 75% ten years later.20 The eight airports were in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Halifax, Calgary, Edmonton, and Ottawa, all large population centres, which suggested that the hub-and-spoke system largely mirrored, and thereby reinforced, historical patterns of urbanization as well as existing urban hierarchies in Canada.21 Of those eight, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver saw the majority of travellers, processing 51% of travellers in 1956 and 54% in 1966.22 Real growth at these airports drove their increasing share of the overall national total. Aircraft movements at Vancouver more than doubled between 1960 and 1970, and annual passenger volume increased from 854,000 travellers in 1962

16 Lars Denicke, “Fifty Years Progress in Five: Brasilia – Modernization, Globalism, and the Geopolitics of Flight,” in Gabrielle Hecht, ed., Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 191. 17 Other airport case studies explore similar processes at work. See Roger Keil and Klaus Ronneberger, “Going up the country: internationalization and urbanization on Frankfurt’s northern fringe,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 12, 2 (1994), 137-166. 18 Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, “Flying through code/space: the real virtuality of air travel,” Environment and Planning A 36, 2 (2004), 195-211. 19 Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), 140-178. 20 V. Setty Pendakur, Airport Access in Canada (Ottawa: , 1972), 16. 21 On the historical causes of urbanization in Canada, see Peter G. Goheen, “Some Aspects of Canadian Urbanization from 1850 to 1921,” Urban History Review (1980), 77-84. 22 Pendakur, Airport Access in Canada, 16.

25 to 2.248 million in 1969, a number that nearly tripled a decade later.23 In Montreal, aircraft movements nearly doubled between 1960 and 1970.24 But of Canada’s air hubs, Toronto International Airport experienced the fastest and most impressive growth. In 1962, it surpassed Montreal as the nation’s busiest airport in terms of passenger traffic with 1.48 million people.25 Expanding steadily over the rest of the decade, Toronto processed an astounding 6.4 million travellers in 1970.26 Observing the rise in total passenger traffic and its concentration in specific cities, the federal Department of Transport embarked on a massive program of air terminal construction and expansion over a twenty-year period beginning in the mid-1950s. It spent $20 million on airports in 1955, $38 million in 1957, and $61 million in 1958, no small numbers by contemporary standards.27 Much of these sums, moreover, went to the eight busiest airports, as well as Gander International Airport in Newfoundland, which served as a refuelling stop for many airlines flying trans-Atlantic routes through the mid- 1960s.28 The Department of Transport built and opened new terminals at Gander in June 1959, Ottawa in June 1960, Halifax in 1960, Montreal in December 1960, Winnipeg in January 1964, Edmonton in February 1964, Toronto in February 1964, and Vancouver in 1965.29 Federal spending continued to rise in the 1960s and 1970s. Between 1961 and 1971, the Department of Transport spent more than $300 million more on airport construction, a number that tripled again over the following ten years.30 Turning Canadian airports into modern infrastructure thus became an extraordinarily expensive public enterprise over time. It also widened the gulf in federal spending between hubs

23 Transport Canada, Aircraft Movement Statistics (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, Transport Division, 1975). McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 245. 24 Transport Canada, Aircraft Movement Statistics. 25 McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 231. Montreal would lead in aircraft movements for another decade. 26 McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 233. 27 The Canadian Architect, January 1959, 33. These figures equate to $181.4 million, 332.9 million, and 516.7 million, respectively, in 2016 dollars. 28 Gander’s role declined in the 1960s after the entry of a new generation of longer-range jets that did not need to refuel on trans-Atlantic routes. On Gander, see Roderick B. Goff, Crossroads of the World: Recollections from an Airport Town (St. John’s, NL: Flanker Press, 2005). 29 McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 51. 30 W.H. Huck, “The Canadian Air Transport Administration: Its Philosophy, Its Framework for the Future,” Canadian Aeronautics and Space Journal, October 1971, 325. The $300 million figure equates to $1.87 billion in 2016 dollars.

26 and spokes while strengthening connections between key Canadian cities and to other international air hubs. Airport planners and architects were key players in postwar airport development, working with federal officials to develop appropriate planning responses for individual airports. Airport planning had evolved as aviation’s popularity increased, forcing project leaders to plan for people as much as for planes. Central to this shift was thinking about why people were travelling and what brought them to their destination. As such, many planners and architects began to see airports as gateways to their respective cities and felt they had to make a positive first impression on arriving travellers. One architect argued that the passenger terminal was especially critical to this process: The airport terminal must be an effective and prestigious monument to the growth and vitality of the city. The dynamics of an economic system in which multi- million investments hang upon the psychological and emotional responses to the city form of the international managerial elite, dictate that the air terminal building must be a distinctive, memorable and powerful image.31

At the same time, authorities and experts linked airport development to nation building, particularly in the wake of the Massey Report, which recommended that the federal state take greater responsibility for creating a distinct national culture.32 In the early 1960s the Department of Transport commissioned and installed new pieces of painting and sculpture in Canadian air terminals to create a unified modernist aesthetic at airports across the country, including Gander, Toronto, Winnipeg, and Edmonton, all of which had been recently been upgraded or expanded.33 As one official said about the artwork plan: “there was no catering to popular taste…We were trying to achieve for Canada the most sophisticated image we possibly could. There was no regional favouritism. We felt that it would be a service to Canadian culture to expose a Vancouver artist in Edmonton, Montreal artists in Toronto, Toronto artists in Winnipeg.”34 In other

31 “Toronto International Airport: A Critical View of the Airport,” The Canadian Architect, February 1964, 42. 32 On the Massey Report, see Ryan Edwardson, Canadian Content: Culture and the Quest for Nationhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 33 Rosalind Alix Rorke, “Constructed Destinations: Art and Representations of History at the Vancouver International Airport,” M.A. Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2001, 31-32. 34 Bernard Flaman, “When ‘la Dolce Vita’ met ‘True Canadianism’: Canadian Airports in the Sixties,” in Alan Elder, ed., Made in Canada: Craft and Design in the Sixties (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 19.

27 cases, however, airport artwork repurposed the character of its host city or province. Edmonton’s new air terminal, which opened in December 1963, featured the “Gas Beacon”, a sculpture that celebrated Alberta’s oil and gas resources. The beacon was an eighteen-metre high stainless steel shaft powered by natural gas, which shot flames upwards through the shaft; the gas was soon turned off, however, because it cost $35,000 per year.35 But Canadian officials and planners also believed that architectural choices as much as aesthetic ones were fundamental aspects of what equipped an airport for mass air travel. This distinction became especially critical once the jet engine made aircraft more powerful. Beginning in the 1950s, project leaders focused on building durable airports that could withstand future technological shocks, drawing a clear link between modernity and durability that straddled the transition to mass aeromobility. For instance, John C. Parkin and Associates, the architectural firm that built Toronto’s Terminal I, tested the glass wall of the terminal before it opened to the public to ensure it could withstand different changes in temperature and pressure and avoid structural fatigue or failure over time.36 Experimenters used a World War II-era bomber outside the terminal to simulate 100 mile per hour winds, sprayed water akin to a heavy rainstorm, and pumped air out from the inside to try and make the glass cave inward; in each instance, the wall held up.37 Runways also had to be constantly repaved and lengthened to remain durable for larger and heavier aircraft. The first generation jets, for example, which began flying in Canada in 1960, required 9,000 feet of runway, forcing officials to scramble to make the necessary changes. By 1961, Montreal-Dorval Airport had three runways that were 7,000, 9,600 and 11,000 feet respectively, the latter more than triple the length of required runways twenty years earlier.38

35 McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 84-85. 36 For a retrospective on the work of John C. Parkin, see Linda Fraser, Michael McMordie, and Geoffrey Simmins, eds., John C. Parkin, archives, and photography: reflections on the practice and presentation of modern architecture (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2013). 37 “Canadian Pittsburgh Walls Attractive Glass and Metal,” Globe and Mail, 26 February 1964, B7. This followed an incident at Ottawa’s Uplands Airport in 1963 when a United States Air Force bomber blew out the glass terminal window during construction there. On the Ottawa International Airport, as it became known, see Robert Rennert, A city takes flight: the story of the Ottawa International Airport (Montreal: R. Rennert, 2000). 38 McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 51.

28 Upgraded airports were the most visible sign that airports were becoming modern infrastructure. Recent advances in construction machinery enabled officials and planners to use powerful machines alongside human labour to complete large redevelopment projects.39 Terminal I at Toronto International Airport, which opened in 1964, best embodied this process at work. Construction of Terminal I removed more than 700,000 cubic yards of earth, and required 122,000 yards of concrete, 8,200 tons of reinforcing steel, and 17,000 tons of structural steel to build the terminal, including an eight-story, nine-level parking garage that was connected to it. But the new terminal consumed even more materials that underlined its material differences from older airport infrastructures: 1,000 miles of wire and 100 miles of conduit were brought to the site to link 19,000 light fixtures and other electrical installations, and more than 2.5 million square feet of lumber was used to build concrete forms. Transporting and organizing these materials required significant a labour force that at its peak totalled 100 subcontractors and 1,220 construction workers.40 Authorities also sought to make air terminals more passenger-friendly places. In doing so, they adopted contemporary architectural practices to design airports in ways that would reflect the speed, comfort, and luxury of jet age air travel.41 During the early 1960s, the federal Department of Transport sponsored a series of information pamphlets about some of the upgrades that had been recently been completed at airports in several major Canadian cities. These pamphlets provided images and content that suggested the open, sleek layout of the jet age airport all but guaranteed a smooth and relaxing travel experience. For example, one described the reconstructed main lobby at Ottawa’s terminal as passenger-friendly because it had “floor-to-ceiling windows of solar grey glass, designed to reduce heat and glare from sun.”42 Likewise, another listed off changes to Vancouver’s terminal, which had cost $18 million and opened in 1965, as proof that it had entered the jet age: “a super-efficient baggage system; spacious waiting areas; a high degree of soundproofing; comfortable heating and air conditioning; a short walk, covered

39 This is briefly discussed in Christopher Dummitt, The Manly Modern: Masculinity in Postwar Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007), chapter 3. 40 “Foundation Co. Led Assault On Staggering Challenge,” Globe and Mail, 26 February 1964, B7. 41 For another example, see Vanessa Schwartz, “LAX: Designing for the Jet Age,” in Wim De Wit and Christopher James Alexander, eds., Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940-1990 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013), 162-183. 42 Government of Canada, Ottawa Airport (Ottawa: Department of Transport, n.d.), pamphlet.

29 all the way to and from aircraft seats; a dining room with the best in international cuisine; a speedy service coffee shop and cafeteria if time is precious; a cocktail bar; parking for hundreds of cars…”43 Planners and officials gradually extended their vision of convenience, luxury, and speed to how people were travelling to the airport. Beginning in the 1960s, they concentrated more heavily on imagining airports as part of an urban, multi-modal transportation system.44 At Toronto’s Terminal I, for example, John C. Parkin and Associates located parking facilities and the air terminal in the same complex, enabling people arriving at the airport to quickly access the terminal and their flights from their cars via elevators without walking outside.45 By building access roads and parking lots directly into the material landscape of airports, Canadian architects crowed about their success in integrating airports within larger systems of movement. Those responsible for Terminal I claimed: “the key to design is the passenger aspect so that the building becomes a complex interchange between the expressway system and the waiting aircraft. This major innovation, this mature acceptance of the motor expressway as the link between aircraft and city, represents a signal achievement bound to affect airport design elsewhere.”46 Project boosters thus linked mass aeromobility to connectivity by aligning the layout of jet age airports with another key symbol of postwar modernity, the automobile. But airports that officials touted as jet age ready did not necessarily function this way. New terminals, in particular, were sometimes unpopular with travellers, either because of infrastructure breakdowns or confusing layouts. Case in point was Toronto’s Terminal II, which fully opened in 1973 to provide relief to the overcrowded Terminal I.47 On the one hand, technologies and equipment that had been installed in the terminal

43 Government of Canada, Into the Jet Age: Vancouver International Airport (Ottawa: Department of Transport, 1970), pamphlet. See also “Planners Cut Time, Steps in New Airports,” Globe and Mail, 12 June 1963, 20. 44 Architects and planners in the United States had also begun to debate these issues. See William Pereira, A Journey to the Airport (Los Angeles: Pereira Associates, 1967). 45 “Jet-Age Terminal a Designer’s Dream,” Globe and Mail, 22 March 1963, B5. 46 “Toronto International Airport: A Critical View of the Airport,” The Canadian Architect, February 1964, 42-43. 47 The airport handled six million passengers in 1971, and Donald Jamison, federal Minister of Transport, predicted it could handle nine million annually with a second terminal. “Passenger-handling capacity will keep growing at Malton,” Globe and Mail, 3 March 1972, 11. The western half of Terminal II, used by

30 to reinforce its passenger-friendly character sometimes failed; for example, the baggage conveyor belt and public address system each malfunctioned soon after the terminal opened.48 Moreover, Terminal II’s design earned far more detractors than supporters. Unlike Terminal I, which contained a circular design that concentrated traveller amenities and minimized walking distances, Terminal II’s architects favoured a linear, or long and narrow, design because they believed a circular model was not well-suited to accommodate new wide-bodied, jumbo jet aircraft, like the , that had entered service in the early 1970s. The linear model proved decidedly unpopular with travellers and airlines, creating longer walking times from cars to plane and greater confusion as people struggled to navigate the spatial layout of the new terminal.49 The travelling public was quick to vocalize their resentment about Terminal II. John Baxter, an American passing through Toronto, disappointingly said of his experience: “It’s terrible. There just aren’t enough seats [in the terminal]. And there’s nobody on the loudspeaker to tell you when the damn plane comes in, if it comes in. There’s no information desk: there aren’t many clocks.”50 H.N. Bawden concurred, describing an experience similar to feeling alone in a crowd: Despite some familiarity with this puzzle I could not find a single person that I could identify as an employee to give me directions. I judge that a minimum of 75 percent of the people milling about in great crowds there are less familiar with that airport than I and if a fire had begun it was perfectly obvious to me that a disaster was inevitable. Has the Ontario Fire Marshal approved the arrangements at this airport? I consider that this is one of the major errors because I found at least two locked doors which had an exit sign above them. I presume that these were exits leading to loading ramps.51

Public criticisms of Terminal II reached their crescendo when esteemed Canadian writer Pierre Berton wrote a scathing critique in late summer 1973. Berton had recently travelled out of town with his family and found himself in Terminal II after returning to Toronto. He had spent time there before, but this night was the point at which he several airlines for regular commercial service, opened in 1973, following the eastern half, exclusively reserved for charter flights, which had opened in June 1972. “Ottawa expects 8% return from airport investment, papers show,” Globe and Mail, 15 June 1972, 39. 48 “Airline has share of problems in switchover to new terminal,” Globe and Mail, 30 April 1973, 5. 49 On airport terminal design and architecture, see Brian Edwards, The Modern Airport Terminal: New Approaches to Airport Architecture (London: Spon Press, 2005). 50 “Frustration and delays greet air travellers at Terminal 2,” Globe and Mail, 8 June 1973, 37. 51 “Letter to the Editor: Terminal 2,” Globe and Mail, 27 August 1973, 7.

31 “reached the end of my rope”. With his family in tow, Berton failed to track down either a skycap – someone who assisted travellers with their belongings – or baggage cart. A nearby Air Canada employee then declined his request for help, telling him his best option was to carry out the family bags – fifteen in total – one at a time to the adjacent parking lot. Once he realized the doors leading from Terminal II to the parking lot were exit-only, Berton was sent into, as he described it, a “stage of impotent fury” and felt “more than a little kinship with Kafka’s poor Mr. K”.52 Struggling to maintain his composure, he managed to convince another airport worker to help him drag and push, in one sequence, the family luggage out the door and on to the car. Reflecting on his experience, Berton lambasted Terminal II as a “major scandal” that had serious engineering and architectural failings. Musing that the best solution might actually be to rebuild the entire terminal, Berton called for a public investigation to ensure the planning principles behind Terminal II were not repeated elsewhere.53 Berton’s full-blown tirade, as well as the criticisms of others, while undeniably hyperbolic, revealed that airports rebuilt for the jet age had come to be a source of real anxiety for many air travellers. In particular, airport layouts profoundly shaped people’s affective responses to flying.54 How people like Pierre Berton emotionally experienced aeromobility was contingent on their ability to derive logic and order from the airports through which they moved to and from aircraft. If a renovated airport lived up to their expectation of a luxurious, convenient, and friendly travel experience, they were reassured. If not, they grew disoriented and angry. While these were authentic emotional expressions that were linked to a fear of impending disaster, these responses undeniably paled next to other instances of public panic and fear in different historical contexts.55 But even as banal anxieties, public hostility towards airports in the postwar era suggested a larger ambivalence and potential fear many Canadians shared about mass air travel. The reactions of Berton and others underlined a fluid and complex relationship between airport design and traveller emotions that was not seriously contemplated by Canadian airport planners in the 1960s and 1970s. Rather, as federal officials and experts rushed to

52 “Mr. K” was the protagonist in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, which focused on the opacity of state power. 53 “Letters to the editor: Terminal 2,” Globe and Mail, 16 August 1973, 6. 54 On this point, see also Peter Adey, “Airports, Mobility, and the Calculative Architecture of Affective Control,” Geoforum 39, 1 (2008), 438-51. 55 Joanna Bourke, Fear: a Cultural History (London: Virago, 2005).

32 redevelop airports in ways that they believed made them more efficient and progressive places, they actually alienated many travellers who grew anxious that these airports were not jet age ready after all.

Airport Congestion and Planning Challenges How to integrate busier and growing airports into urban environments fundamentally challenged and reshaped federal airport development in the early postwar decades. Rapid and sustained annual increases in air and passenger traffic through the 1960s and early 1970s produced significant congestion at a handful of key national airports, not only inside their air terminals but also across the rest of their infrastructure, namely the access roads that linked airports to urban transportation systems.56 While this was partly a consequence of the hub-and-spoke system, it was compounded by the arrival of wide- bodied jumbo jets in 1970, which posed specific technical and logistical problems for those overseeing airport development because they could accommodate three or four times as many passengers as older jets.57 Officials and planners tried to grapple with congestion by ordering more infrastructure upgrades and expansions, but often saw their efforts foiled because technological advances and rising demand outpaced the speed and scope of their projects. At the same time, their efforts took on a greater urgency as the state and its partners began to see jet age airports as economically desirable and conclude that poorly functioning airports represented bad business practice. In other words, by the early 1970s Canadian authorities came to recognize that serious congestion and delays threatened the stability of airport infrastructure and hindered their means of operating as conduits for economic development as well as mass transport nodes. Airport congestion was exacerbated by several factors. First, the proliferation of charter flights during this time often overwhelmed airport terminals, particularly the immigration and customs area where arrivals had to be processed. Charters became more viable once jet travel eliminated the refuelling stops that had been necessary for older aircraft, creating the possibility of direct flights to more distant and remote destinations.

56 On postwar air travel in Canada, see Pigott, Flying Colours, 169-86. 57 The standard configuration in early Boeing 747 models was 350 seats, but it could accommodate upwards of 400 or even 500 passengers depending on the density of the seating configuration and the exact length of the aircraft.

33 From this sprang a burgeoning global tourism economy that quickly proved lucrative by the late 1960s.58 Charter companies led the way, offering weekly flights as part of packaged deals for the growing post-war middle class. Many offered flights from Toronto that were usually sold out, which swelled passenger volumes at the airport and produced headaches for airport managers and workers. Charter flights in Canada reached record levels in June 1971, at which point the Department of Transport reached an agreement with owners of the air cargo terminal at Toronto to temporarily convert it to charters until Terminal II, which was then under construction, was ready.59 However, this was a stopgap measure that moved rather than solved congestion. On one night later that summer, the converted cargo terminal handled several dozen sold out charter flights, which severely taxed the makeshift facilities and nearly caused a riot when people awaiting returning travellers unsuccessfully tried to scale the wooden partition separating the customs and waiting areas. This led one Scarborough, Ontario resident, returning from an overseas trip, to angrily decry, “this isn’t an airport. This is a cattleyard.”60 The rising number of visitors at airports for charters and other flights also worsened congestion, but this was not entirely a jet age phenomenon. Airports had functioned as public spaces and destinations in their own right since the earliest years of aviation, frequented by flying enthusiasts seeking a glimpse of aircraft landing and taking-off and by sightseers and families for reasons of entertainment and recreation.61 The era of mass air travel, however, did precipitate a surge of public interest in airports as people flocked to witness wide-bodied commercial airliners and bid goodbye to or greet returning friends and relatives. Consequently, most major national airports had observation decks installed by the early post-war era, of which curious onlookers made good use. Observation decks (Figure 1) connected visitors to travellers and also celebrated mass aeromobility by enabling the public to witness aviation’s technological

58 See Kenneth Hudson, Diamonds in the Sky: A Social History of Air Travel (London: British Broadcasting Corp., 1979), 139-41; Marc Dieriex, Clipping the Clouds: How Air Travel Changed the World (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2008), 91-94, 98-99. 59 McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 233. McGrath also notes that before the agreement was signed, the Department of Transport had offered free bus service to charter operators who arranged to process their passengers at off-site hotels. See McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 235. 60 “Charters cause near-chaos at airport,” Globe and Mail, 5 July 1971, 1. 61 For a brief case study, see Vanessa Schwartz, “Dimanche Á Orly: The Jet-Age Airport and the Spectacle of Technology between Sky and Earth,” French Politics, Culture & Society 32, 3 (Winter 2014), 37-41.

34 advances up close. To quote Peter Adey, they functioned “not to sedate the airport experience or cocoon it within bricks and mortar, but to arouse the eyes and minds of the airport spectator to the splendorous surroundings of the airfield and the technology of the aeroplane.”62

Figure 1: Stairs to observation deck at Vancouver International Airport, 1959. Canadian Aviation, January 1959, 33.

But by the early 1970s, the federal government signaled that it no longer wanted visitors at airports. The problem was not entirely imagined; one contemporary estimate revealed that at Toronto an average of 3.5 people accompanied every passenger flying out of that airport.63 Mindful of the economic costs of congestion, Transport Minister Donald Jamieson proposed introducing an admission fee for visitors in January 1971, claiming that the ratio of non-travellers to travellers at Toronto during peak hours was

62 Peter Adey, “Architectural Geographies of the Airport Balcony: Mobility, Sensation and the Theatre of Flight,” Geografiska Annaler B90, 1 (2008), 36. 63 “Malton: A magnet for those who don’t fly,” Toronto Star, 16 May 1972, A1.

35 higher than any other major airport in North America. “If those who are travelling would say their goodbyes at home instead of bringing grandpa, grandma and half a dozen youngsters out to the airport”, he said, “our problems would be well on their way to being solved. Malton still seems to be the place to go on Sunday afternoon.”64 A shift manager at Toronto, Donald Mundee, concurred with Jamieson’s assessment: “our biggest problem is not handling passengers and their baggage. It’s trying to cope with all their friends and relatives who come to say hello or goodbye.”65 While the government’s fee proposal was never implemented, over the next year the Department of Transport specifically warned visitors to refrain from going to the airport during peak hours and holiday periods. In July 1972, in the midst of a chaotic Dominion holiday weekend during which motorists endured a four-hour wait to leave the airport, it issued a special notice asking all non-travellers to temporarily stay away.66 This shift suggested that officials felt that redeveloped airports could provide a shorter ground-to-air connection and help to more quickly move the crush of people, cars, and goods if they were largely emptied of non-travellers. The federal government also had to reconsider its role in regulating airport ground transportation as congestion worsened. Prior to the jet age, the Department of Transport had signed a contract with one transportation company in Toronto, Montreal and Winnipeg to provide round-the-clock service to airports in those cities.67 The contract did not prevent drivers for other companies from taking people to the airport; it forbade them only from picking up. To enforce these contracts, the RCMP policed the taxi and limousine stand, arresting any non-contracted drivers that sought an airport fare.68 The contracts became politicized once air travel’s popularity made the rights to them more lucrative. Groups that were not part of the original agreements soon condemned them, arguing that the federal Department of Transport not only destroyed their financial

64 “Congestion relief sought: consider fee for airport visits,” Globe and Mail, 27 January 1971, 1. 65 “Why a storm flooded the airport with people,” Globe and Mail, 28 August 1970, 23. 66 “Noisy, smoky, hot and smooth: airport jam repetition avoided,” Globe and Mail, 1 July 1972, 5. 67 McGrath notes that the Department of Transport awarded Montreal’s contract to Murray Hill Limousines in 1909, even before the city had a functioning airport. The company operated from St. Hubert until 1941, when it transferred its services to newly built Dorval. The Toronto contract was awarded in the 1940s, and Air Terminal Transport took over from Carter Livery Service at Toronto in 1951. He does not discuss Winnipeg’s contract, but it is reasonable to assume that it was awarded roughly around the same time as Toronto’s. McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 150, 231. 68 “7 Tickets for 7 Cabs, Malton Franchise Tested,” Globe and Mail, 11 June 1964, 5.

36 viability but also perpetuated a monopolistic system by refusing to allow non-contracted companies to pick-up passengers, forcing them instead to deadhead, or proceed without a fare, back to the city. They advocated opening the system to free competition that would allow passengers to choose their ride. By critiquing the regulatory system, cab companies and drivers also indirectly questioned whether restrictive measures that suppressed a more competitive process were compatible with the rhetoric of progress and convenience that proponents of airport redevelopment had so readily embraced.69 One of the opening salvos was fired in August 1964 by a taxi driver in Winnipeg who objected to the law forbidding an open market and decided to test it by driving to the city’s international airport to pick up a fare. Since he did not work for Moore’s, the company then in possession of the government contract in Winnipeg, he was promptly arrested by the RCMP on site and charged both with violating the taxi concession regulation and obstructing a police officer. The driver appealed and the case eventually made it to the Manitoba Court of Appeal, which upheld the charge and affirmed the right of the government to grant an exclusive contract for airport transportation services.70 Further resistance occurred throughout the 1960s as cab companies and individual drivers in Toronto and Montreal waged a fight against government regulation of airport transportation. In Toronto, the dispute was fought using differing economic logics. It began when drivers of a non-contracted taxi company, Yellow Cab Co., initiated its own protest in the summer of 1964, driving slowly around Terminal I. A few days later, Air Terminal Transport Ltd., the company that held the contract, responded publicly, saying that overturning the existing system would hurt customers and hinder airport operations because it would remove the contractual requirement that Air Terminal service the airport at all hours. Claiming that its vehicles were immediately available to passengers 95 percent of the time, Air Terminal argued that introducing competition would lead to erratic service and airport congestion during off-peak hours as companies concentrated on the busiest times. It thus characterized governmental regulation as the most

69 Regulation has been a longstanding issue in the Canadian taxi industry. For a brief discussion, see Donald F. Davis, “Continuity and Discontinuity in Canadian Cab History,” Urban History Review 27, 1 (October 1998), 3-6, as well as the essays in that volume. 70 “Court Upholds Taxi Franchise at Airport,” Globe and Mail, 8 December 1964, 5.

37 economically beneficial choice for airports and their passengers.71 Given that advocates had come to associate the jet age airport with speed and convenience, this argument seemed tenuous and out of step with the times, failing to grasp that congestion could also materialize if travellers did not have enough transport options from airports. In Montreal, anger over the contract monopoly at Dorval airport intersected with local labour radicalism and burgeoning Quebec nationalism. Labour played a key role, alongside students and sovereignists, in a new wave of anti-colonial political activism that gripped Montreal in the late 1960s in response to the historical Anglophone political and economic domination of Quebec.72 These developments soon spilled over into the issue of taxi and limousine services at Dorval where Murray-Hill Company held the government contract. Angered both by the monopoly and the fact it was held by an Anglophone company, other disgruntled taxi drivers formed the Mouvement de Liberation du Taxi (MLT) in September 1968.73 The MLT was a splinter organization of members of non-contracted cab companies that was influenced in its rhetoric and actions by anti-colonial rhetoric and Francophone cultural nationalism that had then begun to spread across Montreal and the province more broadly.74 The MLT accused Murray Hill of “illegally competing with the regular taxis of Montreal” and of “robbing the taxicab operators of millions annually with the connivance of City Hall”, casting the airport taxi contract as another manifestation of corrupt municipal politics that largely favoured Anglophone political and economic interests above all else and perpetuated Montreal’s status as a colonized city.75 The MLT moved quickly to bring its case before the public. In late October 1968, with the help of over 1000 taxi drivers and student sympathizers from other Quebec nationalist organizations, MLT members protested the Murray Hill monopoly by blockading airport access routes. Riot-equipped police arrived shortly thereafter, and in

71 “To the Air Travelling Public: Some Reasons why the Responsible Single Carrier System of Ground Transportation should be retained at Toronto International Airport,” Globe and Mail, 13 August 1964, 4. 72 Sean Mills, The Empire Within : Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). 73 On the MLT and its political mobilization, see also Nick auf der Mar and Robert Chodos, eds., Quebec: A Chronicle, 1968-1972 (Toronto: J. Lewis and Samuel, 1972), 21-32. 74 Taxicab driver Germain Archambault fused these elements in a 1964 indictment of Montreal’s taxi industry. See Archambault, Le taxi: métier de crève-faim (Montréal: Les Éditions Parti-Pris, 1964). 75 Quoted in “Murray Hill states its position to the people of Montreal,” Montreal Gazette, 8 November 1968, 5.

38 the ensuing half an hour twelve people were arrested and six vehicles damaged. Less than a week later, a bomb allegedly planted by some MLT sympathizers exploded at the Murray Hill service building.76 Issues came to a head in October 1969 when the remnants of an MLT demonstration that had begun at Montreal city hall moved to the Murray-Hill garage. The Globe alleged that a few of the protestors, chanting “Quebec for Quebeckers”, overturned one of the company’s limousines parked on site, while others threw stones and Molotov cocktails at the garage.77 A building security guard then opened fire into the crowd; several demonstrators were wounded, and an undercover Quebec Provincial Police officer was killed in the crossfire.78 In the wake of the incident, Murray Hill tried to defend its monopoly not by wading into ethnic and cultural politics, but by evoking an argument analogous to Toronto’s Air Terminal Transport Ltd. Murray Hill claimed its contract obligated it to serve the public interest: “our drivers are not at liberty to cruise the streets or to pick up passengers who may wish to hail us; our men are not free to head for home when traffic is not to their liking.... Our service is geared, first and foremost, to the exacting requirements of the airlines which fly into Dorval Airport.”79 Ultimately, the taxi and limousine disputes in Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg illustrated how the jet age had wedded airports to the local political and socio-cultural fabric. The violence in Montreal prompted the federal government, under the auspices of the House of Commons Transport Committee to hold an inquiry later that same year into the state of ground transportation at airports in Canada, particularly Toronto and Montreal-Dorval.80 Authorities could not afford escalating political disputes that threatened to worsen congestion and in the process, alienate travellers of all types. The federal investigation concluded that the contracts should not be renewed after expiring in Winnipeg and Toronto in 1971 and Dorval in 1972, which effectively opened airport

76 “Cars overturned, set afire, in taxi protest at airport,” Montreal Gazette, 31 October 1968, 1; “Bomb rocks Murray Hill headquarters,” 5 November 1968, 1. 77 “Aftermath of Anarchy: The night that taxi driver became a dirty word,” Globe and Mail, 9 October 1969, 7. 78 For a brief account of the taxi airport contract dispute and its relationship to local labour, cultural, and linguistic tensions, see Bryan D. Palmer, Canada’s 1960s: the Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 236-37 and 351-53. 79 “Murray Hill states its position to the people of Montreal,” Montreal Gazette, 8 November 1968, 5. 80 “Study of airport transportation planned,” Globe and Mail, 21 November 1969, 4.

39 ground transportation services to free competition to service a growing market. This decision thus aligned with the pro-growth vision of speed, convenience, and luxury espoused by officials and planners. However, it was cars that most effectively explained why trips to and from busier airports became lengthier and generated more public headaches in the early years of jet travel. Automobile ownership had exploded in the postwar era as the growing middle class incorporated cars into daily life; motor vehicle registrations increased nearly fivefold between 1945 and 1964.81 The automobile, in turn, transformed the postwar landscape in ways that embodied the car’s promise of mobility, individuality, and freedom; highways, suburbs, shopping malls, and fast-food outlets soon emerged as part of a new car-friendly geography of convenience.82 These developments conditioned motorists to believe they could and should drive anywhere, including to airports. By 1969, Toronto had begun to see more than 40,000 cars daily at the airport.83 And in 1972, a federal survey of the nation’s eight largest airports estimated that 50 to 70% of air travellers and 80 to 100% of airport employees had come to rely on the car for their airport trips.84 The automobile’s rise shaped how officials and airport planners defined the jet age airport. For them, airport redevelopment came to mean not only making an airport jet ready, but also sufficiently auto-friendly and compatible with existing urban transport infrastructure that catered to the car. Even before the 1960s, officials and planners understood that slow responses to air travel’s growth had repercussions that would extend to the urban landscape and its assemblage of highways, secondary roads, and city and suburban streets. In 1955, J.R. Baldwin, federal deputy minister of Transport, told the Town Planning Institute of Canada that busier airports were just as much a municipal as federal problem. “There is very little to be said,” he remarked, “for making a three-hour

81 F.H. Leacy, Historical Statistics of Canada, 2nd edition (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1983), series T147- 194. 82 Steve Penfold, “Selling by the Carload: The Early Years of Fast Food in Canada,” in Magda Fahrni and Robert Ruthdale, eds., Creating Postwar Canada: Community, Diversity, and Dissent, 1945-75 (UBC Press: Vancouver, 2008), 162-190. 83 John A. Vance, “Airport Access and Parking,” in Readings in Airport Planning: a Series of Lectures Presented by the Centre for Urban and Community Studies and the Department of Civil Engineering, University of Toronto (University of Toronto: Centre for Urban and Community Studies, 1972), 241. 84 The airports surveyed were Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Halifax. For details, see Pendakur, Airport Access in Canada, 22.

40 airplane flight and then finding that you have to spend an hour-and-a-half to two hours in traffic jams between the airport and the city, as can easily happen at some points.”85 The Department of Transport began to re-configure airports for the car in the 1950s, building parking lots and garages and licensing rental companies to establish offices on site. Tilden Drive-Yourself began offering car rentals at Dorval in 1952, followed by Hertz and Avis Rent-A Car before the end of the decade. Hertz, meanwhile, also began operating at Toronto by 1950 and was joined by Tilden in 1954. Paid car parking also began at Toronto in 1954, the first of the major national airports to offer this service, and by 1957 the airport had 1,050 parking spaces.86 This figure ballooned following the 1964 opening of Terminal I, which contained a nine-story, eight-level parking garage with 2,200 spaces.87 Terminal II, opened in 1973, added a further 4,000 spaces.88 At the same time, the Department of Transport worked with municipal governments to improve links between cities and airports by adding more airport access roads for motorists and widening existing routes. In 1961, for example, the federal government, Ontario Department of Highways, Metropolitan Toronto Roads Commission, and Peel County collaborated on a $1 million project to build a four-lane access road from Highway 401 to Toronto International Airport as well as extend Renforth Drive and widen Dixie Road on the airport’s eastern side.89 Like Canada’s air terminals, however, airport parking lots through the early 1970s could not always accommodate the crush of motorists. When they became full, congestion quickly spread to nearby arterial roads, which became clogged with cars that had nowhere to park, forcing drivers to endure long waits for a parking space and airport officials to sometimes improvise. The fact that airport employees also had to use these same roads only made things worse, especially since their numbers were not insubstantial. In 1968, 6,000 people worked at Toronto, the majority of whom travelled

85 “Town Planners Warned of Growing Problems in Locating Airfields,” Globe and Mail, 19 November 1955, 2. 86 McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 150, 231. 87 “Toronto International Airport: A Critical View of the Airport,” The Canadian Architect, February 1964, 42-43. 88 “Malton: A magnet even for those who don’t fly,” Toronto Star, 16 May 1972, A1. 89 “Wider Roads Planned Between City, Malton,” Globe and Mail, 21 July 1961, 29; “Aviation: Toronto Rides the Jetstream,” Globe and Mail, 13 April 1963, SM5.

41 by car each day.90 Mirroring broader rush hour patterns, most serious traffic volume and delays at busy airports occurred during daily peak travel periods, which were between 7:30am and 9:30am and 4:00pm and 9:30pm, as well as on weekends and holidays.91 In 1968, for example, more than 1,000 motorists at Toronto International Airport on Dominion Day were denied entry to parking lots because they were full. Airport officials had no choice but to tell them to park along access roads instead.92 Travellers sometimes took matters into their own hands. During the 1970 Christmas holidays, rather than sit in traffic some motorists abandoned their cars on the grass and snow at Toronto’s perimeter and walked to the terminal. This led one of the airport’s managers to remark: “the situation here is like putting a quart into a pint pot. It is the worst airport I have ever seen”.93 Weather could also affect the congestion and parking situation. In August 1970, a storm closed Toronto for three hours, trapping people inside the terminal and snarling traffic across the airport grounds. Auto gridlock worsened to the point that hundreds of motorists entering the airport allegedly abandoned their cars on the access ramps, turning them into parking lots themselves.94 These problems extended to other major airports too. In Vancouver, for example, an estimated 3,200 passengers parked each day at an airport that officially had only 2,000 spaces.95 The federal government and airport planners had limited ways to solve auto congestion and delays in the short term since parking lots and roads could not be built or expanded overnight. For the time being, they had to rely mainly on stopgap solutions. In Toronto, they often advised the public to travel to and from the airport by bus if they wanted to help ease congestion and “avoid going round and round the…aeroquay garage looking for space”.96 For the travellers who insisted on driving to Toronto, federal officials and airport planners also considered satellite parking as a means of easing congestion and delays. Travellers would park their cars at newly constructed “remote”

90 “Auto congestion serious: Toronto airport may try satellite parking,” Globe and Mail, 25 July 1968, B10. 91 John Vance, “Airport Access and Parking,” in Readings in Airport Planning, 247-251. 92 “Auto congestion serious: Toronto airport may try satellite parking,” Globe and Mail, 25 July 1968, B10. 93 “Editorial: Airport nightmare unlimited,” Globe and Mail, 2 January 1971, 6. 94 “Storm lashes west Metro with winds over 60 m.p.h.,” Toronto Star, 31 August 1970, 2. 95 City of Richmond Archives, Series 113, Alpha-numeric subject files (Richmond Engineering Department), File D-1, “Exhibit 106: Passenger Parking”. More detail on Vancouver’s situation can be found in Peat, Marwick and Partners, Vancouver International Airport Ground Transportation Study (Vancouver: s.n., 1974). 96 “Malton: A magnet even for those who don’t fly,” Toronto Star, 16 May 1972, A1.

42 lots, check in for their flights, and then be transported to the terminals by bus, a process that would shorten the overall travel journey and bring relief to the terminal and arterial roads.97 But this idea was never adopted as such and many motorists simply ignored the bus plea, leaving congestion a reality until on-site facilities could be significantly expanded to accommodate more travellers and their cars. Put simply, sustained growth meant that overcrowded airports in the 1960s and early 1970s were out of sync with the broader postwar landscape that the automobile had fundamentally transformed, frequently impeding other traffic streams in the broader urban area. By the early 1970s, many Canadians and much of the national media had come to see the federal airport strategy as insufficient and reactive. Angus Kinnear observed that the problem of congestion “arises when passengers and airlines are subjected to the necessity of using airports which have failed to keep up with public demand, and are attempting to gloss over problems of capacity with makeshift schemes which are hurriedly instituted in the hope of ‘getting by’ for yet another year. The problems are ‘self-inflicted.’”98 Another Globe and Mail commentary highlighted how Toronto’s lack of space for people hampered a positive flying experience: “from beginning to end it is not pleasure, not comfort but a test of endurance.”99 The Montreal Gazette, too, chimed in about worsening traffic around airports: “it’s gotten so bad that you can be within 500 yards of the airport an hour before flight time and still miss your plane.”100 The Toronto Star even held a “race” between two of its reporters to see whether it was faster to travel by air or rail between Toronto and Montreal. In the end, the reporter who flew won the race, but only by ten minutes because the flight was delayed.101 More observers also questioned whether airport congestion carried social repercussions and undermined the speed and efficiency of jet travel. Many pointed to lengthier total trip times from congestion as a major red flag against future growth. As

97 “Auto congestion serious: Toronto airport may try satellite parking,” Globe and Mail, 25 July 1968, B10. In the same vein airport planners in the early 1970s also discussed constructing satellite air terminals. See Philip Beinhaker and Andrew Elek, “Passenger Terminal Planning and Design,” in Readings in Airport Planning, 342-369. 98 “Editorial: Chaos at airport,” Globe and Mail, 8 July 1971, 6. 99 “Editorial: Airport nightmare unlimited,” Globe and Mail, 2 January 1971, 6. 100 “Art Buchwald on: Airports,” Montreal Gazette, 16 June 1969, 7. 101 “The great race to Montreal by plane and turbo train,” Toronto Star, 14 December 1968, 9. The reporter who flew had to return to the terminal to change planes after the original aircraft for the flight was deemed ‘unserviceable’, resulting in a departure delay.

43 one person said: “no one wants to cross the Pacific in eight hours only to spend another two battling through immigration and customs checks and then sit in traffic jams on the airport road.”102 Anthony Smith of Toronto concurred: “Toronto has the most modern of facilities for the air traveller. But there modernity stops. Or, rather, clogs up.” Smith proposed rapid transit, specifically the construction of a monorail between Toronto International Airport and the city centre, as the best means of reducing traveller headaches and speeding up traffic flows near the airport.103 By the early 1970s, public opinion had thus concluded that the jet age had not delivered speed, smoothness, and convenience as promised. Rather, because of airports air travel had become a whole series of trips – on the ground, at the terminal, and in the air – that belied contemporary technological advances in aviation. Amidst these developments, federal officials and urban planners concluded that airport congestion was not a trivial matter and began discussing ways to address and resolve it. Joining them were an array of consultants whose presence underlined the growing role of experts in postwar policy and planning.104 Consultants relied on their unique expertise to help shape policy decisions and steer public and private projects towards completion. In the case of airport planning and development, many of the consultants who conducted studies or assisted federal bureaucrats and provincial and municipal planners in other ways were specialists in transportation policy and not airports alone. Many subsequently saw airport overcapacity through a wider urban lens, which added additional layers to planning approaches. Consultants helped set the terms of the postwar world. They were not public employees, but some had previously worked in government before moving to the private sector. One person, Phillip E. Wade, took a position in 1966 with the Foundation of Canada Engineering Corporation in its newly formed planning and research department after fourteen years with the Ontario Department of Highways as director of statistics and economics. Wade trumpeted his government tenure as evidence of expertise and a unique

102 Ken Conoley, Airlines, Airports and You (Don Mills, ON: Longmans Canada, 1968), 219. 103 “Letter to the editor: Monorail for Malton,” Globe and Mail, 18 January 1964, 6. 104 On the rise of postwar expertise and its intersection with government policy and planning, see Penny Bryden, Planners and Politicians: Liberal politics and social planning, 1957-1968 (Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 1997). Government agencies, such as the Ontario Department of Highways, and the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation, also encouraged these collaborations by offering numerous grants for independent studies on urban transportation, development, and renewal.

44 skill and knowledge set, claiming he and others like him could draw from an extensive knowledge base to help conceive more comprehensive and empirical planning and policy approaches: “More and more public agencies are thinking in terms of wide-ranging planning. Decisions are taken less pragmatically and more scientifically…a tremendous variety of skills is needed to develop and implement such concepts…”105 In some cases, consultants embraced unorthodox solutions to airport congestion to relieve pressures on wider transit systems (Figure 2). Beginning in the mid-1960s, a small number of proponents proposed developing the technology for aerial transfer, or the movement of passengers from one aircraft to another in mid-air. Aerial transfer was in part an anticipatory response to relieving future pressures on airports from supersonic aircraft that were expected to be in service by the early 1970s, but in the minds of proponents it also solved the problem of ground logjams.106 If the mechanics of aerial transfer could be worked out, wrote Henry North, “passengers would simply get up out of their seats and walk forward into the SST [supersonic transfer aircraft] in a sedate manner, similar to visiting a magazine rack.” North claimed that the transfer would take a “lengthy” 30 minutes and occur around 30,000 feet altitude, and that traveller baggage would be simultaneously moved to the SST using a conveyor system.”107 A.U. Houle, another analyst, was equally optimistic, predicting that an inter-continental aerial transfer system would be in place by the mid-1970s.108 Needless to say, the federal government and the vast majority of planners and consultants never embraced the idea as a viable solution to congestion.

105 “Transportation planning seen key to solving development problems,” Globe and Mail, 18 January 1968, B2. 106 There is no scholarship on Canada’s brief interest in supersonic transport. On historical developments in the United States, see Erik M. Conway, High-Speed Dreams: NASA and the Technopolitics of Supersonic Transportation, 1945-1999 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 107 Henry North, “Aerial Transfer of Passengers,” Canadian Aeronautics and Space Journal, May 1965, 161. 108 A. U. Houle, “Supersonic Transport or a More Acceptable Time-Saver,” Canadian Aeronautics and Space Journal, February 1965, 33-37.

45

Figure 2: Imagining the future airport as congestion-free. Canadian Aviation, November 1974, 77.

Nevertheless, at its core aerial transfer was about finding a way to bypass airports altogether or at least minimize trips and time there, a position that more officials, planners, and consultants came to support as the crush of more bodies, planes, and cars complicated the state’s airport plans. In the early 1970s, other studies began to highlight the stark economic consequences of airport logjams, capturing an emerging consensus that the jet age airport had to be easy to reach and navigate. Like the public, authorities and industry experts highlighted longer travel trips to and from airports, observing that ground congestion had significantly clawed back some of the time that had been saved in the air as jet travel shortened trips. This regression became especially alarming for shorter flights that were less than 500 kilometres because airport congestion and terminal delays disproportionately lengthened these trips. Observations placed much of the blame

46 on poor airport access, acknowledging that airport planners had failed to incorporate the public’s predilection for automobiles into their vision, leaving the airport built landscape woefully incapable of accommodating motorists. For example, one report revealed that during peak travel hours air time between Montreal and Toronto and between Calgary and Edmonton respectively represented only 20% and 15% of the total trip time it took passengers to reach their destination.109 Statistics like these implied that authorities would ultimately fail if they ignored other factors when trying to make airports jet-ready. Rather, state-sponsored visions of the jet age airport had to take into account larger economic geographies that air travel had helped create and that corporations now utilized to expand their reach nationally and globally. According to a 1964 Globe article, the transformation of airports was taking place “in an age when companies want an executive at a conference at 10 a.m. but on an aircraft at 11 a.m.”.110 For companies with lofty ambitions, overcrowded and inefficient airports slowed the rapid movement and circulation of people and goods and threatened the processes of capital production and exchange that had become bound to mass aeromobility. As one observer stated: “a case for the improvement of access to a particular airport must be presented in such a way as to make clear the economic and social costs of leaving the system as it exists, as contrasted to the economic and social costs and benefits of bringing the system up to a desired level of service.”111 Reducing ground travel times carried significant economic weight because many people travelled for work and had to make frequent trips to central business districts at some distance from airports. Even as aviation’s popularity increased through the 1960s and early 1970s, business travellers continued to comprise a large percentage of air travellers. A 1968 survey by the University of Toronto’s Institute for Aerospace Studies estimated that almost half of respondents who had used Toronto International Airport the previous year worked within Metropolitan Toronto and earned at least $15,000 a year, with men between the ages of 25 and 54 comprising almost two-thirds of that total. A fifth of the respondents were also frequent passengers, making at least twenty flights over

109 Pendakur, Airport Access in Canada, 9. 110 “Toronto Township Offers Industry Air, Sea, Road, Rail Links,” Globe and Mail, 26 February 1964, B6. 111 Pendakur, Airport Access in Canada, 57.

47 the course of the year.112 During peak hours, however, airport congestion swelled travel time to city centres. In the early 1970s, downtown trips to Vancouver and Toronto both took about one hour during peak hours, and about seventy minutes to Montreal-Dorval during peak hours.113 Studies like these underscored the fact that the government and its partners had begun to acknowledge the adverse impact of airport congestion and delays on future growth. In response, they looked for ways to harness the commercial potential of high- traffic airports even as they struggled to resolve overcrowding, concentrating on stimulating business development closer to major airports to negate the perilous ground commute. One way they did this was by enacting new zoning laws that reserved proximate land for commercial and industrial use. As Chapter 2 will discuss in more detail, the government had concluded that postwar suburbanization and air travel’s growth had combined to bring too many neighbourhoods close to airports. Officials felt that allowing this pattern to continue was dangerous and impractical and applied pressure on provincial and municipal governments to rezone nearby areas.114 These changes dramatically increased the value of the rezoned lands and created a seller’s market as commerce and industry groups commenced a biding war over what was available. In 1963, for example, a group of investors paid more than $1.25 million for a 400-acre property directly across the road from Toronto International Airport, intending to transform the land into an industrial park.115 This transaction reinforced the growing linkages between mass aeromobility, airports, and economic development, a process that

112 “Malton: A magnet even for those who don’t fly,” Toronto Star, 16 May 1972, 1. The complete results of the survey are cited in John Vance, “Airport Access and Parking,” in Readings in Airport Planning, 260- 261. 113 Vancouver International Airport was located roughly twenty minutes from downtown Vancouver, while Montreal-Dorval and Toronto International Airports were both located about thirty kilometres from their respective city downtowns. See Pendakur, Airport Access in Canada, 42. 114 This shift began in the mid-1960s. In 1964, for example, a planning study commissioned by the Toronto Township Planning Board recommended restricting residential development to the northeast section of Malton, away from the airport. “Study Predicts 37,000 Persons in Malton Area,” Globe and Mail, 13 May 1964, 2. Two years later, another Toronto-based study concluded that residential development was unsafe within a five-mile radius of Toronto International Airport. “Five-mile radius: Oppose housing plan by citing noise of jets,” Globe and Mail, 16 March 1966, 29. 115 “Toronto Group Plans Malton Industry Site,” Globe and Mail, 2 April 1963, B2. The land cost nearly $10 million in 2016 dollars.

48 gradually transformed the built landscape around key airports into a locus of commercial and industrial activity.116 The most visible change to areas around major Canadian airports was the proliferation of hotels. Beginning around 1965 Toronto International Airport saw a significant surge in nearby hotels, especially along Airport Road, one of its main arteries, earning it the title of “airport strip”.117 By 1972, the value of hotels and restaurants that populated areas around that airport had grown to almost $100 million.118 Vancouver also experienced a frenzy of hotel construction near its airport, including the arrival of two major hotel chains, the Holiday Inn and the Hyatt.119 Developers felt hotels were a logical choice to locate near airports because they offered ways of escaping congestion for pleasure and business travellers alike. Hotels offered people with early morning flights the chance to arrive the night before and avoid the morning rush hour. Business travellers gravitated to hotels for the same reason, using them as meeting places so as to avoid going into the city altogether.120 Hotels near airports, in turn, frequently courted this demographic, often advertising themselves as business-friendly and promoting their large conference rooms that could accommodate hundreds of people and eliminate the need to commute to the city centre. “The downtown moves to the airport”, exclaimed an advertisement for the aptly named Downtowner Motor Inn, which opened near Toronto in 1971. “Our superb 270 rooms are here to spoil you (with another 330 to come)…[and meeting spaces] the ‘Golden Hall’ and ‘Mississauga Room’ can hardly wait to take all 960 of you!” (Figure 3)121 Echoing this message, the Montreal Aeroport Hilton beckoned business travellers to “stay with us – we’re right at the airport. So you can be in bed

116 There was a flurry of airport economic development studies in Canada during the 1970s. For example, see P.S. Ross and Partners, The Impact of Ottawa International Airport on the Regional Economy (Ottawa: 1976); McNeal, Hildebrand and Associates Ltd., A Study of the Economic Significance of Winnipeg Area Airports (Vancouver: 1976); IBI Group, The Economic Importance of Air Transportation in the Toronto Region (Toronto: 1979). 117 “5 more hotel-motels planned for ‘strip’ near Malton airport,” Toronto Star, 23 July 1968, 19; “Perspectives: Projects,” The Canadian Architect, April 1974, 5. 118 “Malton airport: 25% short of capacity even by the most frightening statistics,” Globe and Mail, 12 June 1972, 4. 119 V. Setty Pendakur, et al, Provincial and Municipal Policies: Access to Airport Vicinity (Ottawa: Ministry of Transport, Transportation Development Agency, 1972), 6. 120 Donald McNeill, “The airport hotel as business space,” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 91, 3 (2009), 219-228. 121 “Downtown moves to the airport on July 27th” Globe and Mail, 22 July 1971, B4.

49 minutes after you land. And if your plane back to Toronto is early morning, you won’t have to get up in the middle of the night to get out of Dorval.”122

Figure 3: Downtowner Motor Inn advertisement. Globe and Mail, 22 July 1971, B4.

122 “How to take a late plane to Montréal and still get a good night’s sleep,” Globe and Mail, 21 September 1971, B12.

50 The surge of hotels near major Canadian airports like Toronto and Montreal- Dorval underscored the fact that the postwar geography of convenience had begun to impact areas around major airports as their economic appeal became clear. It also showed that although airport redevelopment was largely incomplete and chaotic through the early 1970s, there were still opportunities for corporations and entrepreneurs to profit from jet age growth even as it strangled the nation’s major airports. For their part, federal officials and planners recognized this shifting reality at the time and used the regulatory tools at their disposal to create more favourable conditions for extracting greater profits from growing airports. Taken together, these efforts to pave the way for a smoother, shorter, and more convenient air travel experience illustrated an emerging national consensus that airports now offered value as both mass transport hubs and nodes of economic exchange and circulation.123

Jet Age Mega-Airports in Montreal and Toronto The federal government began to look closely at building new mega-airports in Montreal and Toronto even as it worked to redevelop other poorly functioning airports and alleviate growth pressures there.124 By the late 1960s, the Canadian federal government had concluded that Montreal and Toronto’s recent and forecasted air travel figures justified a second international airport in each city instead of expanding the existing airports. In Montreal, growth was strong at Dorval, that city’s primary airport for commercial travel, through the 1960s. Between 1963 and 1967, annual passenger air traffic at Dorval doubled from 2.5 million to 5 million, buoyed by strong gains in US- bound and other international travellers.125 Government officials pointed to these figures to state their case as well as recent federally commissioned studies of the city’s future air

123 Discussions about the commercial potential of airports only intensified in later years. For a case study, see Paul Richard Bennett, The impact of Toronto International Airport on the location of offices (Toronto: University of Toronto/York University Joint Program in Transportation, 1980). On the federal government’s move to commercialize Canadian airports in the late twentieth century, see also Mark Douglas Davis, “Changing Course: Commercializing Canadian Airport, Port and Rail Governance – 1975 to 2000,” PhD Thesis, Carleton University, 2016, 139-196. 124 Some of the remaining discussion in this chapter was originally published in a journal article. See Bret Edwards, “Breaking New Ground: Montreal-Mirabel International Airport, Mass Aeromobility, and Megaproject Development in 1960s and 1970s Canada,” Journal of Canadian Studies 50, 1 (Winter 2016), 3-33. 125 Cited in Government of Quebec, A territory: atlas of the airport region (: SATRA, Department of Municipal Affairs, 1973), 36.

51 traffic needs, which predicted Dorval would reach full capacity by 1985 due to projected annual growth rates of nearly 8%.126 At the time, moreover, Montreal was Canada’s international air hub, having greatly benefited from prevailing industry agreements that required virtually all Canada-bound international air flights to stop there.127 National and international airlines, however, had begun to see Toronto as a more attractive air hub by this time, a conclusion reinforced by higher annual growth during the 1960s than any other major commercial airport in the country. Between 1960 and 1969, Toronto International Airport experienced 13.7% average annual growth, largely due to an increase in leisure and recreational travel as well as more international routes and passengers.128 Nevertheless, the federal government initially considered expanding the airport, but local opposition and optimistic air traffic forecasts compelled them to support a new airport instead.129 Government studies predicated that exponential annual growth between 6.4% and 10.5% would occur until the end of the century, so that by 2000 Toronto would handle at least 60 million travellers, but possibly as many as 96 million or, according to one report, even 198 million.130 Once federal officials pivoted towards a new airport, meanwhile, they quietly shelved other government-commissioned reports that had recommended expansion instead of a new airport.131 Government and industry boosters then moved quickly to justify a new mega-airport for Toronto by

126 McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 154. Montreal-Dorval had recorded steady traffic increases during the 1960s, with the total number of takeoffs and landings at the airport increasing 28% between 1961 and 1966. See Roger Gosselin and Jean-Pierre Brassard, Mirabel (Toronto: Institute of Public Administration of Canada, 1977), I-2. 127 On the origins of air bilateral agreements, see David Mackenzie, Canada and International Civil Aviation, 1932-1948 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989). 128 Government of Canada, People and the New Toronto Airport (Ottawa: Transport Canada, 1972), 3. 129 Citizens’ organizations in and around Mississauga, including the Society for Aircraft Noise Abatement, opposed expansion over fears it would generate an increased noise footprint locally. On the Society for Aircraft Noise Abatement’s efforts to mobilize against expansion, see Elliot J. Feldman, The Politics of Canadian Airport Development: Lessons for Federalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1983), 83. 130 Government of Canada, People and the New Toronto Airport, 7. The 60 million forecast is cited in Sandra Budden and Joseph Ernst, Movable Airport: The Politics of Government Planning (Toronto: Hakkert, 1973), 6. The 60 million, 96 million, and 198 million forecasts and the details of the reports that provided them are cited in Diamond and Myers, Pickering Impact Study: Volume 2 – Study Report (Toronto: Diamond Myers, 1974), 25. The Diamond and Myers report concluded that annual passenger volume would not eclipse 40 million by 2000. 131 The Parkin Master Plan of 1967 recommended expanding Toronto International Airport to accommodate expected increases in air traffic. It called for the acquisition of additional 3,000 acres of land, construction of a new parallel runway, new land zoning to protect development in flight paths, and new access roads. See Budden and Ernst, Movable Airport, 4-5.

52 arguing that overcrowding at Toronto International Airport had reached a critical, almost anarchic point that expansion could simply not resolve. As one planner at the time said: The public are [sic] not aware of the interlinkages, don’t understand how fragile the fabric of society is. They showed us a film with rats in enclosures and at first they were living quiet and peaceful and then it got more crowded and more crowded and they began to eat each other, and they got apathetic. Because it was too crowded you had a total breakdown. You can see something like that at times at Malton.132

Federal officials moved ahead with Montreal’s new airport first. After months of studying dozens of possible sites, in late March 1969 the Liberal government under Pierre Trudeau announced it had selected the village of Sainte-Scholastique, more than fifty kilometres northwest of downtown Montreal, and planned to build a fixed rail link to connect it to both the city centre and Dorval.133 Federal officials claimed the new airport would “meet the [air travel] needs of the foreseeable future” and expressed the belief that it would be Montreal’s international airport and Canada’s primary trans-border and trans- oceanic node for the jet age.134 Soon after, Transport Canada expropriated 97,000 acres of land in and around Sainte-Scholastique to build the airport as well as permit future expansion and facilitate ancillary development on site.135 This singular act made Mirabel not only many times larger than other national airports, but also the biggest airport project in the world at the time by a wide margin. Toronto International Airport, the next largest Canadian airport, occupied 4,000 acres, and Montreal-Dorval covered only 3,500 acres.136 Equally significant was how the federal government made Mirabel’s scale possible. The expropriation order marked the first time in Canada that the state had

132 Walter Stewart, Paper Juggernaut (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979), 81. 133 Sainte-Scholastique had emerged the winner even though it was not the first choice of either the federal or Quebec government. On the selection process, which I will not discuss here, see McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 154-56; Stewart, Paper Juggernaut, 25-34; and Suzanne Laurin, L’échiquier de Mirabel (Montréal: Boréal, 2012), 111-118. Stewart and Laurin are very critical of the federal decision. 134 McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 154. Officials expected Mirabel would handle all of Montreal’s international flights by 1985. See Pigott, Gateways: Airports of Canada, 99. Criteria for the new airport included ease of access to Dorval, economic potential for the greater Montreal region, and construction cost. See New Montreal International Airport Project Office (NMIAPO), New Montreal International Airport Project: Information Dossier (Montreal: New Montreal International Airport Project Office, 1971), 1. 135 Gosselin and Brassard, Mirabel, II-2. 136 “Malton airport: 25% short of capacity even by the most frightening statistics,” Globe and Mail, 12 June 1972, 4; Stewart, Paper Juggernaut, 31, 55.

53 expropriated surplus land to build an airport, affecting almost 10,000 people across fourteen towns and villages on the designated lands.137 The government planned to carry out the expropriation in phases, with some told to immediately vacate their homes, while others could remain as tenants until the airport needed their land. Officials marked just 17,000 acres of the expropriated total for the first phase of airport construction; the rest was to be held for future expansion in several phases or opened to redevelopment. Initially, Mirabel was to operate with two runways, a 940,000 square foot terminal capable of handling six million passengers a year, and 20 to 24 gates, making it a sizable airport on that basis alone.138 The airport, however, would dwarf its peers following additional construction phases projected for the coming decades. In its finished form, it would have six runways, six air terminals, and a total of 150 gates projected to handle more than twenty million passengers annually by 2000.139 These were incredibly rosy figures, underscoring the optimism government and industry boosters had in Mirabel’s potential to tap the growing international air market. The Trudeau government finalized plans for the new Toronto airport a few years later. In early March 1972, it selected Pickering Township, forty kilometres east of Toronto, to be the new airport site even after allegedly removing it from consideration early in the process because it did not meet most of the selection criteria.140 The new airport, slated to open in 1978 or 1979, would be linked to Toronto by a rapid transit line from the city centre and by two four-lane highways, alongside the existing Highway 401. Like Mirabel, officials wanted Pickering to be an unprecedentedly large airport and followed the same approach of expropriating a sizable chunk of local land to build it. They set aside 18,000 acres for the airport itself, as well as another 25,000 acres south of the airport for a new city, the North Pickering Community, which would grow to 150,000

137 The expropriation order entailed the largest planned forced removal of people since the Acadian Deportations in the eighteenth century. “It’s our new airport, but their homes and fields,” Montreal Gazette, 11 August 1970, 3. 138 NMIAPO, New Montreal International Airport Project: Information Dossier, 4; NMIAPO, Map of Phase I, New Montreal International Airport, Mirabel, Quebec (Ottawa: Transport Canada, Information Services, 1974). 139 Government of Canada, Keeping Canada one step ahead: The New Montreal International Airport at Mirabel, Quebec (Ottawa: Transport Canada, 1973), 14. 140 Pickering had allegedly been ruled out as a plausible location early in the decision-making process only to be later re-inserted and selected using some questionable analysis and data. For a critical take on the site selection process, see Budden and Ernst, The Movable Airport, 95-133.

54 people, mainly from the airport’s commercial development of the area, over the next twenty years.141 Once fully built, Pickering would have up to four runways and become the city’s primary international air hub, leaving Toronto International Airport to handle most of the domestic and trans-border flights.142 Government officials were optimistic that Pickering would more than pay for itself. They estimated total costs, including the airport, land, and highway and rapid transit links, between $750 million and $1 billion, but predicted a significant return on these considerable expenses.143 Federal Transport Minister Don Jamieson claimed airport construction would employ about 1,000 workers, and that the two Toronto airports would together directly employ 20,000 people by the late 1970s and more than 35,000 ten years later.144 His successor, Jean Marchand, was equally rosy, predicting that the new airport would create 10,000 on-site jobs and an additional 10,000 jobs in the wider area, a figure that could increase to 16,000 and 20,000 respectively five years after completion.145 As with Mirabel, the size, cost, and buoyant predictions about Pickering showed that many government officials and airport planners had concluded, however erroneously, that air travel was destined for several decades more of unrestrained growth. Different forces steered the government towards mega-airports by the end of the 1960s. First, jumbo jets, the next generation of jet aircraft slated to arrive in 1970, forced strategists to rethink how airports would handle aircraft that were a considerable upgrade – in length, weight, and speed – over earlier generation jets.146 As a result, planners had to become vigilant about installing landscape features at airports that were optimal for these

141 “Airport plan to create city of 150,000,” Toronto Star, 3 March 1972, 1. In 1971, the Ontario government had announced plans to create two new towns, Cedarwood and Brock, near Pickering. They proceeded to combine them as the North Pickering Community after the airport was announced one year later. See Diamond and Myers, Pickering Impact Study: Volume 2 – Study Report, 16. 142 Stewart, Paper Juggernaut, 79. 143 “Pickering site for airport,” Toronto Star, 3 March 1972, 2. These figures equate to between $4.4 billion and $5.9 billion in 2016 dollars. 144 Toronto Area Airports System, Financial Implications of the New Toronto Airport (Ottawa: Transport Canada, 1972), included in Transport Canada, Information Kit about Malton and the New Toronto International Airport at Pickering (Ottawa: Department of Transport, Air Services, 1972). See also “Jamieson predicts investment profit in new airport,” Toronto Star, 15 June 1972, 4. 145 Government of Canada, New Toronto International Airport – Pickering: A Plan for the Future (Ottawa: Transport Canada, Public Affairs Branch, 1975), 19. 146 The first jumbo jet, the Boeing 747, entered service in 1970. It was 231 feet long, 63 feet high and had a 196-foot wingspan. On the jumbo jet and its international impact on airports and airport planning, see Alastair Gordon, Naked Airport: a Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), 240-261.

55 jets. These included longer runways, short-cropped glass blade length to deter bird nesting, and a flatter, tree-less landscape to allow control towers and landing aircraft to have unbroken natural sightlines.147 Moreover, as Chapter 2 will discuss, rising citizen complaints about aircraft noise in urban and suburban areas had begun to raise questions about the impact of airports in local environments. Aided by favourable municipal land- use policies and the availability of cheap agricultural land, postwar developers had built new suburbs on city fringes to attract car-owning families, placing some new neighbourhoods in greater proximity to busy airports. Community complaints about jet noise and public opposition to airport expansion projects subsequently rose in the 1960s, prompting a flurry of federal noise studies and stricter noise restrictions and curfews at specific airports, including Montreal-Dorval.148 Observing these developments, industry experts concluded that new airports ideally had to be larger and more isolated in space. J.R. Pickersgill, president of the Canadian Transport Commission and former Minister of Transport, was one convert. In 1968, anticipating future growth in Calgary and Edmonton, he predicted that they would soon be jointly served by one supersonic mega-airport located between the two cities and linked to each by high-speed trains.149 Airport planning discourse at the time also began to emphasize new airports, more land, and stronger governmental regulation as the key to harnessing future growth. In 1970, D.R. Hemming, a national air transport analyst, observed: New airports will require from 10,000 to 20,000 acres of land area depending on the ultimate capacity of the airport system and the aircraft movements generated. However, to ensure zoning control for land use compatibility, particularly within the dictates of the acoustical environment, it is desirable that direct control be obtained over a far greater area.150

These experts effectively endorsed expropriation as being in a major airport’s long-term interests, a view that became critical to the mega-airport vision in Canada. By carrying out a massive expropriation of local land in Pickering, and especially, Sainte-

147 Dennis Cosgrove, “Airport/Landscape,” in James Corner, ed., Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 223-226. 148 Feldman, The Politics of Canadian Airport Development, 83-163. 149 “Alberta: An airport is in the air,” Globe and Mail, 1 June 1968, 8. 150 D.R. Hemming, “Air Transport Facilities Planning in Canada,” Canadian Aeronautics and Space Journal, January 1970, 4.

56 Scholastique, the Canadian government and its partners made clear their intention to create and heavily regulate an aviation-friendly geography that would mitigate or altogether eliminate impediments to the airport’s future expansion.151 This meant that although Mirabel, and to a lesser extent, Pickering, would not be encircled by suburban neighbourhoods like older airports in Canada and other places, they would paradoxically wield a larger socio-spatial impact than their peers because their arrival required a rethinking of local geographical conditions. New issues and conflicts engulfing existing national airports thus helped convince officials, planners, and experts to sanction an enlarged airport footprint for Mirabel and Pickering based on substantially reconfiguring the relationship between airports and the surrounding environment.

Mirabel and Mega-Airport Planning Mirabel and Pickering were quintessential airport mega-projects that emerged just as public resistance grew in the late 1960s and early 1970s towards mega-projects and the pro-growth politics on which they were based. The burgeoning environmental movement in North America and rising urban civic activism had begun to fuel more public concerns about the socio-environmental costs of large-scale infrastructure projects as well as the wisdom of the techno-scientific gaze more generally.152 Public resistance helped defeat Pickering, but not Mirabel. Mirabel’s architects, however, were not ignorant of these developments. Although they continued to align their ideas for the airport with pro- growth ideology, they did demonstrate an awareness of emergent socio-environmental critiques and tried to appropriate them within their own rhetoric when presenting their plans to the public. As a result, Mirabel emerged within a somewhat fluid urban planning context, straddling the line between an era of unparalleled mega-project dominance and a time of growing civic backlash against their perceived societal costs.

151 David Pascoe, Airspaces (London: Reaktion, 2001), 96-99. 152 Arn Keeling, “Sink or Swim: Water Pollution and Environmental Politics in Vancouver, 1889-1975,” BC Studies 142/143 (2004), 69-101; Steve Penfold, “Are we to go literally to the hot dogs? Parking Lots, Drive-ins, and the Critique of Progress in Toronto’s Suburbs, 1965-1975,” Urban History Review 33 (1): 8- 23; Catherine Carstairs and Rachel Elder, “Expertise, Health, and Popular Opinion: Debating Water Fluoridation, 1945-1980,” Canadian Historical Review 89, 3 (2008), 345-371; Danielle Robinson, “Modernism at a Crossroad: The Spadina Expressway Controversy in Toronto, Ontario ca. 1960-1971,” Canadian Historical Review 92, 2 (2011), 295-322.

57 Mirabel was a heavily state-sponsored enterprise from the beginning, with government officials and an array of experts heading an extensive administrative system that was created after the site selection in March 1969. In a general sense, the federal government and Quebec governments, under first the Union-Nationale and later the Liberals, elected in 1970, undertook measures to advance and consolidate this ambitious public works project and “plan the development of the territory around it in a rational and orderly manner”.153 Quebec amalgamated the airport lands in December 1970 as the municipality of Sainte-Scholastique before later changing the name to Mirabel, and also created Service d’aménagement du territoire de la région aéroportuaire (SATRA), an agency charged with developing the new municipality.154 In 1970, meanwhile, the federal government organized a working group of inter-governmental specialists and dozens of university and private sector consultants that soon became the New Montreal International Airport Project Office (NMIAPO), which was responsible for managing the entire airport project.155 The NMIAPO and SATRA were two of thirteen inter- government agencies specially created to plan and build the airport, bringing a strong bureaucratic flavour to the process.156 With so many governmental bodies and agencies on board, Mirabel was undeniably a heavily state-sponsored and technocratic project. The federal government, in concert with NMIAPO, radically reworked its planning strategies and practices for Mirabel, imagining the airport as one that would define its local geography, not be defined by it. Land-use policies around airports became a special focus of concern as this gaze took hold. W.H.S. Neales, manager of airport planning for the New Montreal International Airport Project, which oversaw Mirabel’s development, concurred with this sentiment: “zoning bylaws, or maybe more accurately the lack of them, have permitted developments which are not compatible with airport operations, and have imposed new limitations on the continued or expanded development capability.”157 Expropriation offered the federal government the means to control

153 Government of Quebec, Planning the Airport Region: Information Bulletin (Quebec City: Service de l’amenagement du Territoire de la Region Aéroportuaire de Mirabel, 1973), 61. 154 Government of Quebec, Planning the Airport Region, 61; Government of Quebec, A territory: atlas of the airport region, 46. 155 Government of Canada, Keeping Canada one step ahead, 23. 156 Government of Quebec, Planning the Airport Region, 67-71. 157 W.H.S. Neales, “Decision Making in Airport Planning and Design,” in Readings in Airport Planning: a Series of Lectures. Presented by the Centre for Urban and Community Studies and the Department of Civil

58 surrounding development and reconstruct a local geography favourable for Mirabel to realize its operational and economic potential. As landowner, the government claimed the right to enact whatever zoning measures it saw fit irrespective of existing legislation.158 As Chapter 2 will discuss in more detail, it do so by hiring noise specialists to test anticipated noise levels at the airport in conjunction with other studies occurring in Vancouver and Toronto. Officials used the results to map the expropriated area around Mirabel airport proper as a series of noise contours based on the noise levels emitted by arriving and departing aircraft. Transport Canada then enacted strict zoning laws prohibiting residential development entirely in high noise contours, most of which extended several kilometres from the end of each runway.159 Provincial officials also extended land-use prohibitions outside the expropriated area. Fearing bird strikes on aircraft, the Quebec government prohibited any activities that might attract birds and other wildlife to Mirabel, including picnicking, outdoor food storage, solid waste disposal sites, and agricultural practices like ripening corn. It also imposed restrictions on building heights and cladding to avoid interference with the airport runways, their approach paths, and navigational instruments – like beacons and radar – lining the grounds.160 The key to these measures was refashioning the local environment around the airport for both safety and economic reasons. With these regulations, Mirabel could function as a smartly planned air transport hub and jet age public investment. The NMIAPO echoed this sentiment in 1971, declaring: “public control of land…is aimed at preventing the development of residential communities, thereby ensuring the maximum effectiveness of public investment in the airport…Government prevention of incompatible land uses and activities not only protect the airport, but also the individual citizen who might be involved in these activities”.161 Expropriation was thus fastened to a techno-scientific planning gaze that had migrated to

Engineering, University of Toronto. (University of Toronto: Centre for Urban and Community Studies, 1972), 9. 158 Walter Stewart speculated that the federal government expropriated so much land because it did not trust Quebec to use its power to enact new zoning regulations around the airport. See Stewart, Paper Juggernaut, 31. 159 Government of Canada, Keeping Canada one step ahead, 16. 160 Government of Quebec, Planning the Airport Region, 24-25. 161 NMIAPO, The Use and Management of Land in the Vicinity of the New Montreal International Airport based on Technical Airport Considerations (Ottawa: Transport Canada, 1971), 4.

59 airport development and saw the accumulation of surplus land as the most practical solution for ensuring airports could grow indefinitely into the future. The NMIAPO and other project groups applied a similar gaze when looking at the airport as a space that would process and move people and planes. Officials believed that a user-friendly approach would achieve “the speed and efficiency which both carriers and customers now demand”.162 Mirroring airport-planning strategies elsewhere in North America and Europe, they focused heavily on counteracting the enormity of Mirabel’s terminal, seeking to give people the impression that Mirabel’s terminal was smaller than it appeared and that little physical effort would be required to reach awaiting aircraft.163 To that end, Passenger Transfer Vehicles (PTVs) – then in use at only a handful of North American airports – would transport people from the terminal building to awaiting aircraft parked on the tarmac and elevate them to the plane. Travelling at 15 miles per hour, PTVs were 50 feet long by 15 feet wide and capable of handling up to 150 passengers. With these in use, officials expected passengers would endure shorter walking distances to aircraft and airlines would experience fewer delays in operations.164 At the same time, however, the amount of traveller waiting, or “dwell time”, at major airports had lengthened considerably by the late 1960s and early 1970s, forcing the NMIAPO to engineer an air terminal layout that blended logistical efficiency with traveller convenience in other ways.165 Some of these resulting measures included locating so-called “demand” services, like bars, cafeterias, and newsstands, on the busy main floor of the terminal, and providing more amenities, such as a bank, foreign exchange counter, duty free shop, and information kiosk.166 Canadian Architect’s praise for Mirabel focused on highlighting the terminal’s passenger-friendly character in relation to other airports: “with its lofty space…Mirabel is a understated achievement, and a simple, well-executed design that is contrary to the landscape of hysteria at

162 Government of Quebec, Montreal-Mirabel: The Largest Airport Complex in the World, North Atlantic Gateway in Quebec (Québec: éditeur official du Québec, 1975), 21. 163 Schwartz, “LAX: Designing for the Jet Age,” 164-170. 164 Government of Canada, Keeping Canada one step ahead, 18-19. 165 Mark Salter, “The Global Airport,” in Mark Salter, ed., Politics at the Airport (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 1-25; Justine Lloyd, “Dwelltime: Airport technology, travel and consumption,” Space and Culture 6, 2 (2003), 93-109. 166 Government of Canada, Keeping Canada one step ahead, 13, 17. On the proliferation of airport services in recent decades, see Hugh Pearman, Airports: A Century of Architecture (London: Laurence King, 2004), 212-233.

60 Heathrow or many other airports. It is, in some ways, an example of what should have been done at Toronto’s Terminal 2, known to millions of passengers as the waiting room to hell.”167 Although boosters endorsed a pro-growth vision for Mirabel that emphasized how and why expropriation benefited the airport’s future operational needs, they did so in ways not entirely consistent with earlier rhetorical framings in the postwar era. With civic critiques of progress and development on the rise by the early 1970s, the Trudeau government and its partners tried to anticipate and mollify people’s concerns by making a greater effort to actually sell Mirabel’s merits to the public and present themselves and their notion of expertise and knowledge as socio-environmentally progressive. In many respects, project leaders downplayed the local impact of a new airport and went to great lengths to characterize the expropriation as part of a sensitive, balanced planning vision that was more conciliatory than disruptive. Federal officials believed they could simultaneously prioritize Mirabel’s operational needs and pursue land-use strategies in the area that attached equal value to other people, systems, and things. For example, Transport Canada went so far as to contribute $100,000 to a National Research Council- sponsored study of the ecology of the expropriated lands.168 The Quebec government also declared that the “army of experts” behind Mirabel were attentive to “the balance of nature so that Mirabel, symbol of progress, would not be the cause of irreversible destructive processes or of a degradation of the environment. Montréal-Mirabel may well serve as a model of a harmonious integration with the environment”.169 Even as officials tried to deploy socio-environmental rhetoric more in step with the times, they retained elements that underscored the gendered nature of modernity. Postwar pro-growth visions closely intersected with normative masculinity, with male expertise and labour constructed as especially desirable for managing the risks that came from controlling and reshaping nature along techno-scientific lines.170 Officials folded this gendered language into the Mirabel vision, imagining the airport primarily as a product of manly politics and planning. One Mirabel publicity image captured this sensibility,

167 “Passenger Terminal Building, New Montreal International Airport, Mirabel,” The Canadian Architect, June 1976, 28. 168 Government of Canada, Keeping Canada one step ahead, 21. 169 Government of Quebec, Montreal-Mirabel: The Largest Airport Complex in the World, 19. 170 Dummit, The Manly Modern, 1-27.

61 showing a group of blueprint- and tool-wielding men against the backdrop of the new airport, surrounded by a busy, but unobtrusive roadway and intersected by farmland and green space. Two women are also pictured in the image, but they are positioned behind the men, a placement that suggested deference to male leadership (Figure 4). Framed by a deeply gendered pro-growth outlook, the Mirabel mega-project thus emerged at a time when its ideological signposts displayed signs of change and continuity.

Figure 4: Male expertise and the jet age mega-airport. Government of Quebec, Montreal- Mirabel: The Largest Airport Complex in the World, 19.

62 Mirabel and 1960s and 1970s Quebec and Montreal Broader institutional forces informed how Mirabel as mega-airport took shape. Able to agree that Mirabel had to be a growth-focused public mega-project, officials and planners had to also negotiate other developments in the local, provincial, and national arena that coloured their strategies and approaches towards the airport. Mirabel crystallized in the wake of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, emerging at a time of growing tensions between Quebec and Canada and amidst significant transformation to Montreal’s urban landscape. While rapid changes to Quebec and Montreal during the 1960s and early 1970s helped fuel the federal decision to build Mirabel in the first place, they also coloured federal and provincial discourse and played a key role in framing ideas about the kind of relationship Mirabel would enjoy with its host city, Montreal. In other words, these historical processes complicated the politics of airport development by encouraging Mirabel’s various boosters to see the airport in ways that squarely aligned with their own interests. Deciding to build the airport in the Sainte-Scholastique area proved especially contentious in Quebec. The Union-Nationale government, led by Premier Jean-Jacques Bertrand, was initially strongly critical of the site choice. Its resistance reflected the province’s deteriorating relationship with English Canada and the federal government by the 1960s, much of which was shaped by the effects of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. Launched in 1960 by newly elected Liberal Premier Jean Lesage, the Quiet Revolution was a campaign led by the Quebec government to modernize, secularize and empower the province under the slogan “maitre chez nous” (masters of our own house).171 This was a complex set of developments that not only entailed dismantling a politico-economic order dominated by the anglophone business elite and the anti-modern Catholic Church, which had prevailed in Quebec for decades and been bolstered by the reign of Premier Maurice Duplessis, who held power for a total of eighteen years until his death in 1959.172 It also meant reemphasizing Quebec’s historically French character by strengthening measures within Quebec to protect francophone language and cultural rights, including making French the official language of business and communication, while advocating

171 On Jean Lesage and the Quiet Revolution, see John Dickinson and Brian Young, A Short , 3rd edition (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 305-344. 172 Jacques Rouillard, “Duplessis: Quebec turns right,” in Michael D. Behiels and Matthew Hayday, eds., Contemporary Quebec: Selected readings and commentaries (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 17-30.

63 more strongly within the federal system for recognition of Quebec’s distinct identity.173 Scholars have debated the origins and precise nature of the Quiet Revolution, but the key dynamic at play with Mirabel was a more assertive state committed to nationalist economic and cultural development. Federal-provincial disagreements that would arise over Mirabel, then, sprang from the Quiet Revolution and the Quebec government becoming a vehicle of neo-nationalist modernization. Quebec’s frustration was apparent after Trudeau announced in 1969 that Montreal’s second international airport would be built at Sainte-Scholastique. The Union- Nationale government argued that the airport had to meet Quebec’s economic needs above all else and advocated the Saint-Jean region, southeast of Montreal, as the most attractive site choice.174 It claimed that Sainte-Scholastique’s northwest location and relative proximity to Ontario meant the airport’s economic impact would spill across the provincial border, depriving Quebec of some of the benefits of the airport. Robert Lussier, Quebec’s Minister of Municipal Affairs, called the Sainte-Scholastique choice “dictatorial jest”, claiming that the province had little input in the decision.175 Premier Bertrand was equally upset, decrying the site choice as a federal “coup de force en vue d'imposer au Québec une décision qui lui est inacceptable parce qu'elle est loin d'être la plus favorable à son développement”.176 Choosing Sainte-Scholastique, then, struck the Quebec government as profoundly unfair for the province while providing clear evidence of federal favouritism towards Ontario. The federal Liberals disagreed, arguing that Bertrand and his supporters were misinformed and irresponsibly fanning the flames of Quebec nationalism with their comments, which was a disingenuous stance since government officials privately favoured Sainte-Scholastique because it was closer to Ottawa than other possible sites.177 Prime Minister Trudeau called Bertrand’s remarks “particularly odious” and questioned if he was “off his rocker” for making them. Trudeau added that “to say…that only the provincial government can look after the interest of the province of Quebec, and that we

173 Kenneth McRoberts, Quebec: Social Change and Political Crisis (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1980). 174 Laurin, L’échiquier de Mirabel, 114. 175 “Jetport assault renewed,” Montreal Gazette, 22 April 1969, 1. 176 “Etat de guerre entre Québec et Ottawa,” La Presse, 1 April 1969, 1. 177 Laurin, L’échiquier de Mirabel, 115.

64 here in Ottawa are doing all we can to injure the province of Quebec is to me in the area of, not only fantasy, but it is even insulting”.178 These comments were in line with Trudeau’s growing desire to make the federal government more central in Quebec and show a greater sensitivity to its priorities in the wake of the Quiet Revolution.179 Unconvinced, the Bertrand government doggedly challenged the selection logistics in subsequent months, going so far as to declare a full provincial inquiry into the site choice in June 1969.180 Bertrand relented and finally endorsed Mirabel in March 1970, but only after Ottawa threatened to complete the project itself and isolate Quebec by assuming the province’s responsibility to build access roads and provide services to the airport area.181 Although federal and provincial officials clashed over the site choice, they did display an uneasy truce in agreeing that Mirabel’s economic impact would be wide- ranging. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau called Mirabel “a project for the 21st century” that would handle 25,000 passengers and 3.265 million cargo kilograms a day by 1985. Transport Minister Jean Marchand similarly proclaimed the airport would create 75,000 to 100,000 construction jobs alone and attract industry and enterprises to a future commercial “park” on the airport grounds.182 In spite of its early reservations, the Quebec government shelved concerns about the Sainte-Scholastique site and began to more actively promote the airport by deploying similarly optimistic economic rhetoric, particularly after the Liberals defeated the Union-Nationale in the 1970 provincial election. Provincial officials projected Mirabel would generate 4,000 direct jobs in 1975, 14,000 by 1985, and 35,000 by 2000, with an additional 2,000 indirect jobs created in 1975 and 17,000 by 2000.183 Quebec also forecasted significant suburban development between Mirabel and Montreal fuelled by public and private investment. Drawn by the lure of jobs and other new amenities, Quebec expected 250,000 new residents to settle in the area; several housing projects were underway even before the airport opened,

178 “PM defends jetport choice,” Montreal Gazette, 1 April 1969, 1; “Trudeau attacks Bertrand anew,” 2 April 1969, 1. 179 Kenneth McRoberts, Misconceiving Canada: The Struggle for National Unity (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997), 31-76. 180 “Jetport hassle continues,” Montreal Gazette, 11 June, 1969, 1. 181 “Airport talks: Quebec willing to reconsider,” Montreal Gazette, 23 January 1970, 8; “Quebec gives in on jetport; will co-operate reluctantly,” Montreal Gazette, 12 March 1970, 1. 182 “Choice for jetport to spawn huge road network,” Montreal Gazette, 28 March 1969, 2. Figure converted from tons in original source. 183 Government of Quebec, Planning the Airport Region, 28.

65 including a $50 million, 2,000-unit development in Laval-sur-le-Lac, and a $183 million, 5,500-unit project in Sainte-Rose.184 The province even went so far as to boldly claim that expropriated homeowners who converted to tenancy would reap an economic windfall by using monies obtained from the sale of their land to purchase more advanced farming equipment, leading to a rise in productivity.185 Quebec also had sky-high expectations about Mirabel’s marketability to investors, pursuing a business-friendly strategy heralding the airport as a future economic behemoth. Provincial representatives anticipated the proposed airport industrial park – initially slated to be 700 acres with the possibility of expansion to 2,000 – would attract “international clientele, high technology industries oriented towards air cargo [and]…industries with large space requirements”. The park would in turn brighten Quebec’s economic prospects, with one government estimate projecting that over 200 firms employing a total of 20,000 workers would eventually operate there.186 Boosters also pointed to the absence of a late-night curfew at Mirabel, made possible by the strict zoning restrictions in place around the airport, as a boon to commercial interests, allowing the airport to accommodate more flights without operational interruptions and therefore “eliminate costly waste of time”.187 For government and its allies, Mirabel was a future “economic magnet” that would put industry “within reach of the sky” once integrated within a wider geography and economy.188 With Mirabel, planners and strategists thus imagined the airport would be a mechanism of commercial exchange as much as a modern infrastructure of mobility, equipped to lure a sea of business and investment while simultaneously processing millions of international travellers each year. The Mirabel vision contained another layer that was simultaneously more locally and globally focused than some of these pronouncements. More specifically, it took shape as Montreal underwent a significant identity shift by the end of the 1960s, transforming from Canada’s financial and industrial centre into Quebec’s international

184 “Government outlay at Mirabel triggers North Shore bonanza,” Montreal Gazette, 20 December 1974, 13. 185 Government of Quebec, Planning the Airport Region, 27. 186 Government of Quebec, Planning the Airport Region, 38; Government of Quebec, Montreal-Mirabel: The Largest Airport Complex in the World, 25; “Government outlay at Mirabel triggers North Shore bonanza,” Montreal Gazette, 20 December 1974, 13. 187 Government of Quebec, The Largest Airport Complex in the World, 27. 188 Government of Quebec, The Largest Airport Complex in the World, 25.

66 metropolis. Once the national hub of commerce and exchange, Montreal had gradually lost this position to Toronto as the twentieth century progressed. By the First World War, improved transportation and communication links had made Toronto’s proximity to the Great Lakes and western provinces more attractive to business, and the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959, which allowed ship traffic to bypass Montreal, accelerated the city’s relative industrial decline.189 Corporations continued to leave Montreal during the Quiet Revolution as the Lesage government heavily curtailed the power of Anglophone business interests, notably by nationalizing Hydro-Québec, the province’s electricity utility, in 1963. Moreover, Montreal soon became the epicentre of a burgeoning Quebec sovereignty movement, seeing a rise in urban social activism and political violence led by individuals and groups who looked to the global postcolonial struggle for inspiration and drew from ideas of empire to critique Quebec as a colonized society under English domination.190 But even as Montreal’s national influence declined over the 1960s, its global reputation steadily rose during the decade, a process fuelled by large-scale urban revitalization and development. Beginning in 1960, a group of local political and business leaders, led by Mayor Jean Drapeau, elected again that year after an earlier term in the mid-1950s, embarked on an aggressive program to make Montreal an international metropolis in the post-Quiet Revolution era. Drapeau and his supporters were adamant that Montreal’s best days were not behind it, pointing not only to favourable population forecasts projecting Montreal’s population of over two million would triple by 2000, but also to its selection as the host city for Expo ‘67.191 Moreover, Drapeau directed his gaze outward, seeing Montreal’s global reach as the key to future prosperity at a time of greater interconnectedness. Envisioning Montreal “as a world-class renowned modern metropolis”, Drapeau made clear his belief that the city’s future lay not in luring back business from Toronto, but in cultivating its new status to the world.192

189 Annick Germain and Damaris Rose, Montreal: The Quest for a Metropolis (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000), 29-31; André Lortie, ed., The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2004), 76. 190 Mills, The Empire Within; Marc Levine, The Reconquest of Montreal: Language Policy and Social Change in a Bilingual City (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). 191 Lortie, ed., The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big, 26, 52-53, 77; Germain and Rose, Montreal: The Quest for a Metropolis, 99. 192 Germain and Rose, Montreal: The Quest for a Metropolis, 67.

67 Influenced by the same techno-scientific, pro-growth outlook that had come to guide other governments across Canada and North America, the Drapeau regime turned to mega-project development to mobilize its vision of modernizing Montreal and enhancing its global appeal. Preparing for a surge in tourists and investors from Expo ‘67 and seeking to woo even more after the fact, Montreal’s politicians and planners initiated an array of urban infrastructure projects that would make the city more modern and easier to traverse. Glistening skyscrapers mirroring international architectural forms began to dot downtown Montreal, most notably Place Ville-Marie’s cruciform tower, which was part of a multifunctional development inaugurated in 1962 that housed office space, 150 shops, parking levels, and an outdoor public plaza.193 Meanwhile, a multi-modal transportation network soon intersected and surrounded the city, as the Drapeau government built both auto expressways linking Montreal to its outer areas and began construction on an underground Metro system in 1962.194 These efforts accelerated in the early 1970s once Montreal had been awarded the 1976 Summer Olympics, a surprising win that further bolstered its world credibility.195 Mirabel, then, arrived at a time when Montreal was in the midst of a stunning urban rebrand as part of a comprehensive strategy to modernize the city and expand its international footprint. Montreal’s transformation into an international metropolis substantially influenced the Mirabel vision. Encouraged by municipal officials, many of the airport’s boosters, particularly in Quebec, concluded that Mirabel should embody its host city’s newfound stylishness and urbanity in the post-Quiet Revolution era. To that end, they concluded that Mirabel’s narrative of jet age progress had to be disconnected from Sainte-Scholastique’s historical identity. This process started with naming the airport. Mirabel came from its municipal namesake, which the Quebec government formed in December 1972 after amalgamating Sainte-Scholastique and thirteen other towns and

193 Don Nerbas, “William Zeckendorf, Place Ville-Marie, and the Making of Modern Montreal,” Urban History Review 43, 2 (2015), 5-25. 194 Jean-Claude Marsan, Montreal in Evolution: Historical Analysis of the Development of Montreal’s Architecture and Urban Environment (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1981), 358-362; Claire Poitras, “A City on the Move: The Surprising Consequences of Highways,” in Stephane Castonguay and Michele Dagenais, eds., Metropolitan Natures: Environmental Histories of Montreal (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), 168-183. 195 “Montreal wins bid for 1976 Olympics: scores upset over Moscow,” Globe and Mail, 13 May 1970, 1.

68 villages in and around the airport lands.196 Named after the new municipality, Mirabel thus signified a complete break with Sainte-Scholastique’s rural, agricultural character in favour of modernizing the local landscape around a lucrative international airport to bring it in step with global modernity.197 “The future of Mirabel bears little relationship to its past,” a provincial publication stated. “It was a collection of rural parishes and villages, but now has been plunged into its role as a City, accommodating an international airport and important industrial developments”.198 As a result, naming Mirabel in this way partially rewrote the local historical narrative, marginalizing the region’s pastoral past by severing it from a transitory present and anticipated future now firmly controlled by the airport’s fate. Moreover, officials, particularly in Quebec, believed Mirabel would accelerate Montreal’s global rise, projecting that the airport and city would mutually reinforce and bolster the other’s status and power. This logic underlined a growing awareness amongst those involved with the project that airports held enormous commercial potential, capable of acting as fixed sites that would facilitate the rapid circulation of capital, goods, and bodies across far-flung borders.199 It also suggested that many of Mirabel’s boosters believed the airport would induce more people outside Canada to associate Montreal and its residents with being modern and global.200 “A great international airport needs to have a close tie with a great international city”, one Quebec government publication declared, adamantly concluding that Montreal fit this description as a “tourist Mecca” and “one of the great cities of the Western world”. This was an advantageous position that left Montreal and Mirabel “as the shortest bridge between two continents and the juncture of the waterways, railways and highways of Northeastern America.201 Another provincial government publicity image (Figure 5) captured this sentiment, showing an incoming

196 Laurin, L’échiquier de Mirabel, 39-40, 49. 197 This was a favoured technique of planners influenced by high-modernism and pro-growth ideology in postwar Canada. See Loo, “People In The Way: Modernity, Environment, and Society on the Arrow Lakes,” 168-181. 198 Government of Quebec, Planning the Airport Region, 29. 199 David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (London: Verso, 2006), 78, 101. 200 Vanessa Schwartz explores a similar idea in France during the planning of Paris-Orly International Airport in the late 1950s. See Schwartz, “Dimanche À Orly: The Jet-Age Airport and the Spectacle of Technology between Sky and Earth,” 29-30. 201 Government of Quebec, Montreal-Mirabel: The Largest Airport Complex in the World, 7, 11.

69 jumbo jet crossing the Atlantic towards an airport and city that were distinguished from the rest of a uniformly shaded continent by yellow and red circles respectively. This vision thus linked a jet age mega-airport to world city status, suggesting that Mirabel’s expected dual role as an international transit node and economic agent would substantially increase Montreal’s global visibility.

Figure 5: Mirabel airport – and Montreal – firmly embedded within the global circuitry of jet travel. Government of Quebec, Montreal-Mirabel: The Largest Airport Complex in the World, 19.

At the same time, however, Quebec’s imagined aeromobile geography also carved out a special status for the province by shading it more darkly than the rest of the

70 monochrome map. This clashed with federal commentary that heralded Mirabel as a symbol of national prestige and technological modernity, with some supporters measuring its potential on a scale equal to other recent large-scale projects. One federal official declared the airport’s impact “will be as great as that of Expo ‘67 or the St. Lawrence Seaway…We hope that education, recreation, industry, trade and of course the airport will flourish there”.202 Transport Canada, meanwhile, crowed that Mirabel would “keep Canada one step ahead” of the jet age, enabling it to stay at the vanguard of aviation and foster greater connectivity within and across borders. “Not only is it [the airport] necessary to keep Canadians in touch with each other,” it declared, “but also to assure Canadians are in constant touch with the rest of the world. This is why the New Montreal International Airport is being built”.203 As it progressed over time, then, the Mirabel mega-project vision contained multiple and sometimes conflicting imaginaries that came to rest more on who and where stood to benefit most from it than on why it was built in the first place.

Mega-Airports and the Aeromobile Landscape Mega-airports consumed considerably more land and resources than existing airports that had been redeveloped for mass air travel. The extraordinary scale and capital investments by the state into mega-airports meant that their geographic footprint was especially intensive, altering, and wide-ranging. Moreover, their unique impact could be felt at different stages of the building process, from planning to site preparation to actual construction, since officials and experts had to systematically reconfigure local conditions so that a next-generation jet age airport could be accommodated. This fact meant that Toronto’s unbuilt mega-airport ultimately transformed the local landscape in ways that were analogous to Montreal-Mirabel even though it never materialized in the 1970s. From the beginning, government officials, planners, and experts largely dismissed the socio-environmental costs of new airports in Toronto and Montreal in their desire to build mega-airports that would be more modern than before. But in doing so, they created the

202 Pierre Dansereau, Construction of the new Montreal International Airport and its impact on the natural and social environment: towards a new definition of ecology (Montréal: Bureau d’aménagement du novel aéroport international de Montréal, 1972), 7. 203 Government of Canada: Keeping Canada one step ahead, 3.

71 conditions for these airports, finished or not, to irrevocably dominate, disrupt, and devastate the local built environment. The federal expropriation order enabled Mirabel to rise out of the ashes of Sainte- Scholastique. Assuming legal ownership of the land gave the federal government license to flatten the landscape, more than 75% of which was agricultural and dotted by farms, scattered homes, and forest.204 Beginning in 1969, officials expropriated nearly 3,150 properties for Mirabel in total, over 800 of which were farms; in the latter cases, the former landowners were invited to continue on as renters, a proposal that some accepted.205 Tenancy was contingent and directly tied to the Mirabel expansion plan, however, meaning that the federal government could permanently remove converted tenants if and once it determined the airport needed that land. Beginning in 1970, Phase I construction required the immediate removal of 157 property owners and the razing of their properties to build the initial runways, terminal building and gates, the control tower, a 3,400-space parking garage, and the Chateau-Mirabel hotel.206 Many more expropriated landowners went ahead and left anyway, opting not to stay longer since Transport Canada had made clear the respite would be temporary and that additional removals would come in subsequent construction phases. Some homeowners, however, questioned this idea of progress for Sainte- Scholastique, actively contesting the expropriation order long after most had settled. Approximately 300 farmers refused for several years to sell their land in spite of the federal edict, claiming that the government had significantly undervalued their properties and needed to offer more for the sale to go through. In 1972, the holdouts combined with other expropriated landowners-turned-tenants to form the Community Information and Action Committee (CIAC), a grassroots organization that aligned itself against the airport and strongly criticized federal handling of expropriation payments.207 The CIAC argued

204 Government of Quebec, A territory: atlas of the airport region, 44. 205 “Mirabel residents take jetport woes to Ontario,” Montreal Gazette, 5 October 1973, 3. A 1974 conciliation review determined that an erroneous estimate of land prices caused the federal government to undervalue all of the farms expropriated for Mirabel. See “Conciliation report reveals: all 820 homes undervalued in Mirabel expropriation,” Montreal Gazette, 13 June 1974, 5. 206 McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 155. 207 Local residents impacted by the expropriations had informally organized before 1972 as the Committee of the Expropriated, or le Comite des expropriés. According to Suzanne Laurin, they changed the name of their organization to the Community Information and Action Committee, or Centre d’information et d’animation communautaire, in order to receive government funding. See Laurin, L’échiquier de Mirabel,

72 that Sainte-Scholastique’s expropriated residents had been unfairly victimized because federal officials assessed their properties under the 1906 Expropriation Act, which prohibited affected homeowners from legally protesting their offers and had since been revised in 1970 to offer this recourse, less than two years after the airport expropriations. As justification for reassessing the Mirabel payments, the CIAC pointed to expropriations in Pickering, Ontario, where the government had begun seizing land in 1972 to build Toronto’s second international airport and offered higher settlements to residents there.208 Ottawa refused, arguing that the expropriation payments reflected contemporary market values, and agreed only to modestly top-up the settlements and provide additional moving expense and interest payments for owners who had not yet fully settled.209 In the end, the federal cost of seizing so much land in Sainte-Scholastique was still enormous. Through settlements the government paid over $152 million to expropriated homeowners, more than 760 percent higher than its initial $20 million projection.210 Mirabel carried a substantive spatial impact from day one. To oversee planning and building, the federal and Quebec governments ultimately recruited over 30 consulting firms and awarded over 60 service contracts.211 Construction contracts in 1970 alone cost over $18 million, some of which was attributed to resource extraction and transportation, demolition works, drainage improvements, the two runways, and the access roads to the construction site.212 During this phase, planners also relocated 26.2 kilometres of Canadian National railway track at a cost of over $3 million, contending that the success of the airport’s planned economic corridor hinged on relocating the line.213 Mirabel’s construction costs alone totaled $300 million, reflecting the incredible amount of capital, natural resources, and human energy invested in the project.214

200. The CIAC continued to operate through the 1980s, disbanding in 1990 after the government had returned 80,000 acres in 1985 and following the death of its founder and President, Jean-Paul Raymond. On the local struggle to reclaim expropriated lands in the 1980s, see also Jean-Paul Raymond and Gilles Boileau, La Mémoire de Mirabel (Montréal: Méridien, 1988). 208 “Mirabel residents take jetport woes to Ontario,” Montreal Gazette, 5 October 1973, 3. 209 “$16 million more for Mirabel land called ‘candies’,” Montreal Gazette, 10 November 1973, 1. 210 Stewart, Paper Juggernaut, 31. 211 Julie Harris, “Airports,” in Norman Ball, ed., Building Canada: A History of Public Works (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 310. 212 NMIAPO, New Montreal International Airport Project: Information Dossier, 6. 213 NMIAPO, New Montreal International Airport Project: Information Dossier, 5-7. 214 Harris, “Airports,” 310.

73 During Phase I, planners and labourers exploited local and imported resources and generated significant ecological disruption to realize the airport’s extraordinary scale. They directed much of their efforts towards building a “safe” and “clean” airport by controlling and sterilizing nature in order to eliminate any incongruous elements that would interfere with the airport’s present and future technical requirements.215 Concerned with ensuring “security, aesthetics and operational ease”, the government carried out substantive “ground preparation”, leveling and rebuilding the airport site to make the land amenable to airport operations. This included removing unwanted things that had been classified as safety hazards, like animal habitats, uneven ground, and trees and stumps; draining other ecological mainstays like swamps that might attract wildlife; and eliminating “runway extremities”.216 Sterilizing the landscape also meant rebuilding it to ensure that Mirabel’s varied infrastructure was sufficiently jet friendly. For example, at 12,000 feet and 200 feet wide, Mirabel’s first runway required a total of 209 488 cubic metres of concrete, over 308 million kilograms of gravel, over 662 million kilograms of sand, and 38.5 million kilograms of hot mix asphalt, astounding quantities that would enable it to accommodate the next generation of jumbo-jets and, later, anticipated supersonic aircraft that each weighed close to 453,500 kilograms.217 To transport these resources, workers constructed access roads connecting the airport site to a nearby quarry and sand pit by cutting a swath literally through the middle of forest and farmland (Figure 6). Mirabel’s Phase I construction thus meant much more than the erection of an airport and its ancillary buildings as planners and builders rematerialized much of the local built landscape for new practical and economic uses by extracting nearby resources and flattening or outright eliminating existing ecologies and topologies.

215 “Ste. Scholastique jetport double ‘catastrophe’,” Montreal Gazette, 9 February 1971, 2. 216 NMIAPO, New Montreal International Airport Project: Information Dossier, 2-4; Government of Canada, Keeping Canada one step ahead, 12. 217 “Ontario firm wins contract at new airport,” Montreal Gazette, 2 October 1970, 3. Figures converted from yards, tons, and pounds in original source.

74

Figure 6: Mirabel airport Phase I access road. NMIAPO, New Montreal International Airport Project: Information Dossier, 8.

The landscape around Pickering, the site selected for Toronto’s future mega- airport, experienced a similar transformation even though the airport was never completed. In 1975, after three years of local opposition, a public inquiry, and the expropriation of 7,500 acres for the airport site proper, along with ministerial orders restricting development on an additional 55,000 acres, the Trudeau government postponed Pickering after the Ontario government, under Bill Davis, refused to fund and

75 build the access roads leading to the airport.218 But the fact that no airport was built in Pickering did not mean that officials left the site untouched. Rather, the airport had been postponed, not cancelled, effectively freezing development since the government still owned the land designated for the airport and the homes it had already expropriated.219 By the end of the decade, this perpetual state of uncertainty over the fate of the airport had demonstratively reconfigured Pickering’s social, economic, and environmental landscape. Walter Stewart documented this transformation after revisiting Pickering only a few years after the postponement. Stewart argued that the government’s decision to build and then postpone an airport it never needed had turned Pickering into a “comfortable wasteland” of residential abandonment, agricultural stagnation, and absence of community.220 Even though there was no airport, the possibility that one might eventually be built and the government’s continued ownership of that land meant that the economic geography of the region had been irreversibly affected. Traditionally a “lovely country, a land of rolling hills and magnificent maples, towering pines, lush cornfields and rows of apple trees…[with] some of the richest, as well as some of the prettiest, farmland in Canada”, Pickering had fallen victim to rural blight because of the rash of expropriations, becoming a place of “dead and decaying houses and the dead and decaying dreams”.221 And because of the expropriation order, any sense of propriety and community had been eradicated, leaving only renters left to worry about their security if the airport was ever revived. “What this did [the proposed airport] will never be measured”, said Isobel Thompson, a local resident and activist with POP. “The families that were broken up, the neighbours who turned against each other, the friends who fell out, the people who took

218 Local opposition was led by People or Planes (POP), a grassroots organization comprised of Toronto professionals, middle-class retirees, and local farmers. POP castigated the government’s decision to build an airport in Pickering, saying it had ignored its own selection criteria by locating an airport on high-grade agricultural land. For more on the POP’s anti-airport activities and rhetoric, see Hector Massey and Charles Godfrey, People or Planes (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1972) and Budden and Ernst, The Movable Airport. 219 Pickering has recently been revived once again. In June 2013 the Conservative federal government announced its intention to move forward with the airport, referring to a 2011 Department of Transport study that concluded Toronto would need a second airport by 2027 to accommodate forecasted increases in air passenger traffic. For more details about the government study, see “Pickering ‘prime’ spot for airport,” Toronto Star, 12 July 2011, A1. 220 Stewart, Paper Juggernaut, 7-15. 221 Stewart, Paper Juggernaut, 8-9.

76 to drink, the hearts that went, the way it affected people…To the government they were just so many bodies to be moved.”222 What made the case of Pickering especially significant, then, was that a jet age mega-airport did not need to physically exist to redefine local conditions along a different axis. The mere consideration that the government planned to build a mega-airport acted as a paralyzing agent that froze local development and stagnated existing economic networks by channelling local land use towards airport-friendly practices. The “unbuilt landscape” of Pickering showed that federal officials and planners saw landscape transformation, from the earliest planning stages, as a fundamental aspect of their vision for mega-airports.223 Even if unfinished, mega-airports were especially modern because their extraordinary scale and cost as public mega-projects demanded that authorities progressively redevelop the local environment for aeromobility. Put simply, mega- airports carried a socio-spatial impact that far surpassed older airports in their disruption of local landscapes.

Conclusion While Pickering remains unbuilt to this day, Mirabel ended up as a white elephant. Expected to last many generations, the airport barely lasted one, struggling to meet even modest growth projections early on and closing to commercial air traffic entirely in 2004.224 Although these projects ultimately failed to achieve what their proponents intended, their respective trajectories were very much part of a larger narrative that saw key national airports in Canada begin to look, work, and be experienced and understood much differently in the early postwar era. During this period, the Canadian state dramatically reconceived these airports as modern infrastructure that would be fixtures of mass air travel. The federal government, airport planners, and independent experts and consultants relied on a combination of strategies that sought to not only transform airports into mass transport hubs, but also enhance their commercial appeal and potential

222 Stewart, Paper Juggernaut, 7. 223 “Unbuilt landscape” as a concept refers to failed mega-projects that nevertheless materially alter the local landscape and change the ways that people relate to that environment. See Jonathan Peyton, Unbuilt Environments: Tracing Postwar Development in Northwest British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2016). 224 For a brief explanation of the factors that led to Mirabel’s closing, see Edwards, “Breaking New Ground”, 27-28.

77 when and where appropriate. These efforts took place in two phases of mega-project development that first sought to bring existing airports into the jet age and then shifted to build new mega-airports that would effortlessly accommodate future demand. The many planning challenges and setbacks that took place along the way and that were in part responsible for the shift revealed the extent to which airports in early jet age Canada often came to represent troubled mega-projects that fell short of being completely modern infrastructure.

78 Chapter 2

Noisy Neighbours: Airports and Communities in the 1960s and 1970s

In the fall of 1973, John Walsh of Richmond, British Columbia was steaming mad. He had recently learned of a proposal by Transport Canada to expand Vancouver International Airport and was struggling to comprehend the social and environmental ramifications for Richmond, a burgeoning suburb adjacent to the airport. Even though federal officials, airport planners, and other consultants had dismissed public concerns over the airport expansion, Walsh was adamant that the airport constituted an affront to the thousands of residents living nearby. “In my view”, he contended, “there’s no reason why these comparative newcomers should be allowed to continue this constant disturbance, which seems to be increasing as the number of aircraft flights multiplies”.1 Comments like this became common as the first phase of airport redevelopment took hold across Canada in the 1960s and early 1970s and helped push the federal government towards mega-airport development. Walsh’s remarks provided further proof that government officials and planners could not redevelop existing airports without considering how it would affect cities and the health of urban economies and transportation systems, as Chapter 1 showed. They also introduced a new dimension to that narrative in the jet age, one that revealed how upgrades and expansions had begun to impact more homeowners as part of a fundamental shift in the relationship between airports and surrounding communities. Across Canada, residents near major airports contested the state’s airport vision, arguing that making airports more jet-friendly produced harmful socio-environmental impacts that officials and planners were reluctant to recognize or address. In this sense, people like Walsh were part of a broader pushback against state planning and dominant ideas of progress in postwar Canada even as they found themselves displaced, figuratively more than literally, by airport development near their homes. Richmond was one of several Canadian suburbs that felt the impact of busier and enlarged Canadian airports by the early 1970s, and protests by people like Walsh helped to sow the seeds for a national public debate about the socio-social impact of modern airports.

1 City of Vancouver Archives (CVA), Community Forum on Airport Development (CFAD) fonds, Clippings 1973-88, folder 578-G-7, file 5, “West Van wants it quiet,” Vancouver Sun, 3 October 1973, 35.

79 This chapter examines airports and community dislocation in postwar Canada, considering the extent to which aircraft noise, in particular, altered the relationship between airports and surrounding neighbourhoods as the jet age progressed. It largely focuses on Vancouver because civic resistance to noise there was particularly intensive and prolonged through much of the late twentieth century. This chapter first explores the postwar historical developments – suburbanization and jet age planning – that helped elevate noise complaints by the late 1960s. It then discusses how authorities and communities themselves each confronted noise around airports and sought to find a middle ground that was sometimes elusive. Generally speaking, the Canadian state and the public had radically different ideas of how larger airports could most effectively co- exist with surrounding neighbourhoods and environments. While the state favoured technocratic solutions that were not always responsive to local realities, individual homeowners and grassroots organizations characterized noise as a disruptive force in their daily lives that left them emotionally displaced. In the end, jet age noise disputes in Canadian cities not only illustrated the extent to which airport redevelopment had begun to affect communities. It also revealed a new, and deeper, level of public awareness, particularly in Vancouver, about noise pollution and its potential social and environmental impact in the late twentieth century. Events in Vancouver were not only part of a longer history of public awareness of and engagement with sound.2 They were also part of a more recent, and distinctly modern, history of complaints about noise, or unwanted sound.3 At the same time, any official responses to noise complaints were hampered by the challenge of identifying and measuring sounds and determining how much was too much for those nearby. While technologies to identify and map sound did exist before the 1970s, they could not provide extensive data to users regarding the intensity, duration, and contour of specific sounds,

2 This discussion will only address the relationship between people and sound in the modern era. It is important to note, however, that numerous scholars have shown that noise awareness dates back to pre- modern times. For some historical accounts that describe human interactions with sound in different geographical and temporal contexts, see David Hendy, Noise: A of Sound and Listening (London: Profile Books, 2013); Mark M. Smith, The Smell of Battle, The Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Richard Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 3 Garret Keizer, The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book about Noise (New York: Public Affairs, 2010); Aimee Boutin, City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015).

80 nor could they explain individual reactions to particular noises if these conflicted with the data.4 But even as technologies to track large-scale noise grew more sophisticated, noise remained difficult to measure at micro-scales because individual reactions to noise differed widely. By nature, a noise annoyance is a socially constructed, subjective experience; it involves the listener, the sound in question, and a variety of other factors that may or may not influence the hearing experience such as age, mood, intensity, duration, frequency, time and location.5 Increases in sound levels will induce different responses from different people, as might for example a combination of noise frequencies or the presence of pure, single tones in repetition. These responses are predicated on one’s relationship to their environment and the specific socio-spatial circumstances underlying exposure to a sound.6 Attempting to understand and regulate particular noises is especially difficult, then, because while the science of acoustics can keep pace with technological advances producing new sounds, it cannot easily account for the social and cultural attitudes or the practices of individual listeners that determine their response to noise. This inherent unpredictability in both the nature of sound and the listener response means the modern soundscape is itself undergoing perpetual change.7 It also means that the measurement and presentation of noise data is itself an unstable and arbitrary process because these statistics, along with the formula that produced them, are capable of being read multiple ways by people desiring different outcomes.8 In the end, then, the subjectivity and unpredictability of the sound listening experience led government officials to manage jet and other aviation-related noise around airports, rather than resolve it to the public’s satisfaction or eliminate it altogether. They did this by engineering a new approach to planning and building around airports that

4 The first extensive study of noise exposure around airports was conducted in the United Kingdom in 1961. See Michael Smith, Aircraft Noise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 14. 5 For an example of these factors work in practice, see Peter Bailey, “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” in Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 194-211. 6 Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 2. 7 Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, 1-2. 8 For a pertinent example, see Daniel Fujiwara and Ricky N. Lawton, “Living with aircraft noise: Airport proximity, aviation noise, and subjective well-being in England,” Transportation Research, Part D: Transport and Environment 42 (2016), 104-118.

81 placed a greater emphasis on protecting airports over people and places by strictly regulating surrounding development unfavourable to aviation needs. As a result, the Canadian government reconstructed the relationship between airports and surrounding communities in a way that was closely modelled on its existing redevelopment vision. It endorsed a policy of jet-age expansion that was predicated less on eliminating noise than on minimizing its effects and naturalizing its consequences. In the process, authorities downplayed the dislocation felt by local residents who were exposed to the noise, compelling them to articulate a critique of progress that was more attuned to noise and other aspects of social and environmental change in their daily lives.

Colliding Sprawls: Aeromobility and Suburbanization The arrival of jets in the late 1950s, as well as air travel’s steady growth through the next decade, generated an unprecedented amount of noise at and around airports. People like Walsh heard this noise because they lived in subdivisions that had been built nearby before the jet age when airports were quieter and smaller. Their exposure to and irritation with aircraft noise symbolized the growing collision of mass aeromobility and suburbanization across Canada in the postwar era. These were two different capitalist projects, one focused on the jet and the other on the suburb, each with a planning complex that aimed to harness a specific postwar boom. The rise of noise complaints around airports in Vancouver and other cities, however, revealed that these respective postwar projects could not be easily reconciled once they intersected and began to consume the same space. Aviation-related noise became part of a modern soundscape that had begun to crystallize in North America from industrialization and urbanization in the late nineteenth century.9 Initially, these new sounds were widely celebrated as symbols of progress and technological proficiency, akin to thick factory smoke blanketing the skies of towns and cities.10 But the tone soon shifted as critics charged that modern sounds made people

9 See Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity; Karin Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008). 10 Harold Platt, “Invisible Gases: Smoke, Gender, and the Redefinition of Environmental Policy in Chicago, 1900-1920,” Planning Perspectives 10, 1 (January 1995), 67-97.

82 anxious and hurt labour productivity and economic growth in the process.11 Governments were slow to respond, however, and Canada saw very few municipal noise by-laws erected before 1970.12 Municipalities with existing by-laws largely enacted them in response to automobile noise, with the nature and scope of legislation differing greatly by municipality, a patchwork of approaches that largely prevailed until the late twentieth century.13 But jet aircraft dramatically accelerated local complaints about noise and efforts to regulate it. Jet aircraft engines produced loud thrust during climbing procedures – much louder than the older, turbo-propeller planes still in service – which exponentially increased the total area affected by airport noise.14 The noise from jet aircraft proved impossible to ignore for some people who heard it nearby, prompting the federal Ministry of Transport to look at reducing it soon after these planes first flew in Canada. In 1959, it commenced preliminary studies on noise abatement and instituted a curfew at Montreal- Dorval as well as landing restrictions at Dorval, Toronto, and Winnipeg the following year.15 In contrast to surface-based noises like automobiles and industrial machinery, a plane’s acoustical footprint could be particularly intensive and extensive because it originated at higher altitudes and could pass directly over a listener. Depending on one’s exact location, the sound of a jet aircraft roaring above could be roughly equivalent to, or even several decibels louder than, a noisy motorcycle heard at close range.16 An aircraft’s footprint also varied depending on whether it was taking off or landing. Generally

11 Canadians in the early twentieth century shared these anxieties about noisier modernity. For example, out-of-town visitors at the Toronto Exhibition were often overwhelmed by sudden bursts of noise on Toronto’s streets from streetcars, automobiles, pedestrian traffic, and industry machinery operating nearby, elements that were either absent or less intensive in rural Ontario at the time. See Keith Walden, Becoming Modern in Toronto: The Industrial Exhibition and the Shaping of a Late Victorian Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 167-215. 12 One exception was Toronto, which passed an anti-noise by-law in 1938. “When’s Noise Not Noise? When A Truck Makes It,” Toronto Star, 7 July 1961, 7. At the same time, private companies peddled products, such as acoustic tiles and air conditioning, to businesses and schools to muffle surrounding noise. Office buildings, in particular, were often fortified against unwanted sounds. See Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 19-34. 13 World Soundscape Project, A survey of community noise by-laws in Canada (Burnaby, BC: Labatt Breweries of Canada, 1972). 14 Thrust is a reaction process where acceleration in one direction produces an equal force in the opposite direction. Aircraft generate thrust by pushing air in the opposite direction of flight. See B.W. McCormick, Aerodynamics, Aeronautics, and Flight Mechanics (New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 1995), 284-356. 15 T. M. McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 2nd edition (Toronto: Lugus, 1992), 55-56. 16 Smith, Aircraft Noise, 9.

83 speaking, departing planes produced a noise contour, or area of emission, that was long and intense and grew progressively wider as an aircraft climbed. On the other hand, arrivals generated a shorter, narrower footprint that produced less noise across a smaller area.17 Aircraft generated maximum noise levels during runway acceleration and the takeoff and climb.18 Equally significantly, people hearing this noise from the ground inevitably had different reactions depending on the plane’s trajectory and their position relative to it. For example, a location underneath an aircraft flight path generally produced more sustained noise than a position off to the side.19 The emergence of these varied and complex aircraft-generated noise contours ultimately formed the backdrop for escalating citizen complaints by the late 1960s. They also complicated official strategies to categorize and identify patterns. In the end, noise brought into greater focus the changing relationship between modern airports and their surrounding environments. Newer, larger aircraft might have produced more noise, but postwar suburbanization also brought people like Walsh to homes near airports. Prior to the Second World War, municipal officials and aviation enthusiasts recognized that airports would operate more efficiently and safely if located outside urban areas where land was plentiful and people were not. During these early, inchoate days of commercial air travel, there was little traffic to and from airports apart from sporadic commercial flights, single- piloted aircraft, and the occasional charter plane.20 Moreover, there were other technical and practical concerns at play. For example, aircraft, however rudimentary, required flat and straight takeoff and landing strips several thousand feet long to produce the required lift necessary for flight.21 Aircraft also required constant maintenance before and after flights and sometimes had to remain on site for long periods of time, so airport operators had to build additional service facilities, known as hangings, to temporarily accommodate

17 Smith, Aircraft Noise, 271-72. 18 Keith Attenborough, Oleksandr Zaporozhets, Vadim Tokarev, eds., Aircraft Noise: Assessment, Prediction and Control (New York: Spon Press, 2011), 4. 19 Smith, Aircraft Noise, 241. 20 See Chapter 1. 21McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 50-51.

84 aircraft.22 Put simply, even in the earliest years of commercial air travel in Canada, early airports had basic technical requirements that shaped where they were built. Consequently, municipal officials built airports in remote areas or at some distance from city centres.23 In 1929, for example, Vancouver purchased land on Sea Island, located some twenty-five kilometres of the downtown core, for its first airport. The city’s investment was purportedly spurred by Charles Lindbergh’s refusal to include Vancouver on his 1927 North American tour because it lacked a proper airport.24 Toronto followed a few years later. In 1931, the city parcelled 1,600 acres of relatively cheap farmland to build its first airport in the village of Malton, approximately thirty kilometres northwest of the city core. And in the early 1940s, Montreal replaced its first airport, Saint-Hubert, with a new one at Dorval, purchasing 1,500 acres at a site twenty kilometres from downtown.25 Generally speaking, officials chose sites like Sea Island, Malton, and Dorval because they were located in relatively flat areas and offered favourable weather most of the time. At the time, they gave little consideration to the possibility of these airports later expanding to accommodate higher traffic. Some people even criticized Malton for being too far from downtown Toronto, which betrayed a lack of concern about locating airports in or near population centres. In 1937, Ken Tussell of the Royal Canadian Air Force No. 10 Squadron, which was debating whether to use the new airport, claimed “the Malton field is absolutely impossible as far as our men are concerned. We won’t be able to get our men that far. It’s about twenty-five miles from the east end of the city. I’m afraid for No. 10 if we have to go to Malton.”26 Before mass air travel, Canada’s major airports existed as relatively insular places before mass air travel, minimally affecting the larger urban environment in which they were situated. Postwar suburbanization, however, gradually eroded the isolation of airports. Several major developments precipitated the suburban boom. First, North American cities

22 Passenger traveller needs also had to be looked after even during the early days of commercial air travel, which necessitated the construction of terminals. On the history of Canadian airports before 1945, see Peter Pigott, Gateways: Airports of Canada (Lawrencetown Beach, NS: Pottersfield Press, 1996), 15-34. 23 Before the jet age, municipal governments largely owned and operated city airports, only turning later to the federal government to assume management and control once they became more expensive to run. 24 Lindbergh allegedly said that in Vancouver “there was no field fit to land on”. Vancouver Sun, July 21, 2011: http://thevancouversun.tumblr.com/post/7896435939/in-1927-aviation-icon-charles-lindbergh- turned-up. Accessed: February 12, 2014. 25 McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 147. 26 Pigott, Gateways: Airports of Canada, 129.

85 became less desirable places to live for many in the early twentieth century as a result of capitalist industrialization.27 The federal government and housing developers sought to capitalize on growing public disenchantment with cities by marketing new residential developments on city fringes as bourgeois utopias that offered privacy and stability away from cities.28 Second, the development of advanced transportation technologies, particularly the streetcar, introduced in the late nineteenth century, and later the automobile, dramatically expanded the scope of mobility within and across cities; streetcar suburbs and automobile suburbs soon followed.29 Lastly, rising postwar affluence compounded the suburban boom. Consumers possessed more disposable income and used it to purchase homes and cars, both considered attractive investments and a ticket to a middle-class lifestyle at affordable prices.30 As a result of these developments, suburban communities expanded at a feverish pace in early postwar Canada. During this period, housing developers steadily snatched up formerly agricultural land around Canadian cities to accommodate persistent public demand and offer appealingly low home prices. These developers presented a “packaged” suburban ideal to consumers that featured public services, paved roads, and nearby amenities, offering the prospect of a pastoral living experience perfect for raising a family and enjoying a sense of community without the anomie and hyper-density characteristic of the urban environment.31 Generally speaking, developers operated within the

27 Public concerns about morality in cities precipitated efforts to reform urban life in the early twentieth century. See Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). 28 See Richard Harris, Creeping Conformity: How Canada Became Suburban, 1900-1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), chapters 5 and 6; Lawrence Solomon, Toronto Sprawls: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 50-55. 29 Toronto introduced streetcars in 1890. On the rise of streetcar suburbs, see Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), chapter 3. Automobile suburbs largely emerged in the postwar era; Toronto’s Don Mills, planned and built in the early 1950s, was a notable example. Developments like Don Mills flourished because urban planners acted swiftly to accommodate the rising popularity of the automobile and its promise of freedom, individuality, and fast and convenient transportation, building highways that linked these new suburban communities to downtowns. See S.D. Clark, The Suburban Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966), 33-36; Harris, Creeping Conformity, 168-169. 30 Between 1945 and 1952, car ownership in Canada doubled. By 1953, more than 50 percent of Canadian families owned a car, and by 1960 two-thirds of households had one. Cited in Steve Penfold, “Selling by the Carload: The Early Years of Fast Food in Canada,” in Magda Fahrni and Robert Ruthdale, eds., Creating Postwar Canada: Community, Diversity, and Dissent, 1945-75 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008), 167. 31 Clark, The Suburban Society, 6-7, 32-33, 48.

86 boundaries of federal regulation and in some cases had their ventures subsidized. Under the National Housing Act of 1935, the federal government permitted new housing developments provided they met minimum standards in such areas as the provision of basic services, street widths, building materials, and structural performance. If so, developments could then be eligible for federal insurance as well as possible funding from corporate lenders.32 The conflict between airports and suburbs actually began during the Second World War. Some major national airports became principal sites for military training operations or locations for aircraft plants as part of the war effort, prompting the federal government to subsidize the construction of nearby suburbs for the larger airport workforce. Near Toronto-Malton, for example, authorities green-lit a new subdivision called Victory Village to house workers from the National Steel Car Company aircraft plant, which saw its labour force expand from 900 to 10,000 during the war.33 Moreover, in 1943 the federal government built the subdivision of Burkeville east of the Vancouver airport property line for people employed at the Boeing aircraft factory on site. Many of Burkeville’s 300 homes were subsequently sold to returning veterans after the plant closed down at the end of the war.34 Subdivision construction near airports increased after 1945, leading some in the aviation industry to express concern that a collision between airports and new suburban developments was inevitable. Commenting on the future of Montreal-Dorval, a national aviation observer suggested that the airport’s growth hinged on curtailing certain local land uses: “the Dorval site is so near the city that it is essential to secure enough property to provide for future developments and prevent the building of homes, facilities and other obstructions in the immediate neighbourhood of the flightways.”35 And in a 1953 report, A.D. Crerar, member of the Lower Mainland Regional Planning Board of British Columbia, regarded noise around airports as a problem that would worsen with continuing technological advancements in aircraft size, power, and speed. He declared

32 Harris, Creeping Conformity, 123. 33 Roger E. Riendeau, “Settlement and Lost Villages: A History of Toronto Township,” in Frank A. Dieterman, ed., Mississauga: The First 10,000 Years (Toronto: Eastendbooks, 2002), 140. 34 Jill Wade, “Wartime Housing Limited, 1941-1947: Canadian Housing Policy at the Crossroads,” Urban History Review 15, 1 (June 1986), 46. 35 McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 147.

87 that while noise was a nuisance with real social consequences, its effect could be contained by controlling development on lands adjacent to airports so that the “general interest of the community at large in airports and the private rights of those who live near them can both be satisfied fairly and equitably.” One way to do this, he declared, was to prohibit “the construction of schools, theatres, hospitals and other such concentrations of population on runway approach areas.”36 However, Crerar’s recommendations ultimately fell on deaf ears. In the postwar era, the prevailing belief amongst government officials, aviation representatives, and housing developers in Canada was that jet-age airports were and would remain residential-friendly. They felt that airports, as burgeoning transport hubs, offered advantages to residents nearby in terms of airport-related jobs and favourable property values. For example, plans for Edmonton’s new airport, which opened in 1960, included the construction of two new subdivisions in Leduc, five kilometres from the airport, at a total cost of nearly $10 million. One of the two developments, Linsford Park, consisted of 225 lots with prepaid paved streets, concrete sidewalks, gravelled lanes and street lighting. It would house mainly residential homes but also include sixty terraced housing rental units. As of 1960, thirty homes had already been completed and occupied, about half by airport personnel. A further twenty were under construction, to be completed by the beginning of the next year. Alongside an elementary school that had already opened, plans for the site included a 4.5 acre park, a $1 million shopping centre that included a supermarket, a dozen retail stores, and a parking lot that could accommodate more than 600 cars, and a 30-room hotel. The other development, Skyway, was envisioned as a 400- home self-contained neighbourhood located north of Linsford Park, covering 125 acres in total. Like Linsford Park, it would have a school, shopping centre, and five small parks totalling 10 acres.37 In these planning visions, airports and suburbs formed a symbiotic relationship, with airports playing a critical role in community life as its economic lifeline.

36 CVA, W.L. Inglis fonds, Publications re: Vancouver airport 1946-, folder: 550-A-3, file 6, A.D. Crerar, “Airports for the Lower Mainland”. 37 “New Residences Now Being Constructed for Airport Personnel,” Edmonton Journal, 12 November 1960, 41.

88 Across the country, the population of suburbs rapidly increased in the postwar era, swelling the number of households in subdivisions, like Richmond in British Columbia, Etobicoke and Mississauga in Ontario, and Dorval in Montreal, that were proximate to airports. In Dorval, population growth quickly encircled Montreal-Dorval by the 1960s, leaving the airport with little room to expand and presaging the decision to build a second city airport at Mirabel. Similarly, Richmond, south and southeast of Vancouver International Airport, and Etobicoke and Mississauga, east and southwest respectively of Toronto International Airport, experienced startling and intensive population growth in the early postwar period. Toronto Township, the predecessor to the amalgamation of Mississauga in 1968, had 30,000 residents at mid-century, a number that rose to 174,982 by 1971, while Etobicoke grew from 53,779 residents in 1951 to 202,000 in 1971.38 Richmond’s population also exploded over these decades, climbing from 8,000 residents in 1930 to 43,323 in 1961 to 96,154 in 1981.39 Its stunning growth was symptomatic of a broader postwar population boom in the Greater Vancouver Area, where the number of inhabitants increased from 374,000 in the early 1940s to more than one million thirty years later.40 Thus, as Canadian subdivisions ballooned in the early postwar decades, the land adjacent to airports filled in, irrevocably repositioning suburban communities and airports within the same geographical space. Originally touted by developers as an advantageous settlement option, suburbs near the nation’s major airports became antithetical to their quiet, idyllic image. In essence, these airports grew busier, louder, and more socio-environmentally disruptive as they handled higher volumes of passenger and plane traffic through the 1960s and early 1970s, and any economic advantages that had been gained by locating subdivisions nearby soon became a liability as these effects began to be felt in local communities and

38 Riendeau, “Settlement and Lost Villages,” 141; Census of Canada (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1971), also online at: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-516-x/sectiona/4147436-eng.htm; Clark, The Suburban Society, 9; John Sewell, The Shape of the Suburbs: Understanding Toronto’s Sprawl (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 27. This growth was part of a significant population increase in Toronto’s suburban population in the postwar era; in 1967, it had reached 1.2 million. See Solomon, Toronto Sprawls, 56, 63. 39 City of Richmond Archives (CRA), Government Publications 416, Township of Richmond Planning Department, Official Community Plan Issue Paper No. 6, “Environment: Aircraft Noise,” April 1985, 11. 40 Leslie J. Ross, Richmond: Child of the Frasier (Richmond, BC: Richmond ’79 Centennial Society, 1979), 114, 178. Vancouver’s population figures are cited in Christopher Dummitt, The Manly Modern: Masculinity in Postwar Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007), 11.

89 environments. Toronto, for example, saw significant noise protests in the late 1960s, particularly as the federal Department of Transport flirted with the idea of expanding the airport by building a new terminal and several new runways. Local opposition was spearheaded by the Society for Aircraft Noise Abatement, a group of individual residents and twenty-eight ratepayer organizations that formed in September 1968.41 600 residents attended the fledging group’s first meeting early that month, and supporters vehemently lobbied the Transport officials to reverse their decision, sending over twenty thousand letters and statements of protest to the government.42 It was no surprise then that in 1972 Air Canada pilot Dave Muckle charged that real estate agents were going to great lengths to sell homes around Toronto International Airport. According to him, they were scheduling visitations on days when aircraft were not using the nearest runway and lobbying federal authorities to pressure pilots to jettison certain aircraft safety procedures to minimize noise on takeoffs and landings.43 By the early 1970s, then, major national airports had come to symbolize the epicentre of mass aeromobile sprawl. The fact that one facet of aeromobile sprawl entailed more noise in the suburbs also showed the unevenness of the Canadian government’s planning vision after the Second World War as suburbanization and jet age airport redevelopment, two radically different planning approaches, collided. Aeromobile sprawl extended into wider space and unsettled the postwar suburban landscape, creating the conditions for local resistance and a critical revaluation of the role of airports within urban environments. These developments were framed by grassroots protests against escalating aircraft noise and governmental efforts to mitigate noise for residents while also protecting their investment in airports by reconsidering how surrounding land should be categorized and developed. In other words, noise complaints from suburbanites like Walsh became part of a much larger public conversation amongst government, industry, and local homeowners about how to reconcile aeromobile sprawl with local experiences.

41 “Etobicoke noisier because of work at Malton airport,” Toronto Star, 17 October 1973, B1. 42 Elliot J. Feldman, The Politics of Canadian Airport Development: Lessons for Federalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1983), 83. 43 “Pilot says airport a waste,” Canadian Aviation, March 1972, 34.

90 The State and Jet Age Noise More than anywhere else in the country, events in Vancouver shaped the federal response to noise. Mirroring other Canadian cities, residents in neighbourhoods adjacent to Vancouver International Airport had begun to protest noise on a more regular basis by the early 1970s. However, unlike other places like Toronto and Montreal where complaints declined by the mid-1970, noise continued to be an integral part of public discussion in Vancouver into the early 1990s. Its prolonged conflict over airport expansion and the centrality of noise to the debate amongst government, industry, and the public represented a microcosm of how airports had begun to infringe on local communities across the country. Federal officials began to contemplate expanding Vancouver International Airport almost immediately after acquiring it from the cash-strapped municipal government in 1962.44 At the time of the federal takeover, it had two runways, one primary runway running west to east and a secondary crosswind runway running northwest to southeast that was used only when wind conditions became unfavourable for taking-off and landing from the primary runway. In 1957, the Department of Transport began to seriously consider adding a second runway parallel to the primary runway and phase out the crosswind runway in the process. Made aware of this development, the Vancouver Airport Board and urban planners in Richmond recommended rezoning the area around the airport as part of a new classification known as “airport zoning”. A new by-law would prohibit further residential development and restrict Sea Island to airport, heliport, the aviation industry, hotels and motels, and other “allied commercial development” in the future.45 Two years later, the federal government introduced new zoning regulations to protect the airspace of the future runway and commenced a series of studies that would go on to recommend construction of a parallel runway.46 The government’s push to build a parallel runway at Vancouver was another manifestation of the federal government’s duel impetus to respond to and stimulate

44 As with other airports across the country, the federal government had temporarily assumed ownership of Vancouver’s airport during the Second World War, returning it to the city’s management once the war concluded. The city retained control until the airport’s growth made it too expensive for the municipality to finance airport development itself. 45 “Sea Island zoning bar further residences,” Richmond Review, 16 April 1957, 1. 46 CVA, CFAD fonds, Airport Planning Committee, 1973-1976, folder: 579-A-1, file 2, “Transport Canada, Vancouver International Airport Proposed Expansion, 1973: Public Information Kit, Acquisition of Land”.

91 growth by upgrading the nation’s major airports. Vancouver, like other airports, experienced meteoric growth that caught the attention of government and industry observers. Between 1965 and 1972, the airport saw a nearly threefold increase in passenger traffic and more than 100% increase in aircraft movements, statistics that made Vancouver into Canada’s busiest airport in terms of aircraft movements and third busiest in terms of passenger traffic.47 In contrast with the 3.2 million passengers who passed through the Vancouver in 1972, Transport Canada forecasted the airport would serve 6 million by 1980, 8.5 million by 1985, and 11.5 million by 1990. Additionally, it projected annual cargo movements to double by 1977 to 80,000 tons and later reach 150,000 tons by 1980.48 Much of this growth stemmed from Vancouver’s role as an international gateway to the Pacific Rim, a position that had first crystallized around the turn of the century.49 Moreover, the city was also the headquarters for Canadian Pacific Airlines, one of Canada’s two major airlines at the time, which gave it special national clout.50 Expansion proponents in the early 1970s expected Vancouver’s growth would continue, but strongly believed the airport could not accommodate any future volume increases in its current state. Transport Canada stressed the airport’s role in solidifying Vancouver’s position as a premier aviation node: The Airport is an essential facility in Canada’s air transport network. Its importance to the economy of the West Coast, to the convenience of Canadians travelling to the Orient and as the western gateway to Canada is beyond dispute. The airport cannot be allowed to become obsolete. Safety and passenger convenience, as well as economic and other factors, must be observed.51

Other key figures in Canada’s commercial aviation industry shared this assessment about Vancouver. Said Grant McConachie, president of Canadian Pacific Airlines: “it is important for us to recognize that with the increasing speed and range of airliners,

47 CVA, W.L. Inglis fonds, Airport statistics, folder: 550-A-3, file 3, “Vancouver International Airport – Air Traffic”. 48 CVA, CFAD fonds, Airport Planning Committee, 1973-76, folder: 579-A-1, file 2, “Transport Canada, Vancouver International Airport Proposed Expansion, 1973: Public Information Kit, Acquisition of Land”. 49 Jean Barman, The West Beyond the West: A History of British Columbia, 3rd edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), chapter 7. 50 On the history of Canadian Pacific Airways, see D. M. Bain, Canadian Pacific Air Lines: Its History and Aircraft (Calgary: Cal/Oka, 1987). 51 CRA, Series 17, File 2606, Memo from H.V. Porter, Acting Municipal Clerk, to Mayor W.H. Anderson, March 2, 1973, page 2, copy of Transport Canada press release about expropriation.

92 Vancouver can no longer be considered just a Pacific port – we are a gateway to all the world.”52 In February 1973, Transport Canada officially announced the airport would be expanded. It released a Master Plan of the expansion project and also formed an Airport Planning Committee, consisting of government, industry, and public representatives, to study the impact of the proposal.53 The Master Plan stipulated that 1400 total acres of land on Sea Island would be added to the airport to build a parallel runway, estimated to cost $14 million, as well as expand the air terminal, a mere five years after erecting a new $23 million terminal.54 Part of the new runway would sit on filled land beyond the present western shore of Sea Island, surrounded by a rock wall and filled with silt dredged from the nearby Lower Fraser River channel. To acquire the necessary land, federal authorities announced that homes in the Cora Brown and McDonald subdivisions, which were located on Sea Island north of the current airport boundary, would be expropriated. The government had actually begun acquiring land from Cora Brown and McDonald homeowners in 1967 in preparation for expansion, purchasing 117 properties from homeowners since then. In 1972 it then gave notice under the Expropriation Act to seize 53 more properties from residents who had previously refused to sell. Forty-eight hours after the second of two contentious public hearings ended in January 1973, Transport Canada officially approved expropriation at a cost of $3.25 million.55 Federal officials and their partners characterized the airport’s expansion as people-friendly, claiming a parallel runway would not mean more noise and other nuisances for local residents. They noted that since the runway would be located in an east-west direction (Figure 7), more planes could use it to take off in a westerly direction over the sea rather than east over residential areas or, in the case of the crosswind

52 CRA, Series 17, File 2644, “Jet traffic ‘explosion’ may swamp airport,” Vancouver Sun, unknown date. 53 On the work of the Airport Planning Committee, see Paul Robert St. Pierre, “Public Participation in an Inter-Agency Committee: The Airport Planning Committee in Vancouver,” M.A. Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1977. 54 Ross, Richmond: Child of the Fraser, 177. Feldman, The Politics of Canadian Airport Development, 122-24. The government also announced that six homes in the Burkeville subdivision, located east of the airport on Sea Island, would be expropriated to upgrade the Hudson Street Bridge connecting the airport and Sea Island to Richmond and downtown Vancouver. See CRA, Series 17, File 2606-2, Vancouver International Airport Planning Committee final report, March 1976. 55 CRA, Series 17, File 2606-1, Transport Canada public information kit on Vancouver International Airport proposed expansion, February 12, 1973, page 1 fact sheet. On the expropriation hearings, see “Expropriation law leveled: Ministers whisk through report,” Richmond Review, 7 March 1973, 1.

93 runway, north or south into South Vancouver or Richmond. In addition, they trumpeted the future arrival of quieter, larger planes like the Boeing 747 and the McDonnell- Douglas DC-10 that were expected to transport more people and produce a gentler acoustic footprint. These next-generation jet aircraft would eventually help phase out the aging, noisier models, such as the Boeing 707 and MD DC-8, which had been introduced in the late 1950s and were still in wide use.56

Figure 7: Vancouver International Airport, the proposed parallel runway, and surrounding environs, including Richmond. CVA, CFAD fonds, Airport Current 1989-2000, folder: 579-A-6, file 7, originally published in Spectrum, Fall/Winter 1990, 12.

Federal officials largely embraced a techno-scientific approach that conceived of noise in abstract and objective terms. The government relied on a new noise methodology

56 CVA, CFAD fonds, Clippings 1973-88, folder: 578-G-7, file 5, “Noise no problem, airport foes told,” Vancouver Sun, February 13, 1973, 29.

94 known as the Noise Exposure Forecast (NEF) to substantiate its claim that a second runway would not generate any new noise.57 Transport Canada heralded the NEF as the product of years of research around major airports in Europe and North America and thousands of interviews carried out by sociologists about noise annoyance. The NEF value itself, however, was not a singular measurement of noise levels in a given area that advanced existing science-based noise measurement values, like the perceived noise decibel unit and the early-perceived noise decibel unit. Rather, it was a composite of these very same units as well as other sociological variables tied to expected individual behaviour and response to noise, which made it less a new tool than a revision of older ones.58 Transport Canada declared the NEF was the most effective measurement tool for measuring and summarizing noise from any aircraft operating on a runway and would permit planners and engineers to “predict the annoyance to the average individual caused by flight operations at an airport”.59 Nevertheless, Transport Canada betrayed its preference for categorizing listener responses according to a techno-scientific vision by using the NEF to construct a noise airspace around Canadian airports that was based on objectivity, predictability, and reliability. This geography of noise contained four contours around and through residential subdivisions near airports and aircraft flight paths, which were grouped by noise intensity levels and the likelihood of neighbourhood mobilization and protests. The contours ranged from the areas with the lowest intensity and projected noise emission levels, labelled as the below 30 NEF contour, to the highest, the over 40 NEF contour. Transport Canada did not expect citizens of areas in the below 30 NEF contour to mobilize individually or collectively against aircraft noise, believing that they would be generally compliant and unbothered by conditions. However, the higher the noise range, the more the government expected pushback from the public, ranging from “sporadic to repeated individual complaints” in the 30-35 NEF contour, to “vigorous” individual complaints and possible “group action” in 35-40 NEF. It characterized the highest

57 For a technical overview of the NEF system, see Aeronautical Planning and Development Division, Civil Aeronautics, NEF System User’s Manual (Ottawa: Transport Canada, 1977). 58 On the technical specifics of different noise measurement systems, see Smith, Aircraft Noise. 59 CVA, CFAD fonds, Airport Planning Committee 1973-76, folder: 579-A-1, file 2, “Transport Canada, Vancouver International Airport Proposed Expansion, 1973: Public Information Kit, Noise and the Environment”.

95 contour, over 40 NEF, as the most restive, leading officials to predict: “repeated and vigorous individual complaints are likely. Concerted group and legal action might be expected.”60 Transport Canada, in other words, sought to predict where noise complaints were most likely to occur by redefining local areas as a series of noise pockets that waxed or waned relative to the airport and its flight paths. In the process, it effectively made the noise complaints that originated in areas outside the highest contours appear less legitimate by virtue of where they occurred. Transport Canada revamped its approach for measuring aircraft noise by introducing a set of strategies and practices that were unprecedentedly techno-scientific in nature. It had a more extensive noise abatement approach in Vancouver than anywhere else in the country, in no small part because it was trying to sell airport expansion to a sceptical public. In 1973, shortly after announcing the Master Plan, authorities awarded a $53,000 contract to a firm, Acoustical Engineering, to measure noise at twenty-two locations across the Greater Vancouver area, most of which were close to the airport or under or near its flight paths. Acoustical Engineering used noise-monitoring equipment that was housed in mobile units at each of the sites to compile the data (Figure 8), which was then sent to the National Research Council of Canada for analysis.61 The units contained recording and radio communication systems connected to two microphones as well as a wind direction and velocity indicator positioned outside. The recording system tabulated the data and the radio kept the monitoring station operator in touch with aircraft movements at the airport to ascertain the type and size of the aircraft responsible for specific noise measurements. Acoustical Engineering also tried to measure aircraft noise in relation to local factors like other neighbourhood noises and prevailing atmosphere conditions as well as determine the relation of noise to the position of the runway, which reflected the challenges of isolating and gauging the impact of a particular noise in space. Preliminary results from Acoustical Engineering’s tests showed high and potentially

60 Canadian Air Transportation Administration, Aviation Planning and Research Division, Civil Aviation Branch, A Description of the CNR and NEF Systems for Estimating Aircraft Noise Annoyance (Ottawa: Transport Canada, 1971), 38. 61 On the National Research Council of Canada’s role in this project and specific findings, see J.E. Piercy and T.F.W. Embleton, Effect of Weather and Topography on the Propagation of Noise: Vancouver Airport (Ottawa: National Research Council of Canada, Division of Physics, 1974).

96 hazardous readings in Richmond underneath or adjacent to aircraft departures and landings.62

Figure 8: Acoustical Engineering employee measures aircraft noise on top of mobile “Noise Measurement Vehicle” near Vancouver International Airport. CVA, CFAD fonds, Clippings 1973-88, folder: 578-G-7, file 5, Vancouver Sun, unknown date.

Transport Canada also took other steps to convince residents that it cared as much about their noise concerns as modernizing airports to stimulate further growth. In 1974, it established a 24-hour telephone complaint service in Vancouver, a first for Canadian

62 CVA, CFAD fonds, Clippings 1973-88, folder: 578-G-7, file 5, “Airport jet noise reaches ‘hazard level’, study finds,” Vancouver Sun, 27 October 1973, 1.

97 airports.63 Residents in the Greater Vancouver area affected by aircraft noise could call the service and register their concerns. The government pledged that complaints would be “followed up by appropriate action”, which could include informing airlines about ground testing at inappropriate times or flagging for air traffic controllers any aircraft that were flying below regulated altitudes and thereby emitting greater noise. In the first four months, the service received nearly 800 complaints, approximately half of which pertained to jet aircraft operating either in the air or on the airport grounds.64 Despite establishing the complaint line for Vancouver residents, governmental strategies to define and measure noise in the area were unmistakably based on a technocratic desire to impose an orderly and efficient program that could be applied to other settings. Moreover, authorities displayed less than a genuine willingness to consult with the public on the noise issue, working instead to normalize noise and airport development through feedback mechanisms that inured people to these changes. The federal government’s purported commitment to consult and engage with local populations on the noise issue was predicated on constructing and entrenching a new aerial-minded sentiment amongst local populations near airports that defined aircraft noise as a natural symptom of mass aeromobility in the late twentieth century.65 In other words, officials and their partners recognized the subjectivity of noise, but adopted an objective framework anyway and took steps to convince the public that some noise was all but inevitable around airports for the foreseeable future. A 1975 pamphlet about noise that Transport Canada issued specifically for the Greater Vancouver area illustrated this process at work. Entitled ‘Sorry About The Noise’, the pamphlet acknowledged the pervasiveness of aircraft noise in and around the city and sought to assuage concerned residents that the government had a mitigation plan in place. However, it also contended that much of the generated noise was tolerable to the average person, displaying little interest in interrogating individual responses to jet noise. And while the pamphlet acknowledged that public reactions to noise were inherently

63 People could call an existing number to make noise complaints, but the CFAD applied pressure on authorities to upgrade it, claiming that evening calls were not being logged and creating incomplete and unreliable data in the process. See “Noise objectors want night line,” Richmond Review, 3 April 1974, 1. 64 CVA, CFAD fonds, Airport Planning Committee 1973-76, folder: 579-A-1, file 2, “Airport Planning Committee News: ‘Sounding Off About Noise’”. 65 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large : Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 6-14, 17.

98 subjective, it did so only to highlight the difficulty in formulating a policy response to capture the broad spectrum of responses. “In effect”, read one section, “one man’s sound is another man’s noise, and there are no constants in the ‘taste’ or reaction to sound. No one is yet able to tell us what is ‘acceptably quiet’.” And speaking to aircraft in particular, the government accepted that “there will be people annoyed by them” but, in a curious example designed to suggest that planes were not universally detested, noted that to “someone who is lost or injured there is no more welcome sound than that of a search and rescue aircraft”.66 Transport Canada also sought to address public concerns about the proximity of airports to residential developments and its effect on aircraft noise emissions. In a section titled “Too close for comfort” it noted how “housing and industry have been allowed to encroach on airports”.67 But Transport Canada tried to absolve itself of much of the blame for these developments by touting its own record and pointing the finger at provincial and municipal governmental inaction. On the one hand, it advertised the new 24-hour noise complaint line as a meaningful way for the public to express its concerns through official channels. At the same time, it distanced itself from the provinces and cities by arguing that “local authorities have not always insisted on appropriate zoning around airports and the necessary building code provisions dealing with levels of sound- proofing have not been adopted.” It went on to add that the federal government had done its part not to encourage development of lands adjacent to airports by denying financing to the noisiest NEF contours and making recommendations for insulating homes in affected areas.68 Transport Canada thus tried to portray residential build-up around airports, a key cause of the noise problem in the first place, as a product of flawed municipal planning policies that federal intervention had since tried to stabilize and rectify through various means. Transport Canada tried to end on a high note in the final sections of the pamphlet. It compared the recorded sound of a jet to other noise sources like food blenders, lawn

66 CVA, CFAD fonds, Greater Vancouver Citizens’ Committee on Noise Abatement 1973-76, folder: 579- A-6, file 5, Ministry of Transport Noise Information Pamphlet, 1975, page 1. 67 CVA, CFAD fonds, Greater Vancouver Citizens’ Committee on Noise Abatement 1973-76, folder: 579- A-6, file 5, Ministry of Transport Noise Information Pamphlet, 1975, page 5. 68 CVA, CFAD fonds, Greater Vancouver Citizens’ Committee on Noise Abatement 1973-76, folder: 579- A-6, file 5, Ministry of Transport Noise Information Pamphlet, 1975, page 5.

99 mowers, and a typical hard rock band, concluding that jets produced an agreeable level of noise – around 80 decibels – that would meet most by-law requirements, except along takeoff and landing approach paths. This might not have consoled readers in Richmond and South Vancouver who were located along those very paths and viewed as most likely to complain by the government’s own regulatory system. Nevertheless, in a bid to convince sceptics Transport Canada avowed that “jet aircraft are kept as high as possible for as long as possible in the Vancouver area”, and that listeners on the ground were exposed to at least 6 decibels less sound each time an aircraft’s altitude doubled.69 Finally, the section titled “It’s getting quieter all the time” outlined the aviation industry’s stepped-up efforts in the 1970s to meet recent international certification changes by introducing quieter aircraft engines that would alleviate the roar of jet exhaust and high- pitched engine whine, responsible for much of the noise aggrieving people on the ground.70 It also mysteriously promised more “exotic developments” in the future to further reduce noise.71 The federal government soon combined these public outreach efforts with new land use policies around airports. This technocratic vision was built into space, relying on two planning tools to bring surrounding land into the orbit of airports: zoning and financing. First, the government turned to zoning to institute new guidelines restricting development around existing airports.72 Beginning in 1971, the Canadian Air Transportation Administration, under the auspices of Transport Canada, released new guidelines regarding land use in the vicinity of airports that stressed the importance of zoning to the safety of airport operations:

69 CVA, CFAD fonds, Greater Vancouver Citizens’ Committee on Noise Abatement 1973-76, folder: 579- A-6, file 5, Ministry of Transport Noise Information Pamphlet, 1975, pages 6-8. 70 Certification standards introduced by the International Civil Aviation Organization in the early 1970s required the manufacturers of new aircraft to meet noise requirements, meaning that only wide-bodied jumbo jets, introduced beginning in the early 1970s, initially conformed to the updated standards. It was only for economic reasons in the 1980s that new technologies fitted in jumbo jets, particularly turbofans, spread to small and medium-sized aircraft. For more on technological advancements in jet aircraft influenced by the need for noise control, see Smith, Aircraft Noise, 252-61. By 1990, quieter aircraft reduced the number of people in the United States and Europe affected by aircraft noise to a fraction of 1970s numbers. See Attenborough, Zaporozhets, Tokarev, eds., Aircraft Noise: Assessment, prediction and control, 45-46. 71 CVA, CFAD fonds, Greater Vancouver Citizens’ Committee on Noise Abatement 1973-76, folder: 579- A-6, file 5, Ministry of Transport Noise Information Pamphlet, 1975, pages 6-8. 72 At the same time, as Chapter 1 explains, federal authorities expropriated substantial amounts of land for the new Montreal and Toronto mega-airports, an act that enabled them to control surrounding development from the beginning.

100 Zoning of the airspace in the vicinity of an airport is essential to ensure the safety of aircraft using the airport, particularly during landing and takeoff operations. Airport zoning requirements have been established, and in certain cases, legislation enacted to ensure that no obstacle will penetrate certain zoning surfaces above which all aircraft must, by design, be capable of operating.73

Safety concerns about arriving and departing aircraft and their ongoing communication with air traffic control partly determined zoning policies. The more sophisticated means of tracking and communicating with aircraft, made possible by advances in radar technology, necessitated restriction on building heights proximate to the airport.74 More specifically, under the new rules, buildings or “other large structures such as power line towers” were not permitted to “block the line of sight from the radar antenna to the airspace on approaches to runways and other critical airspace which can only be identified by the Air Traffic Control Branch for a particular airport.” Moreover, Transport Canada also had to be consulted if other large structures like warehouses, power lines, and hangars were constructed within two miles of radar antenna because of concerns about signal interference.75 Generally speaking, however, the land use policies primarily dealt with noise at and around airports. They contained specific measures to eliminate noise as a social issue as well as counteract historical municipal development policies that had facilitated suburban sprawl near airport boundaries. The most significant change restricted the construction of specific structures within designated noise exposure areas that were based on the NEF system. Within the 35-40 NEF and above 40 NEF contours, the two highest noise measurement categories that equated to a range of 80 decibels or higher, the government forbade the building of most residential structures, including detached and semi-detached homes, town houses, garden homes, and apartments. It allowed some construction of these structures in the 30-35 NEF contour, but recommended developers “should be required to inform prospective tenants or purchasers of residential units that aircraft noise may interfere with certain activities. Construction should not be permitted

73 Canadian Air Transportation Administration, Civil Aviation Branch, Aviation Planning and Research Division, Land Use in the Vicinity of Airports: Planning Guidelines for the Use of Land Outside the Airport Property Boundary (Ottawa: Transport Canada, 1972, revised), 4. 74 On the beginnings of radar in Canada, see W.E. Knowles Middleton, Radar Development in Canada: the Radio Branch of the National Research Council of Canada, 1939-1946 (Waterloo: Wilfred University Press, 1981). 75 Canadian Air Transportation Administration, Land Use in the Vicinity of Airports, 8.

101 until the responsible authority is satisfied that appropriate noise insulation features have been considered in the building design.” It relaxed standards for structures in the below 30 NEF contour, the weakest designated range, but identified a “marginal zone” near this level “where aircraft noise may begin to annoy some residents”, a prospect that developers had to convey to prospective homeowners or renters before purchase.76 Beyond recommending restrictions on where residential dwellings could be built adjacent to airports, the CMHC also curtailed other types of surrounding development. In the NEF 40 above and 35-40 contours, it disallowed a host of structures entirely, including schools, churches, hospitals, nursing homes, libraries, campgrounds, stadiums, and hotels and motels.77 In the 30-35 NEF contour, meanwhile, it recommended that construction of these structures should be avoided “unless a detailed analysis is conducted and the required noise insulation features are considered by the architectural consultant responsible for building design,” and also pushed for them to be located at a distance from the 30 NEF contour to reduce overall noise exposure and the possibility of resident complaints.78 Second, the government sought to control development around airports by influencing what types of structures could receive federal funding. Transport Canada worked with the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, a Crown agency responsible for financing housing and insuring residential mortgage loans, to encourage residential housing development around impacted airports in ways that aligned with NEF noise contours. As a federal Crown Corporation, the CHMC could not regulate the construction of dwellings adjacent to airports, but it could make national recommendations and refuse monies to individual projects.79 Therefore, the CHMC developed a methodology for financing housing around airports that closely conformed to the NEF system by prioritizing funding for quieter areas where individual irritation to aircraft noise was projected to be weak. Accordingly, the CMHC denied financing, under the National Housing Act, to areas that fell within the 40+ and 35-40 NEF contours, the

76 Canadian Air Transportation Administration, Land Use in the Vicinity of Airports, 36. 77 Canadian Air Transportation Administration, Land Use in the Vicinity of Airports, 37. 78 Canadian Air Transportation Administration, Land Use in the Vicinity of Airports, 37. 79 As a federal body, the CHMC was responsible for commercial and industrial land use around airports. Authority over residential development, on the other hand, rested with the provinces and municipalities. Consequently, CHMC’s recommendations involving residential land-use around airports were intended as strong guidelines to influence government policy at lower levels.

102 noise zones classified as the loudest and most likely to experience individual and group complaints frequently and repeatedly. In the 30-35 NEF contour, the third of four designed noise zones, the CHMC agreed to fund housing only if it contained “adequate sound insulation”, and went on to strongly recommend the same for all dwellings in the lowest noise zone, 25-30 NEF.80 The focus of the CHMC’s efforts thus lay with phasing out new housing from concentrated aircraft flight paths, an acknowledgement that federal authorities had begun to define residential quality of life and safety in relation to airports and their capacity and potential for growth. Jet age airport upgrades, expansions, and renovations, then, not only helped produce aeromobile sprawl, but also engendered a rethinking of how development should occur. While moving quickly to discourage many building types near airports, the federal government also encouraged others in its revised land use policies. Generally speaking, it approved development “not considered to be adversely affected by aircraft noise” and did not require special noise insulation. Accordingly, it placed no restrictions on a wide range of designations that were not expected to interfere with or be impacted by airport operations, including cemeteries, parking lots, gasoline stations, warehouses, lumber yards, gas and oil storage, sewage treatment, highways, and railroads. Curiously, beaches and pools and golf courses also fell in this category despite representing public spaces of sociability, something the government might have felt compelled to overlook since they were not permanent places of residence, making any noise exposure an ephemeral experience rather than a daily lived reality.81 These exceptions aside, all of the structures federal authorities exempted from restrictions were of an industrial or commercial character that functioned as places of business or as transitory spaces. In some cases, these structures, particularly work sites, also produced their own noise that mitigated the impact of any emissions from nearby departing or arriving aircraft. The government thus reasoned that zoning lands around airports as primarily non-residential and separating airports and people would effectively re-isolate airports from surrounding populations and their environment and minimize the

80 Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation, New Housing and Airport Noise: A Supplement to the Site Planning Handbook (Ottawa: Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation, 1972), 10. 81 Canadian Air Transportation Administration, A Description of the CNR and NEF Systems for Estimating Aircraft Noise Annoyance, 39.

103 extent of future local resistance to noise at and around airports. Through its new land use policies, however, the federal government fundamentally altered how major national airports existed in space. As a result, it helped to legitimate a process by which modern airports, as transport hubs and economic conduits with specific operational requirements and enlarged geographical footprints, came to influence and dominate the character of local built landscapes.

Homeowners, Dislocation, and Jet Age Noise Vancouver homeowners affected by noise and airport expansion opponents challenged the techno-scientific logic of aeromobile sprawl by offering a critique of progress that mirrored some of the rhetoric of other civic resistance movements in Canada during the 1960s and 1970s, especially the same language of environmentalism that urban renewal sceptics had embraced, with a narrower focus on noise in suburbia.82 As part of this, they characterized new noise as something that they felt on an embodied level in their daily life, an experience that left them mentally dislocated from their surroundings. Joy Parr has shown how , such as alterations in sound, can fundamentally alter a person’s lived experience by “disordering their material reference points…[that] made the rhythms of habitat the rhythms of self – by extension incorporating the reckonings of distance, depth, duration, and direction – and situated people in their habitat.”83 In this way, aggrieved suburban homeowners and their supporters offered a sensory critique of aircraft noise that envisioned more noise from airport development further disrupting and severing individual connections to local environments. Noise protests in Vancouver escalated just as other communities in Canada were experiencing a sense of dislocation from mega-airport development that was both similar to and different from Vancouver homeowners. The expropriation of enormous parcels of

82 The language of environmentalism was a key part of civic resistance towards postwar urban renewal in Canadian, and North American, cities. See for example, Danielle Robinson, “Modernism at a Crossroad: The Spadina Expressway Controversy in Toronto, Ontario ca. 1960-1971,” Canadian Historical Review 92, 2 (2011), 295-322. Other postwar critiques of progress, however, were more issue-based. See for examples, Tina Loo, “People In The Way: Modernity, Environment, and Society on the Arrow Lakes,” BC Studies 142/143 (Summer 2004), 161-196; Steve Penfold, “Are we to go literally to the hot dogs? Parking lots, drive-ins, and the critique of progress in Toronto’s suburbs, 1965-1975,” Urban History Review 33, 1 (Fall 2004), 8-23. 83 Joy Parr, Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953-2003 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 129.

104 land in Montreal and Toronto to build new airports, described in Chapter 1, carried its own form of physical and emotional dislocation for affected homeowners, particularly with respect to Mirabel.84 On the one hand, the Mirabel expropriation literally removed homeowners – over 3,000 – from the land now reserved for the airports, causing much disruption in the process. People from the area linked the loss of homeownership to individual decay and the demise of a socio-economic identity firmly fixed in place and time. Offered a job as an airport construction worker after his farm was seized, Stanislas Leroux refused on the grounds that he was “a farmer, not a lumberjack” whose sense of self was intimately linked to agriculture and a specific skill-set cultivated over the years.85 Others, meanwhile, argued that relocation presented insurmountable challenges for farmers hoping to resume their trade in a new environment. “This is my family’s land,” remarked Fernand Ladoucer, a farmer and expropriated landowner. “I was born here and I was raised here and the farm has been mine for 21 years. I know this land and I know what it can do and that has taken me a long time to learn”.86 At the same time, the federal expropriation and Mirabel’s impending arrival also upended the local reality for those who were left behind. Pierre Nepveu, who would go on to win multiple Governor General’s Awards in the 1990s for poetry and non-fiction, lived near the area and visited the expropriated lands in the early 1970s.87 While there, Nepveu bemoaned the changes that had already occurred during Mirabel’s early construction. “Everything will be levelled for as far as the eye can see, and suddenly this flattened vastness frightens me”, he wrote.88 “This place was surveyed, studied, tested, and turned over down to its lowest layer. It was scanned with infra-red, its stones were counted like a sick man’s organs, its sands and open lands were x-rayed.”89 Nepveu linked this transformation to a technocratic vision of airport development, accusing the state and its partners of caring little about respecting or preserving what was there before Mirabel. “Progress prefers a straight line, says the prophet in the dark blue suit, and out

84 For a lengthier discussion, see Edwards, “Breaking New Ground”, 22-27. 85 “It’s our new airport, but their homes and fields,” Montreal Gazette, 11 August 1970, 3. 86 “The Ste. Scholastique jetport: Progress spells doom for family farms,” Montreal Gazette, 15 December 1972, 10. 87 For a comprehensive list of Nepveu’s works, see Fannie Loiselle, “Bibliographie de Pierre Nepveu,” Voix et Images 34, 1 (2008), 91-105. 88 Pierre Nepveu, Mirabel (Montréal: Signal Editions, 2004), 27. 89 Nepveu, Mirabel, 34.

105 of his briefcase he pulls the airport construction plans…On paper thin as a sewing pattern, the whole region seems abstract and featureless, reduced to solid or dotted lines, with the land on all sides uniformly white.”90 The particular sprawl of Mirabel, then, disrupted the lives of people nearby, uprooting some entirely and leaving others behind who struggled to reconcile past memories of place and identity with the airport’s wholesale transformation of the local area. Like Nepveu, Vancouver homeowners witnessed their city’s airport transformation first hand and mobilized over their shared sense of dislocation. Upon learning that federal officials had approved the construction of a new parallel runway in February 1973, local residents formed a number of tiny grassroots organizations to protest the airport expansion along socio-environmental lines. Although never entirely united, their efforts to organize collectively led them to form the Community Forum for Airport Development (CFAD) that same month.91 The CFAD comprised a coalition of pre-existing community groups ranging from ratepayers’ organizations in and around Richmond to other organizations with a strong environmentalist bent; notable members included the Richmond Residents’ Association, Sea Island Ratepayers’ Association, Greater Vancouver Citizens Committee for Noise Abatement, the Richmond Anti- Pollution Association, and the BC Wildlife Federation.92 The CFAD worked strenuously to contest the airport expansion project itself as well as question the federal strategies for managing noise that had sought to strike a perilous balance between winning public consent and accommodating airports. It functioned as a loosely structured organization, headed by an appointed chairperson and board of directors who were primarily responsible for outreach, and remained locally active for over two decades until

90 Nepveu, Mirabel, 36. 91 The Greater Vancouver Regional District was tasked with ensuring that local residents were involved in the airport planning process and invited 150 organizations to send representatives to the CFAD’s first meeting, which was held on 8 November 1973. CVA, CFAD fonds, Community Forum 1973-78, folder: 579-A-4, file 7, “Formation of the Community Forum”. For a brief discussion of the CFAD and its anti- expansion critique, see Elliot J. Feldman, The Politics of Canadian Airport Development : Lessons for Federalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1983), 150-63. Feldman is overly critical of the organization, arguing that it lacked wide local support and did not possess a democratic organizing structure. 92 CRA, Series 17, File 2606-2, details of Community Forum meeting at Richmond Inn on 12 December 1973, list of groups in attendance.

106 expansion finally went ahead in the 1990s.93 Along the way, the CFAD was joined by municipal and regional political bodies, such as the Greater Vancouver Regional District, which also objected to the federal noise proposals and the methodology that lay behind them. In doing so, this cross-section of local interests evoked a different understanding of the position of airports in local geographies, one that challenged the growth imperative that underlined the rising federal interest in airports. The anxiety about noise was part of a larger suburban critique that drew on many languages, including postwar environmentalism. Many activists drew from this rhetoric to highlight the ecological impact of aeromobile sprawl and predict negative changes to the nature and order of ecosystems around the airport.94 Local environmentalists focused on the possible repercussions of a larger airport on the nearby Fraser River estuary, an ecologically sensitive area with a large bird and wildlife population that sat directly in the path of the new runway. The CFAD derided the absence of a plan for environmental protection of the estuary, including compensation for lost habitat and pollution control, and the lack of an environmental benefit and cost assessment of the proposed expansion.95 The BC Environmental Council and Richmond Anti-Pollution Association also expressed concerns about the possible impact on water life and the dispersal of effluent from the nearby Iowa Sewage Treatment Plan as a result of dredging to fill in land for the runway extension.96 A 1974 study by the Canadian Wildlife Service, meanwhile, concluded that although it would be impossible to determine the exact impact until expansion happened, there would be a loss of 50 to 360 acres of marsh vegetation and 75 to 1234 acres of intertidal mud flats, which would result in the partial or even total destruction of the Sea Island estuary. Additionally, it estimated that 15% to all of the existing foreshore habitat would be lost due to expansion, including between 800 and

93 The CFAD’s first chairperson was Gordon Waddell. CVA, CFAD fonds, Community Forum 1973-78, folder: 579-A-4, file 7, “Vancouver International Airport,” 30 June 1974. 94 On the rise of postwar environmentalism in North America, see Ryan O’Connor, First Green Wave: Pollution Probe and the Origins of Environmental Activism in Ontario (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2015). 95 CVA, CFAD fonds, Clippings 1973-88, folder: 578-G-7, file 5, “Bigger airport ‘could imperial wildlife’,” Vancouver Sun, unknown date. 96 CRA, Series 17, File 2606-2, Hearing Officer’s report from the Cora Brown expropriation hearings, 28 February 1973, 13.

107 5,500 ducks and geese, 200 and 1,400 shorebirds, as well as 60 and 400 gulls and seabirds.97 Other objections arose from Sea Island’s First Nations population. Delbert Guerin, Chief of the Musqueam Indian Band, and John Brampton, the Musqueam’s land development officer, protested on the basis that the Musqueam settlement on Sea Island, which was located northwest of the airport, had not been consulted about the federal expropriation plan.98 They also declared that more noise from the parallel runway would disrupt their ongoing efforts to develop land on the north side of the Fraser River across from Sea Island and the airport.99 At the time of the expansion announcement, Guerin and Brampton said that the Musqueam had built 40 homes there and planned to build another 30, along with developing a subdivision that would consist of 134 large homes.100 Their protests rendered visible the complex historical legacy of white settler colonialism, characterized by the federal reluctance to recognize and negotiate First Nations land claims in good faith.101 Alongside these concerns, however, citizens from affected neighbourhoods in Richmond and South Vancouver most frequently cited current and future noise as both a growing socio-environmental nuisance and as a clear reason why the airport should not be expanded until a satisfactory local resolution could be found. These concerns were not new; rather, residential complaints about aircraft noise had begun soon after jets entered service and only accelerated since then. Beginning in November 1960, residents in Riverdale subdivision, directly south of the airport across the Lower Fraser River, circulated a petition to reduce noise around the airport, particularly from ground engine testing. Mrs. R.H. Archdekin, the author of the petition, said that noise had “steadily

97 E.W. Taylor, The Vancouver International Airport Expansion Proposals and Possible Impact on Wildlife of the Fraser River Estuary (Delta, B.C.: Canadian Wildlife Service, October 1974), 35-37. 98 On the history of the Musqueam First Nation, see Susan Roy, These Mysterious People: Shaping History and Archaeology in a Northwest Coast Community (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). 99 The Musqueam owned land on the north side of the Fraser River in the area known as Musqueam Park, where land values had soared in the 1960s because of its proximity to downtown Vancouver and the University of British Columbia. The Musqueam had begun leasing land in Musqueam Park to settler Canadians before the airport expansion was announced. See Jennifer A. Hamilton, “Resettling Musqueam Park: Property, Landscape, and Indian Land in British Columbia,” Political Legal and Anthropology Review 29, 1 (2006), 88. 100 CRA, Series 17, File 2606-2, Hearing Officer’s report from the Cora Brown expropriation hearings, 28 February 1973, 30. 101 On the history of settler colonialism in British Columbia, see Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002).

108 grown worse and is now unbearable”. She added that engine testing was “with us most of the time day and night. Any respite from this house-shaking roar is so rare as to be noticed and much enjoyed. One dare not sleep with windows open…normal conversation out-of-doors is impossible.”102 Archdekin successfully collected 208 signatures in her subdivision and surrounding area between November 22 and December 10, illustrating that her feelings reflected growing suburban alienation as noise at and around airports steadily increased.103 People in suburban Vancouver continued to protest noise through the 1960s, turning their attention more towards aircraft noise across flight paths as the decade progressed. F.L. Puberston, who lived just east of the airport in the Burkeville subdivision, pleaded for noise relief in a February 1963 letter to Richmond Municipal Council: “Can’t something be done about the low flying planes over our houses, about the early hours of the morning a plane went over my house, and it nearly scared the life out of my wife, like it was going to take the top of the roof off, and the noise is terrible.”104 Later that year, Richmond resident Robert Zarelli, who lived six kilometres north of the airport, claimed that his house walls and stucco were cracked from what he described as constant jet noise overhead: “Planes are coming in every three minutes. We can’t watch television and we have to scream at each other to be heard.”105 Moreover, in 1968 D.B. Henning, another Richmond homeowner, declared that rising noise from aircraft takeoffs and arrivals as well as ground engine testing had dramatically reduced the air quality in Richmond. “I consider life in general pretty grim,” he wrote, “if we all followed the example of the airports’ disregard of the common environment.”106 As these examples show, many people became annoyed with aircraft noise in the 1960s and early 1970s mainly because it affected their hearing or disrupted daily routines and interactions. In this way, they positioned jet-age noise as an unwanted part of the environment that comprised their sensory landscape. Provincial and local media were quick to grasp this point and regularly satirized the issue in cartoons and comics while

102 “‘Intolerable noise’ at airport protested,” Richmond Review, 6 December 1960, 1. 103 CRA, Series 17, File 2622-1, Letter from R.H. Archdekin to Richmond Municipal Council, 2 January 1961. 104 CRA, Series 17, File 2622-1, letter from F.L. Puberston to Richmond Municipal Council, 15 February 1963. 105 “Jets shatter walls, nerves,” Richmond Review, 6 June 1963, 1. 106 “Letter to the editor,” Richmond Review, 8 October 1969, 17.

109 also acknowledging its seriousness for homeowners. One cartoon, for example, showed a doctor treating a visibly rattled patient for hearing loss and unsuccessfully asking them how long they had lived near the airport (Figure 9). Newspapers also often printed pictures of aircraft flying low over neighbourhoods that visually explained the nature of the problem to readers (Figure 10).

Figure 9: Newspaper anti-noise cartoon. CVA, CFAD fonds, Clippings 1973-88, folder: 578-G-7, file 5, Vancouver Sun, unknown date.

110

Figure 10: John and Alice Tiles at their Richmond home as an airplane passes overhead. CVA, CFAD fonds, Clippings 1973-88, folder: 578-G-7, file 5, Vancouver Sun, unknown date.

Residents in Richmond and suburban Vancouver as well as elements of the media had thus begun raising the issue of noise well before the release of the airport expansion plan in 1973. In light of this, it was no surprise that many critics opposed a new parallel runway on the basis that authorities could not claim to have comprehensively studied the impact of expansion on the local landscape and community because they had failed to convincingly resolve the noise problem over the years. For these reasons the CFAD took the lead in questioning the societal benefits of a parallel runway under the current circumstances, asking Vancouverites whether “to proceed with expansion and a 3rd runway is to write a blank cheque for development that has no demonstrated need, and has unquestionable negative effects, the full costs of which are still unknown.”107 It then went on to recommend a series of measures to mitigate noise, including prohibiting arrivals and departures between 10pm and 7am, raising the minimum altitude for flights

107 CVA, CFAD fonds, Community Forum on Airport Development 1975-97, folder: 579-A-4, file 1, “Excerpts from Decision Option: Decide not to build a 3rd runway now”.

111 over urban areas to 7000 feet from 5000, and restricting planes to airspace away from residential areas as much as possible.108 The CFAD and its allies also attacked Transport Canada’s reliance on the NEF system as the centrepiece of its noise mitigation strategy. In a 1974 position paper on the airport’s proposed expansion, the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD) blasted the NEF’s schematics, calling it a “faulty” methodology for measuring noise that vastly underestimated the “extent and seriousness of noise exposure from airport and aircraft operations” in Vancouver.109 Basing its claims on studies undertaken by the National Research Council in relation to the proposed Vancouver expansion, the GVRD asserted that federal NEF readings failed to account for noise from ground operations at the airport itself, such as engine testing and particular engine techniques pilots employed during landing, which constituted a growing source of noise complaints from the public. It also claimed that the NEF ignored topographical variations and meteorological conditions such as wind direction and velocity, temperature inversions, and overcast conditions, the latter two of which were common occurrences in Vancouver and had the effect of blanketing noise over a larger and longer distance. The GVRD concluded by arguing that the statistical schemes responsible for creating the NEF contours and generating readings contained “systematic biases in calculation methods” that underestimated maximum levels of noise exposure at specific distances. It went on to recommend sweeping changes to the general NEF formula as well as more effective built-in variables for measuring Vancouver’s aircraft noise.110 Public responses also focused on the technocratic-based logic of Transport Canada’s noise methodology. “We’re talking about a real, actual factor of nuisance”, said John Creery, spokesman for the anti-expansion Vancouver Citizens’ Committee for Noise Control, “not some computerized study by a self-interested engineer.”111 E.R.

108 CVA, CFAD fonds, Community Forum on Airport Development 1975-97, folder: 579-A-4, file 1, “Excerpts from Decision Option: Decide not to build a 3rd runway now”. 109 The GVRD was a member of the Airport Planning Committee, formed in 1973 to assess the viability of the proposed Vancouver airport expansion project and made up of representatives of all three levels of government, the airlines, and the public. 110 CVA, CFAD fonds, Greater Vancouver Regional District and Airport Expansion 1973-79, folder: 579- A-6, file 6, “GVRD Position Paper, October 17, 1974”. 111 CVA, CFAD fonds, Clippings 1973-88, folder: 578-G-7, file 5, “Noise no problem, airport foes told,” Vancouver Sun, 12 February 1973, 29.

112 Starling of the Richmond Ratepayers’ Association concurred, stating he had “great difficulty understanding terms such as – LEQ, NNI, PNOB, EPNL, OASPL, CAR, NEF, CNRS, LEN, EPNDB – and discovering which are the best criteria for measuring noise.” Starling asked for a moratorium on scientific terminology and further reflection on the social costs of airport development and expansion. “The public has no wish to threaten the jobs, or enjoyment, of any one in the aviation industry”, he contended. “We are only suggesting that growth for the sake of growth is a stupid premise, when it infringes on the rights of the majority of human beings”.112 The CFAD, too, reserved harsh words for the NEF, describing the government’s noise strategies as woefully bureaucratic and civically irresponsible and finding them guilty of “lowering the quality of life for everyone in order to make travelling more convenient for a few amounts to dictatorship by the minority.” It went on to add: “[they] treat Vancouver as an air-conditioned city where people sit inside their houses with all windows closed. Because this is an unrealistic view of the habitat and habitants, what other erroneous assumptions have been made?”113 These comments collectively linked the NEF system to pro-growth ideology and stressed that where airport development was concerned technocratic logic should not trump local realities. Noise sceptics and airport expansion opponents also tried to invert the pro-growth reasoning behind the NEF system and the general nature of aeromobile sprawl by arguing that it stifled local growth and carried myriad economic repercussions. The GVRD claimed that the NEF schema understated how much Vancouver’s temperate climate would influence noise annoyance levels because warmer weather year round meant more people were outside. It noted that there were 23 different parks within the NEF contours, along with 11 golf courses that were used by approximately 75,000 people annually.114 Meanwhile, some suburban homeowners, like Ron Mackee of South Vancouver, feared a drop in property values from noise:

112 CVA, CFAD fonds, Clippings 1973-88, folder: 578-G-7, file 5, “Letter to the editor: Threats of aviation industry ignored,” Vancouver Sun, 14 August 1974, 5. 113 CVA, CFAD fonds, Airport Alert 1981, folder: 578-G-7, file 3, Community Forum on Airport Development Newsletter, November 1981. 114 CRA, Series 17, File 2606-2, Hearing Officer’s report from the Cora Brown expropriation hearings, 28 February 1973, 20.

113 There’s millions of dollars of real estate values and tens of thousands of people involved. The question that comes to my mind all the time is, why is it necessary? I think there should be public hearings…You get a jumbo jet coming over the Shaughnessy golf course clubhouse [located in south Vancouver, a few kilometres northwest of the airport across the Fraser River] and I’ll tell you, everybody is going to hear about it.115

Mackee’s comment implied that class and social influence were linked, meaning that people with significant power and capital could effectively marshal these resources to pressure authorities into resolving issues that they found disagreeable. Broadly speaking, this process helped to not only fuel the rise of the CFAD and other suburban grassroots critiques of aircraft noise, but also to explain why authorities delayed airport expansion through the 1970s and 1980s in the face of civic protest. Many of the CFAD’s active members and supporters predominantly lived in upper-middle class communities in northwest Richmond, which was south of Sea Island and the airport, and in South Vancouver, north of Sea Island. Census data from 1971 revealed that neighbourhoods in northwest Richmond, located underneath aircraft flight paths, earned an average household income between $12,000 and $15,000, which was higher than the average household income of $11,650 for home-owning residents across Richmond. Vast sections of South Vancouver, moreover, also averaged over $12,000 in average household income.116 These residents utilized their class identity and social capital to contest forms of development that negatively affected their everyday lived experiences, actions that mirrored resistance in other upper-middle class neighbourhoods across Canada to urban development and public mega-projects in the late twentieth century.117 The role that privilege played in civic protests against jet-age noise and aeromobile sprawl in Vancouver did not go unnoticed. Rather, it led some people, including pro-growth proponents and other local residents, to challenge the authenticity of suburban critiques of progress. Some accused the CFAD and others of ignorantly portraying themselves as victims. Donald Cameron of the British Columbia Aviation Council, a local group strongly supportive of airport expansion, disputed the notion that

115 CVA, CFAD fonds, Clippings 1973-88, folder: 578-G-7, file 5, Vancouver Sun, unknown date. 116 Data from 1971 Census, cited in Financial Post, Vancouver [map]: average household income, 1971 (Toronto: Financial Post, 1975), map. 117 Christopher Leo, The Politics of Urban Development: Canadian Urban Expressway Disputes (Toronto: Institute of Public Administration of Canada, 1977); Robinson, “Modernism at a Crossroad”.

114 individual residents had earned the right to challenge the state on aeromobile sprawl. “I find it less than amusing”, he said, “to listen as I have had to over the past year to non- aviation people…discussing noise abatement procedures about which they know nothing.”118 Portraying activists as out of their depth was a common tactic amongst industry boosters who sought to highlight the federal government’s objective and technocratic approach as a refreshing and appealing contrast. Others speculated that suburban critiques of progress were place-based more than anything else. Put simply, they questioned whether suburbanites were truly opposed to noise and airport development in principle or only near their homes.119 In some cases, people in these neighbourhoods even made this point. “It’s not unliveable [the noise from aircraft]”, observed George Fierheller, a resident of Point Grey, a neighbourhood in South Vancouver and one of the hotspots for noise complaints. “I think people who live close to airports have to be realistic, and accept some noise.”120 Comments like these asked whether community activists had come to expect too much from airports within a neighbourhood setting when in fact they only had themselves to blame for choosing to live near one in the first place. In direct contrast to the CFAD and its supporters, then, they suggested suburbanites were responsible for their own plight for buying the image of symbiotic living that had been offered to them by subdivision developers. Far from victims, this argument went, residents angered by jet-age noise and aeromobile sprawl had made a conscious decision to embrace suburban living and settle near an airport, leaving them in no position to characterize airports as bad neighbours since they should have implicitly understood that future growth and socio-environmental change was inevitable. What complicated this argument, however, was the fact that suburban sprawl in Canada had largely preceded jet-age noise and aeromobile sprawl. Even after airports had begun to encroach on surrounding communities, blaming newly arriving residents for reacting angrily ignored the role of housing developers and financiers in continually

118 CVA, CFAD fonds, Clippings 1973-88, folder: 578-G-7, file 5, “Environmentalists, governments hit,” Vancouver Sun, unknown date. 119 This position was widely renamed Not In My Backyard, or NIMBY, Syndrome in the 1980s. The phenomenon is briefly discussed in Harris, Creeping Conformity, 36-37. 120 CVA, CFAD fonds, Clippings 1973-88, folder: 578-G-7, file 5, “Airport noise level tortures residents under flight paths,” Vancouver Sun, unknown date.

115 promoting affordable residential living near airports. Captain Charles Simpson, President of the Canadian Air Traffic Controllers Association in the early 1970s, reached this conclusion, contending that federal authorities had failed to rein in and more strictly regulate residential development in preceding years despite evidence that jets had fundamentally transformed air travel as well as the relationship between airports and surrounding environments: “People who moved close to an airport after it was built, and who are now complaining about the noise, should never have been allowed to move there. Governments should have bought up the surrounding land for industrial uses, which aren’t bothered by the noise.”121 Civic concerns about the socio-environmental costs of jet and other aircraft noise soon extended beyond daylight hours. Until 1978, the vast majority of airport operations at Vancouver airport, including departures and arrivals, had occurred between 7am and midnight. This schedule was the product of a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ arranged in the 1960s between the two major Canadian airlines – Air Canada and Canadian Pacific Airways – and a host of smaller, regional airlines to avoid scheduling departing or arriving flights at airports across the country between midnight and 7am as a way of reducing noise complaints. The federal government was also partly responsible for the gentlemen’s agreement, having instituted noise abatement procedures, including a curfew, at Toronto, Montreal-Dorval, and Winnipeg airports, but not Vancouver, in 1970.122 Beginning in June 1978, however, the groups responsible for the gentleman’s agreement at Vancouver ended it in order to allow several airlines to offer low cost, red- eye flights between Toronto and Vancouver. Known as ‘nighthawk’ services, these flights became attractive to air carriers because they prevented planes from being grounded for several hours overnight during curfew hours.123 As such, they were also part of a broader cost-cutting approach that Canada’s major airlines as well as most other

121 “CALPA stand is firm on mid-airs, noise, medicine,” Canadian Aviation, January 1971, 42. 122 “Air Man War Climax Nears: Law suits launched,” Richmond Review, 26 May 1971, 1. 123 Airlines lost money when their planes were grounded because of maintenance costs. For a more detailed explanation, see Rigas Doganis, Flying Off Course: Airline Economics and Marketing, 4th edition (New York: Routledge, 2010), 4-25, 75-150.

116 North American airlines gradually employed as part of the push towards de-regulation of the commercial aviation industry in the late 1970s.124 The abrogation of the gentleman’s agreement and introduction of ‘nighthawk’ flights left Vancouver as the only Canadian international airport without a nighttime curfew. Montreal-Dorval had instituted a stricter one in May 1978, banning all jet activities between 10:55pm and 7:05am, and Toronto did the same in April 1979, prohibiting departing scheduled flights between 1am and 7am and instituting preferred – meaning most socially acceptable – runway measures for arriving flights during curfew hours.125 The federal government and airport managers at Vancouver did impose restrictions on the nighthawk flights that were approved, restricting the application of power reverse thrust – a particular manoeuvre employed during landing that generated substantial jet noise – to situations when safety concerns warranted its use.126 They also encouraged airplanes to depart and land from the Georgia Strait in the west whenever possible in an effort to minimize the noise damage over residential areas in South Vancouver and Richmond. For these reasons, officials were quick to label the first nighthawk flights, widely attended by the media, as a success. After one of the first nights, A. Bach, Pacific Regional Administrator for the Canadian Air Transportation Administration, confidently exclaimed that the loudest noise all night was not from any jet, but rather from “a reporter slamming the door of a Volkswagen after parking it behind our airport noise monitoring unit [on the scene to measure the flight noise]”.127 Nevertheless, despite Bach’s sunny view the new program still meant a dramatic increase in night flights at the airport. From only five nighthawk flights in July 1976, officials

124 On the impact of deregulation on the Canadian commercial aviation industry, see Garth Stevenson, The Politics of Canada’s Airlines from Diefenbaker to Mulroney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 194-96. Peter Pigott, Flying Colours: A History of Commercial Aviation in Canada (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1997), 189. 125 CVA, Vancouver Councillor’s Office, Alderman Helen Boyce fonds, Vancouver Airport, 1977-80, folder: 84-F-3, file 9, G.F. Farry, Chief Administrator Planning, to Chairman and Members of the Planning Committee, Re: Night Flying at Vancouver Airport, March 20, 1980. 126 Power reverse thrust temporarily diverts the aircraft’s engine exhaust forward, rather than backwards, to produce deceleration. It is usually applied just after an aircraft has landed in order to help slow it down more rapidly and reduce wear on the brakes. 127 CVA, Vancouver Councillor’s Office, Alderman Helen Boyce fonds, Vancouver Airport, 1977-80, folder: 84-F-3, file 9, letter from A. Bach, Pacific Regional Administrator, Canadian Air Transportation Administration, to June Binkert, unknown date.

117 authorized 153 in 1978 and 566 in 1979, as more Canadian airlines and European charter companies took advantage of the overnight opportunities at Vancouver.128 The rise of nighthawk flights at Vancouver led expansion opponents and noise sceptics to broaden their concerns about the local effects of aircraft noise and aeromobile sprawl. Aggrieved homeowners and other critics had focused on the daytime effects of aircraft noise on people’s hearing and daily routines. However, nighthawk flights were especially dangerous because they could potentially disrupt sleep patterns and cause more acute psychosomatic distress. To make their case, activists turned to experts for help, seeking out specialists in Canada who had begun to study the physiological and psychological effects of aircraft noise on affected populations.129 This collaboration, in turn, brought greater nuance to the arguments of noise sceptics and anti-expansion people by exploring the possible mental health threat that overnight aircraft noise posed. Specialists who studied the Vancouver situation questioned whether the federal noise abatement strategy had actually complicated the means of accumulating knowledge about the overnight effects of aircraft noise on populations. In the late 1980s, the CFAD appointed Dr. James Piercey, affiliated with the National Research Council of Canada, to study Transport Canada’s NEF-based noise analyses at and around Vancouver airport. Piercey concluded that the impacts of aircraft noise on sleep and speech interference had been understated and recommended a full community survey with a greater built-in cognitive and psychological focus.130 He also called for the introduction of a noise compensation project for affected residents. Through this program, Transport Canada would compensate homeowners who wished to insulate their homes from noise through installation of wall treatment, glazing, heavier roofs, solid core doors, air exchange or air conditioning systems, all of which would help make neighbourhoods surrounding the airport more habitable.131

128 CVA, CFAD fonds, Clippings 1973-88, folder: 578-G-7, file 5, clipping from Express Finance, 20 June 1979. 129 This followed pioneering studies in the early 1970s that blamed jet noise for irregular sleeping patterns and a disproportionately high number of infant deaths in communities near Los Angeles International Airport and London’s Heathrow International Airport. On the London sleep studies, see Smith, Aircraft Noise, 17. 130 CVA, CFAD fonds, Airport Current 1989-2000, folder: 579-A-6, file 7, letter to Ray Robinson, Chairman, Vancouver International Airport Environmental Assessment Panel, January 21, 1991, page 1. 131 CVA, CFAD fonds, Airport Current, 1989-2000, folder: 579-A-6, file 7, letter to Ray Robinson, Chairman, Vancouver International Airport Environmental Assessment Panel, January 21, 1991, page 3.

118 Others also highlighted the possibly harmful physiological and psychological effects from noise that was not readily audible. In 1991, Paul Wolstenholme, a professor in the Department of Communications at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, argued that the impact of infrasound and very low-frequency noise from aircraft traffic was equally injurious to affected residents as the more common high-frequency sounds. Jets, he claimed, emitted extraordinary high intensity levels of infrasound, particularly during takeoff and subsequent turning climb manoeuvres as the aircraft ascended towards its assigned flight path. These were mostly emitted rearward, meaning that neighbourhoods typically located away from the noisier flight paths could be adversely affected. Moreover, Wolstenholme argued that wide-body jets that had been introduced into service during the 1970s and 1980s, generally thought to be quieter and more noise- friendly than their predecessors, were actually the biggest offenders of low-frequency emissions.132 According to him, people exposed to it experienced general discomfort and difficulties performing cognitive tasks and, as intensity increased, feelings of “nausea, headaches, dizziness, oppressiveness, fear, lethargy, and loss of balance”.133 Failure to substantially reduce aircraft noise and low-frequency emissions led Wolstenhome to foresee extensive damage to emotive and neural capabilities that would induce “increasingly neurotic, psychotic, indulging in violent, vandalistic, anti-social, and essentially self-destructive behaviour”.134 While this description was undeniably dystopian, it illustrated not only that civic concerns about jet-age noise in Vancouver remained strong into the 1990s, but also that these critiques had grown more refined as general societal awareness about noise grew over this period.

Interest in noise compensation projects continued into the 1990s as a solution for placating residents if noise mitigation strategies were deemed to have failed; more options floated then included relocation assistance; a house sale value guarantee; house insulation for people who wished to stay in their homes; insulation of local churches, schools, community and recreation centres, old age homes and vulnerable industries; community betterment programs; and annual tax rebates. 132 By the 1980s, a common industry argument was that continuing advances in jet technology had begun to mitigate aircraft noise in local communities and by extension, decrease the number of noise complaints, rendering the noise problem an individual, rather than collective, issue. See CVA, CFAD fonds, Community Reports 1989-90, folder: 579-A-7, file 3, “Vancouver International Airport, Parallel Runway Project, Community Report, Volume No. 2, 1990”. 133 CVA, CFAD fonds, Airport Current 1989-2000, folder: 579-A-6, file 7, Paul Wolstenholme, “Impact of Infrasound and Very Low-Frequency Noise from Traffic on the Proposed Third Runway Vancouver International Airport, January 1991,” page 1. 134 CVA, CFAD fonds, Airport Current, 1989-2000, folder: 579-A-6, file 7, Paul Wolstenholme, “Impact of Infrasound and Very Low-Frequency Noise from Traffic on the Proposed Third Runway Vancouver International Airport, January 1991,” page 14-15.

119 Jet Age Noise and the Modern Soundscape In Vancouver, an emerging culture of public noise awareness and engagement with the modern soundscape also shaped and was shaped by local critiques of jet-age aircraft noise. Generally speaking, noise awareness advocates challenged the link between noise and progress, encouraging individuals to think more critically about noise in their daily lives as well as promoting stricter regulation of the modern soundscape to protect the health and well being of society. Once again, Vancouver represented a unique theatre of activity because of the level and intensity of local engagement. Noise advocates in Vancouver, in other words, sought to define the steady roar of jets over nearby residential subdivisions as a manifestation of a broader, more comprehensive sensory barrage that now greeted people in the late twentieth century. As these developments intertwined, Vancouver became the epicentre in Canada in the 1970s for a burgeoning noise awareness movement that sought to increase public knowledge about the potential dangers of a modern soundscape of which jet-age noise was only one element. The World Soundscape Project, an international study and research group based at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University, was largely responsible for the transformation in local attitudes towards noise. Founded in 1969 by R. Murray Schaefer, a Canadian musician and composer who also taught an acoustic ecology course at Simon Fraser, the WSP helped foster a wide-ranging discussion about modern noise at a time when rapid technological change and economic globalization had amplified public anxieties about the future, and specifically the health of communities and the planet.135 The WSP was especially critical of tri-level governing bodies, arguing that officials had failed to collaborate on measures to control the spread and intensity of noises that posed real public health threats. In 1972, for example, it surveyed the noise bylaws of ninety communities across the country and found that only three contained effective measures to cope with noise.136 It blamed the absence of national standards and called explicitly for the federal government to “assume its responsibilities and set adequate standards for coping with ‘technological sounds’”.137

135 Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970). 136 World Soundscape Project, A Survey of Community Noise by-Laws in Canada. 137 CVA, CFAD fonds, Clippings 1973-88, folder: 578-G-7, file 5, “Few anti-noise laws found,” Vancouver Sun, 6 March 1973, 2.

120 If authorities were to act, however, the WSP believed individuals had to know more about the noise hazards that they navigated on a daily basis. Therefore, it focused on a series of educational strategies to increase civic knowledge about the modern sensory landscape and the relationship between technology, environment, and society in the late twentieth century. Over several months in 1973, the WSP installed several recording devices across urban Vancouver to record noise. It subsequently published the results in a monograph as well as on two 12-inch sound discs, which contained a multitude of noises at different pitches, intensities, and durations, including aircraft noise. These sound recordings collectively helped to render Vancouver’s soundscape more intelligible, and audible, to listeners by isolating various sounds that might otherwise go unnoticed on a daily basis.138 In December 1973, moreover, the WSP sponsored co-sponsored noise workshops at Simon Fraser University with the Sonic Research Studio, which was also based at Simon Fraser.139 Organizers framed the workshop as a pedagogical exercise on the modern soundscape to reverse years of public apathy and ignorance about noise that had left modern society rife with “outrageous” and “hazardous” noises to which humans mistakenly believed they could adapt. “Many people”, a newsletter advertising the workshop declared, “still believe that noise is the price to be paid for progress and do not realize that it actually is a sign of regression in the quality of human living.” The problem, therefore, was attitudinal; unwanted noise could be eradicated if people simply decided they no longer wanted to live with it.140 The objective of the WSP’s Simon Fraser workshop mirrored the practices of “consciousness-raising” espoused by various social movements, including second-wave feminism, in Canada and the United States during the 1960s and early 1970s.141 Consciousness-raising participants undertook intense introspection to achieve a more enlightened and healthy sense of self that would be free of misconceptions about one’s

138 World Soundscape Project, The Vancouver Soundscape (Burnaby, B.C.: Sonic Research Studio, Simon Fraser University, 1974), includes two sound discs. 139 The Sonic Research Studio operated inside the Communications Department at Simon Fraser University and contributed heavily to the World Soundscape Project. 140 CVA, CFAD fonds, Greater Vancouver Citizens’ Committee on Noise Abatement 1973-76, folder: 579- A-6, file 5, “Noise Workshops,” page 1. 141 On consciousness raising and second-wave feminism, see Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 101.

121 place in the world as well as unburdened by the toxic messages that had defined and informed their ways of seeing and self-identifying until then.142 Along these lines, the WSP workshop organizers cautioned that dismissing noise pollution as a societal problem carried systemic and long-term consequences whereby people lost control over their aural senses and “became passive receptors of any sound, wanted or unwanted”. Individuals who turned a blind eye to noise, in other words, relinquished their agency over the process and exposed themselves to potentially harmful psychosomatic effects.143 The organizers built the workshop around the goal of inducing participants to develop a more active interest in noise on a personal as well as public level. Personal initiative could take the form of self-education or a change in lifestyle to mitigate the appearance or frequency of certain noises, whereas public engagement meant educating others as a civic duty in ways analogous to the WSP itself. Lasting two and a half hours, the workshop included an introduction on the history and current state of the soundscape; a listening experience involving a tape recording that “demonstrates the evolution of soundscape in general”; a lecture on the effects of noise with the aid of charts, statistics and taped sounds as demonstrations; a talk on legal initiatives being taken to address noise problems; a “soundwalk” that allowed participants to interrogate the “sound environment as it is now” and more critically take note of their aural surroundings; and a discussion about specific community noise problems and ways of producing a local soundscape that would be more aligned with public health needs. Collectively speaking, these initiatives had the same aim of producing informed, conscientious, and civic- minded participants who now had the tools to pressure for stricter noise abatement strategies and policies.144 Government-sponsored surveys and questionnaires in the 1970s indirectly gave people in Vancouver an opportunity to communicate with authorities about noise and the place of sound in their daily lives. One of the more significant noise surveys took place in 1974, sponsored by the Greater Vancouver Regional District and funded by the

142 Anita Shreve, Women Together, Women Alone: The Legacy of the Consciousness Raising Movement (New York: Viking, 1989). 143 CVA, CFAD fonds, Greater Vancouver Citizens’ Committee on Noise Abatement 1973-76, folder: 579- A-6, file 5, “Noise Workshops,” page 1. 144 CVA, CFAD fonds, Greater Vancouver Citizens’ Committee on Noise Abatement 1973-76, folder: 579- A-6, file 5, “Noise Workshops,” page 1.

122 Government of British Columbia. The GVRD survey reached a total of 1161 households in thirteen designated residential areas in the Greater Vancouver Area and was designed to determine “whether people are bothered by noise; if they are bothered, what sources of noise are creating the difficulty; and among the bothersome sources, what the relative importance of each source is”.145 Moreover, some of the survey was especially geared towards asking respondents about jet-age noise, making it the first comprehensive attempt in Canada to quantify and categorize individual, subjective concerns about noise from jets and other aircraft. The fact that survey included aircraft noise also confirmed that it constituted a key element of the modern soundscape that now faced greater scrutiny from a more sceptical public. The GVRD survey specifically queried respondents about aircraft noise following several starter questions about other noise sources from the neighbourhood, local traffic, and industrial work. Respondents were asked the number of times per day they heard aircraft, the type of aircraft emitting noise, whether they were bothered by it, whether they phoned in a complaint if they were bothered, and the extent to which aircraft noise interfered with daily routines and, if so, which ones. To finish the survey respondents then had to answer two broader questions. One returned to the subject of aircraft noise: “do you feel aircraft noise is a problem in Greater Vancouver? If yes, what do you think should be done about it? [followed by a list of options from which respondents could choose their answer[s]]”. The other, meanwhile, aimed to elicit deeper reflection about the ubiquity of noise in the modern era: “do you feel that noise is an inevitable consequence of progress?”146 Not surprisingly, the GVRD survey results indicated at least 50% of respondents across all of the surveyed residential areas acknowledged hearing aircraft noise. Incredibly, 65% of all survey respondents also thought aircraft noise was a problem in Vancouver. But when asked for possible ideas on how to mitigate the noise, almost half of the respondents said they either did not know what to do or felt nothing could be done. Moreover, the level of civic apathy towards aircraft noise was high; only 3% indicated that they had lodged an official complaint when bothered by aircraft noise, while 60%

145 CVA, CFAD fonds, GVRD Noise Survey, folder: 579-A-3, file 6, “A Brief Explanation of the GVRD Noise Survey”. 146 CVA, CFAD fonds, GVRD Noise Survey, folder: 579-A-3, file 6, “Questionnaire,” pages 5-6.

123 drew a correlation between noise and progress.147 The survey also confirmed that location shaped individual levels of engagement with and hostility towards aircraft noise. The most strident opposition came from three areas most proximate to the airport: the University of British Columbia (UBC) neighbourhood in South Vancouver, as well as Oblin Road and Westminister Highway, which were both in Richmond. When asked about aircraft noise in Vancouver, 83% of the UBC respondents declared it a problem, along with 78% of respondents in Westminister Highway and 58% in Oblin Road. On the correlation between noise and progress, however, opinions were more divided. UBC rejected the association by an almost three-to-one margin, but 66% of respondents in Oblin Road agreed with it, as did 69% in Westminister Highway. Additionally, less than 10% of people in these three places had ever lodged a noise complaint against aircraft noise, even though a substantial number were bothered by it.148 These results appeared to confirm the fears of the WSP workshop leaders that many people were annoyed with noise from aircraft and other sources, but also saw a natural link between noise and modernity. But the attitudes of the respondents, as gleaned through their answers, can also be interpreted in a different way that suggested that progress was a multivalent term. By accepting noise as symptomatic of a modern society and yet identifying aircraft noise as excessive in Vancouver, some respondents offered a soft critique of modernity. They endorsed practical, responsible development and the existence of noise at liveable levels, but registered their displeasure with unchecked aeromobile sprawl for affecting quality of life in local neighbourhoods around airports. Many of the comments that respondents provided when asked to elaborate on yes/no answers confirmed this outlook because they recommended stricter regulation of aircraft noise to achieve more liveable levels. Statements like “aircraft is a useful noise, not functionless”, “could try to do more about noise”, “should develop anti-noise technology along with progress”, “no [existing] knowledge of engineering and planning”, “they don’t do enough about it, industry could

147 CVA, CFAD fonds, GVRD Noise Survey, folder: 579-A-3, file 6, “Survey Analysis”. 148 CVA, CFAD fonds, GVRD Noise Survey, folder: 579-A-3, file 6, “Survey Analysis”.

124 do more”, and “progress should include trying to cut down on noise” all called for greater noise mitigation without removing it entirely.149 The conundrum, however, was that while much of the public accepted aircraft noise as a consequence of mass aeromobility, they still construed it as a major social and environmental problem of the late twentieth century that left affected individuals and communities with little recourse and even less power because of local accountability mechanisms were generally lacking. The survey’s authors noted this predicament: “even when people are bothered by aircraft noise, few know how or who to complain to…[and] should be given the opportunity to register their concern with the MOT [Transport Canada] by publicizing the fact that there is someone to complain to when you’re annoyed by aircraft operations”. The rise of aeromobile sprawl and the wider impact of airports on communities, in other words, had made aircraft noise a neighbourhood issue that could nevertheless not be resolved in the same way as other local issues. Put simply, residents could confront a troublesome fellow neighbour with relative ease by simply speaking to them, but having a similarly straightforward discussion with noisy aircraft or the nearby airport was impossible. “After all”, the survey’s authors remarked, “you can’t bash an airplane over the head” or, no less dramatically, easily restrict airport operations to quickly resolve a community noise issue.150 The authors, then, reinforced the activists’ calls for a locally sensitive governmental approach towards aircraft noise and airport expansion that was based less on pro-growth ideology. This outlook did not reject modernity and jet-age growth entirely, but did strongly question the logic of aeromobile sprawl and the transformation of local landscapes around airports. However, the survey conclusions also highlighted public ambiguity and antipathy about achieving real change and controlling airport development. Although public anger in Vancouver towards federal airport development strategies and worsening aircraft noise rose over the 1960s and coalesced in the early 1970s as part of a broader culture of noise awareness, then, affected local residents still

149 CVA, CFAD fonds, GVRD Noise Survey, folder: 579-A-3, file 6, “A Sample of Typical Comments made by Respondents for Questions 5, 6, 8, 18, 19, 20, 21 and Comments of the Questionnaire”. 150 CVA, CFAD fonds, GVRD Noise Survey, folder: 579-A-3, file 6, “Survey Analysis: The Necessity of Domestic and Neighbourhood Noise”.

125 faced tremendous challenges in mobilizing the majority of public opinion against the socio-environmental effects of jet-age growth and noise.

Conclusion The GVRD noise survey’s mixed conclusions about the place of aircraft noise in the modern soundscape helped to illustrate the ambiguity of suburban critiques of progress in late twentieth century Canada. Although some residents had become more noise conscious and frequently drew from this knowledge to advocate strict restrictions and oppose further airport development, others were more inclined to see noisier airspaces above communities and larger, more geographically disruptive airports as a fixture of modern society that could only be minimally controlled without affecting air travel’s future popularity and ubiquity worldwide. In major Canadian cities like Vancouver, the federal government exploited local challenges to reach a consensus about jet-age noise and clearly define the role of airports in local communities, imposing a pro-growth, techno-scientific ideological vision that displayed little sensitivity towards local realities. In Vancouver, suburban anti-noise activism successfully postponed, but failed to derail, airport expansion. Federal officials finally approved the parallel runway project in 1996, more than twenty years after first announcing it, having concluded that the science of noise mitigation had progressed to a point where 1970s noise critiques no longer held weight. By the late 1980s, computers and global positioning system trackers had begun to pinpoint and measure aircraft noise around airports in an unprecedentedly swift and quantified manner.151 At the national level, Transport Canada began to embrace these techniques in the 1980s, even as federal deregulation of aviation accelerated towards the end of the decade. At Vancouver, officials had installed the Aircraft Noise Monitoring System in 1987 before formally turning over management of the airport to the Vancouver International Airport Authority in the early 1990s.152 The Aircraft Noise Monitoring System was computerized sound management and measurement on an unprecedented

151 This marked the start of a series of advances in noise control that continue to the present day. For a technical discussion of some of the changes, see Lawrence K. Wang, Norman C. Pereira, Yung-Tse Hung, eds., Advanced air and noise pollution control (Totowa, N.J.: Humana Press, 2005). 152 The Vancouver International Airport Authority was created as an arms-length entity in 1991 to manage the airport following federal deregulation of the aviation industry in the 1980s. On the causes and effects of deregulation, see Stevenson, The Politics of Canada’s Airlines, 62-199.

126 scale, producing “continuous measurements and data storage of sound levels for each measured site, display of real-time sound levels on computer terminals at any time and a continuous real-time display on a public information board”, along with an array of other statistical data over different periods of time.153 In the early 1990s Vancouver also saw the addition of twelve noise-monitoring terminals, which resembled “four to six metre high street lamp standards with a microphone fixed to the top”. The terminals represented a significant upgrade to the mobile noise units that Transport Canada had employed in the 1970s, relaying by modem to airport staff real-time measurements of noise decibel movements of every aircraft that was mapped and tracked on a “radar-screen-like display of aircraft movements”, giving management instantaneous information on noise generated by particular aircraft during takeoff and landing.154 Nevertheless, public awareness and critiques of new noise in Vancouver remained strong into the 1990s in spite of advances in noise measurement science and technology. Local noise complaints actually increased in the five years prior to airport expansion in 1996 and peaked at 428 in 1995, a fact that suggested some residents saw the issue in terms that were far greater than simply the construction of a new runway.155 Wendy Turner, former chair of the CFAD in the 1980s, effectively made this point in 1996 while reflecting on events over the preceding decades: If people in the community had not continued to be involved with airport development over those years, we would probably have black-topped to the water’s edge…I’m sure the runway will produce a lot of numbers that look pretty good…but we mustn’t forget people that live here want this place to remain somewhere with a high quality of life.156

Turner’s comments effectively summarized the ways in which airport redevelopment had transformed local landscapes and irrevocably altered the relationship between airports and communities. More than anything else, public complaints about aircraft noise brought these developments to light and situated them within broader debates about

153 CVA, CFAD fonds, Airport Current 1989-2000, folder: 579-A-6, file 7, “Vancouver International Airport: Aeronautical Noise Management, 1993 Annual Report,” page 12. 154 CVA, CFAD fonds, Airport Current 1989-2000, folder: 579-A-6, file 8, Vancouver International Airport Authority public release, “VYR: Building for the Future”. 155 CVA, CFAD fonds, Airport Current 1989-2000, folder: 579-A-6, file 7, clipping from Vancouver Courier, 6 November 1996. 156 CVA, CFAD fonds, Airport Current 1989-2000, folder: 579-A-6, file 7, clipping from Vancouver Courier, 6 November 1996.

127 modernity and progress in the late twentieth century. Federal officials and their partners, however, ultimately endorsed a vision of progress that clashed with many of the sentiments espoused by local residents, opting to address specific residential concerns only when they did not jeopardize the airport’s growth potential as a transport node at multiple scales. In the end, events in Vancouver showed that although homeowners felt and expressed a sense of dislocation from noise and other airport developments that was more often than not inadequately addressed by federal measures, having noisier airports nearby helped to make them more attuned to noise and other social and environmental changes of late twentieth century modernity.

128 Chapter 3

“We’re cracking up down here”: The Airport Workplace, Labour Alienation, and Language Politics in the 1970s

On the evening of June 25, 1976, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau addressed the nation in a rare national television appearance. His subject was the ongoing strike by the Canadian Air Line Pilots Association (CALPA), many of whom had walked off the job several days before citing safety concerns in air traffic control towers across the country.1 The CALPA blamed the federal government both for preventing a separate strike action by the Canadian Air Traffic Controllers’ Association (CATCA) and for proposing to fully bilingualize air traffic control communications in Quebec. The strike grounded thousands of flights and showed no signs of a swift resolution. On the fifth day, a frustrated Trudeau took to the airwaves, calling the strike Canada’s worst national crisis since the conscription debate during the Second World War. Appealing for calm, he declared that “this country is in very serious danger of being divided on as basic an issue as has ever divided the country in the past thirty years…The issue in this regard is indeed national unity and no other issue.”2 Trudeau’s remarks were partly a response to growing national sociocultural cleavages over language rights that the strike, which lasted eight days in total, had amplified following the government’s adoption of official bilingualism as a new national model in 1969. At the same time, public disagreements in Canada over official bilingualism that the strike helped to animate and that led Trudeau to speak of a national crisis were tied to mass aeromobility and the emergence of fast-paced, challenging airport workplaces, many of which were staffed by federal employees. This change was no more apparent than at air traffic control towers. Aviation’s growth through the 1960s had left Canada’s air traffic controllers occupying a strategic place in global mobility as their job took on greater public importance and their workplace became a key chokepoint in air travel worldwide. But it had also severely stretched the ability of controllers to perform

1 For a detailed account of the 1976 CALPA strike and its main actors, see Sandford F. Borins, The Language of the Skies: The Bilingual Air Traffic Control Conflict in Canada (Kingston, Ont.: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 1983); Irene Lepine, “The Air Traffic Controllers Dispute: 1976,” M.A. Thesis, Department of Sociology, McGill University, 1980. 2 “‘Issue is national unity’: Air crisis is Canada’s worst since conscription,” Globe and Mail, 26 June 1976, 1.

129 their work without succumbing to physical or emotional fatigue and without endangering air safety. Official bilingualism threatened to further reshape and destabilize air traffic control towers, underlining the shifting relationship between language and labour in federal workplaces that were wedded to the global arena. The national crisis that Trudeau believed the strike had caused, in other words, had its roots in the jet age as much as national politics. This chapter situates the 1976 pilots’ strike in this historical context, examining how fundamental changes to the infrastructure of airports, especially air traffic control towers, intersected with ongoing national debates about language rights and the relationship between Quebec and Canada. It shows that by the mid-1960s the jet age had brought substantial technical changes to air traffic control in Canada, giving air traffic controllers more leverage and power in their workplace and transforming control towers into flashpoints of labour organization. At the same time, however, the speed of these changes also created new workplace challenges that alienated controllers from their work, disrupting their relationship with the Canadian state in the process. It then shows how federal language policy after 1969, specifically official bilingualism and the right to speak French in the air over Quebec, further alienated many English-speaking controllers. This led many controllers to express concerns about the safety of their workplace using ideas that were specific to aviation but that also held appeal to opponents of official bilingualism in the years leading up to and following the strike. The pilots’ decision to walk off the job, then, was directly linked to the pace and scale of technical changes in air traffic control towers and the introduction of French into their workplace. The 1976 strike thus offers a case study of how different issues – mass aeromobility, labour alienation, and language politics – intersected at the jet age airport, and came to inform wider public discussions about reconciling national interests with the global realities of the jet age.

The Airport Workplace and Federal Unionization Air traffic controllers saw the nature of their work shift considerably in the jet age. Air travel’s rapid growth not only imposed greater responsibility on controllers to protect the safety of planes and passengers travelling through increasingly clogged airspace. It also meant that controllers became key parts of a larger technical system that spanned the

130 globe over land, sea, and air. Like dockworkers and other labourers in global systems of mobility, controllers came to help oversee what Deborah Cowen calls the “circulation of stuff”, or the flow of people, cargo, and other things through a network of supply chains that underpin the global capitalist system.3 This had the effect of remaking air traffic control towers into a new type of choke point in the circuit of capital and thus a flashpoint for labour organization.4 Controllers, simply put, could disrupt a large system through their actions, so as they took on more workplace responsibilities, they gained public notoriety and labour power by performing a necessary, and vital, public service. Following the lead of other countries, Canada had utilized a rudimentary form of air traffic control since the earliest days of commercial aviation to regulate and ensure the safety of its airspace. In 1939, the federal Department of Transport formed the Airport Traffic Control service and began accepting applications for air traffic controller positions at larger airports; the first group including ten candidates.5 It also began to construct control towers equipped with basic radar technology and radio beacons at and near airports. Between 1940 and 1945, it built control towers at Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Lethbridge, Regina, Winnipeg, North Bay, Windsor, London, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Moncton.6 Air traffic controllers were assigned to these towers, where they relied on radar and radio to monitor aircraft from departure to arrival and communicate precise flying instructions to pilots concerning altitude, speed, heading, and route. They also helped pilots avoid nearby hazards, specifically approaching weather patterns and other aircraft, by steering them around or away from dangerous flight paths.7 Because of their unique vantage point, controllers essentially acted as pilots’ eyes in the air, capable of seeing far more of the airspace than pilots themselves.

3 Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 2. On the role of dockworkers in global supply chains, see Peter J. Turnbull and Victoria J. Wass, “Defending Dock Workers – Globalization and Labour Relations in the World’s Ports,” Industrial Relations 46, 3 (2007), 582-612. 4 It should be noted that air traffic controls were chokepoints not only of capital, but also migration in different forms. For example, people travelling to visit family were just as vulnerable as global supply chains to controllers’ disruptive actions. The growing power and public status of controllers, in other words, stemmed in part from the fact that they had the ability to interrupt the movement of a significant number of people on the move for a variety of reasons at any given time. 5 T.M. McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 2nd edition (Toronto: Lugas, 1992), 34-35. 6 McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 47. 7 For a brief description of air traffic control, see Glen A. Gilbert, “Historical Development of the Air Traffic Control System,” IEEE Transactions on Communications 21, 5 (May 1973), 364-375.

131 Prior to the 1950s, air traffic control in Canada had been a piecemeal operation, comprehensive in some places and non-existent in others. Control towers at busy airports like Toronto and Montreal-Dorval kept an eye on the airspace immediately surrounding these airports, but large swaths of the country, notably the expansive corridor between Toronto and Winnipeg, were left unregulated because of technological constraints.8 Initially, air traffic controllers were referred to as airline dispatchers because of the rudimentary nature of air traffic control. They were largely disorganized until the Second World War, when Trans-Canada Airline dispatchers formed the Canadian Airline Dispatchers Association during the war.9 Improvements to radio and communication technology during the 1940s and 1950s saw the work grow more sophisticated and intensive, which soon prompted the name switch from dispatcher to controller. Air traffic control work became professionalized in the early 1960s, with controllers embracing the idea that they constituted a workforce that faced challenges distinct from other airport staff. In 1961, twelve countries, not including Canada, created the International Federation of Air Traffic Controllers’ Associations to represent the interests of controllers at the international level.10 That same year, Canadian controllers formed the CATCA, creating a new union for addressing individual and collective grievances with their employer, the federal government. Controllers had previously been represented by the Civil Service Association of Canada, a larger, big-tent Canadian public services union, but chose to withdraw and form a separate union on the belief that they could better articulate and address occupation-specific concerns through self- representation.11 The CATCA described itself in forward-thinking terms as “a united and professionally styled Association” dedicated to the “advancement of the ATC profession in the interests of safety and efficiency for the aviation public…[and was] organized to cope with the jet-aged advances of today and tomorrow, not yesterday.”12

8 Canadian Air Traffic Controllers Association (CATCA) Archives, “The Good Old Days!” CATCA Journal, Fall 1975, 14-16. 9 Peter Pigott, Air Canada: The History (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2014), 24-25. 10 Canada later joined the IFATCA. See Neil Vidler, Under Control: The Story of the International Federation of Air Traffic Controllers’ Associations (Montreal: IFATCA, 2001). 11 On the history of the Canadian civil service, see J.E. Hodgetts, The Canadian Public Service: A Physiology of Government, 1867-1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973). 12 CATCA Archives, “Statement,” CATCA Annual Yearbook, 1965, 2.

132 Air traffic controllers had to confront two major problems in the jet age. First, rising passenger traffic volume in the 1960s meant that they were responsible for the safety of more aircraft and people in a crowded national airspace, particularly around major airports. For example, controllers at Toronto handled 114,734 flights in and out of the airport in 1963, a number that rose to 139,278 in 1965, 174,288 in 1966, and 201,786 in 1967, with the majority being air carriers operating large aircraft.13 The trend continued across the country as the volume of aircraft movements handled by national control towers rose 75.6 percent between 1963 and 1967.14 Growing safety concerns about congested airspace compounded the work of air traffic controllers to monitor and maintain separation between planes within a delineated airspace. In particular, jet aircraft, which were responsible for much of the volume growth, travelled at markedly faster speeds than older planes and could enter the airspace of another aircraft faster than ever before if controllers failed to keep them apart. This dramatically decreased controllers’ margin of error for avoiding in-air collisions by demanding from them more frequent, faster, and pivotal decision-making to ensure planes at higher altitudes always remained horizontally separated by the typical international requirement of five nautical miles.15 One senior controller summed up the challenges faced by controllers with the arrival of jets, lamenting that “we must handle aircraft with closing speeds faster than a rifle bullet, and could be personally handling from eight to 20 aircraft at any given time. Reaction time of pilots is inadequate to avoid collision by the time one aircraft spots another on a closing course.”16 Air traffic controllers also had to track and separate more numerous and faster planes with little relief. During the 1960s, the federal government, struggling to adapt to changing conditions at Canadian airports, failed to hire enough new controllers to offset the rise in air traffic volume, which created chronic staff shortages at major control towers across the country. By the middle of the decade, job vacancies had reached

13 “How safe are our crowded skies?” Toronto Star, 13 April 1968, 9. 14 “We’re cracking up down here!” Maclean’s, June 1969, 32. 15 This requirement applies to aircraft at cruising altitudes, generally taken to mean anything above 29,000 feet. Aircraft below that altitude are to be separated by three nautical miles, unless a controller specifies otherwise. Additionally, controllers are also expected to vertically separate aircraft to prevent them from getting too close to one another while flying at different altitudes; the requirement below 29,000 feet is 300 metres and above 29,000 feet is 600 metres. 16 CATCA Archives, “The Role of the Controller and Supervisor,” CATCA Journal, Spring 1975, 21.

133 alarming levels. In April 1966, the CATCA claimed that Montreal Centre, responsible for what was then Canada’s busiest airspace around Montreal-Dorval, was scheduling 165 overtime shifts each month, with individual controllers working as many as six or seven.17 In January 1967, it further alleged that the control tower was operating well below required levels with 46 employees instead of 68, forcing controllers to collectively work more than 2100 overtime shifts and some to individually work as many as thirty consecutive days without a day off.18 The situation became so dire that the government briefly contemplated extending the airspace monitored by the Toronto Centre control tower into Montreal’s existing area to bring some relief to its beleaguered controllers.19 The CATCA, however, blasted this idea because Toronto Centre itself had 22 fewer controllers than required minimum levels, which meant that implementing the change “would be merely robbing Peter to pay Paul”.20 These accumulating workplace stresses led air traffic controllers to mobilize through the newly created CATCA and accuse the federal government of creating an exploitive labour environment that had fallen out of step with the times. Controllers clashed with federal officials over working conditions as early as 1962, when CATCA executive members attacked the government’s decision to institute a hiring freeze on controllers as part of a broader austerity program that the Progressive Conservative government under John Diefenbaker had recently adopted.21 President E.A. Smith reserved special criticism for the Treasury Board, the governing body that oversaw the hiring and remuneration of federal civil servants, for investing in newer air traffic control technologies without adding more controllers.22 Echoing Smith’s concerns, Security- Treasurer J.R. Campbell forecasted the staff shortages of the mid-1960s, envisioning more overtime because of the hiring freeze. He claimed that because of the unfilled vacancies “added tension and strain will be placed upon the Controllers’ constitution.

17 CATCA Archives, “Controller Shortage,” CATCA Newsletter, April 1966, 2. 18 CATCA Archives, “Editorial: Expo 67 and ATC,” CATCA Newsletter, January 1967. 19 Toronto Centre was the designation for several air traffic control towers in the Toronto area that monitored most of Ontario’s airspace. 20 CATCA Archives, “Controller Shortage,” CATCA Newsletter, April 1966, 2. 21 The postwar economy contracted between 1958 and 1962, leading the Diefenbaker government to embrace a series of restrictive economic policies that marked a shift away from Keynesian principles. See Robert Campbell, “The Diefenbaker Years Revisited: The Demise of the Keynesian Strategy in Canada,” Journal of Canadian Studies 18, 2 (1983), 106-131. 22 CATCA Archives, “The Facts of Life,” CATCA National Council Bulletin, December 29, 1962.

134 How many will succumb to the strain…before the situation becomes an emergency in itself?”23 The CATCA also levelled separate critiques at federal pension rules. The Treasury Board mandated that a full pension could only be collected after thirty-five years, but controllers objected by pointing to rising job burnout rates in the profession during the 1960s, arguing that the pension rules no longer reflected their changing workplace realities. Controllers instead sought a special employment status that would align with their self-identification as atypical federal civil servants whose tenures were shorter but far more intensive. As one person summarized: “Air traffic controllers are civil servants, yes. Do air traffic controllers enjoy the same job security as do other federal civil servants? No! And herein lies the injustice – so blatant, so mechanically unfeeling that it is a wonder that anyone would even consider becoming a controller!”24 In painting the air traffic controller as an anomalous federal employee, the CATCA called out the federal government, asking it to renew its commitment to administering the nation’s air traffic control systems and reclassify controllers as a specially designated workforce that had to perform a vital and demanding public service. In the mid-to-late 1960s the relationship between the CATCA and federal officials worsened as the union adopted a more militant stance, threatening to withdraw its services through a strike if the country’s air traffic controllers were not reclassified as federal employees with unique workplace conditions and labour skill sets: It is an inescapable fact that the safety and success of the entire operation depends solely, completely and absolutely on the man on the floor. The controller, when all is said and done, is air traffic control; without him there is nothing. In this day and age of air transportation, he is one of the world’s most valuable human resources...the controller, in general, is indispensable.25

The CATCA’s efforts to draw attention to emerging workplace issues also began to attract support outside the union membership. Canadian Aviation, one of the country’s largest aviation trade publications, predicted a controllers’ strike if the government failed to address grievances like low wages and overtime. If the strike went ahead, editor Peter Brennan contended, “it would be effective; it would be embarrassing; and it would be the

23 CATCA Archives, “Austerity is Here,” CATCA National Council Bulletin, July 31, 1962. 24 CATCA Archives, “Editorial: TIME…the Enemy!” CATCA Newsletter, February 1964. 25 CATCA Archives, “Management and the Controller,” CATCA Newsletter, April 1966.

135 fault of the government…So this is the time we suggest the government should be affected by an appeal to the heart rather than waiting for the pistol at its head.”26 The federal government, for its part, was moved to respond to controllers after the CATCA threatened a strike action in December 1966.27 Faced with the prospect of grounded planes and travel chaos nationwide, the Liberal government under Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson quickly appointed Judge John Robinson to examine controller workplace issues and offer recommendations based on his findings.28 Released in 1968, Robinson’s observations confirmed to a large extent what controllers had been saying for several years. His inquiry concluded that controllers possessed “unacceptably low” morale that its author blamed on “indifferent management”, equipment difficulties, staff shortages, and inadequate servicing. In a nod to what he perceived as a growing disconnect between controllers and their employer, Robinson recommended removing air traffic control from direct government oversight and creating a new position, director of air traffic control, to better manage this relationship.29 Canadian Aviation supported the idea, arguing that failing to do so maligned the importance of air traffic control to air safety and left the public at risk: “Air traffic control is more than a means of expediting passengers to their destination: it is a matter of life and death.”30 However, the federal government’s decision to ultimately preserve the status quo grew untenable as more public sector workers, like the CATCA, came to see themselves as exploited employees and demanded greater concessions. This marked an end to the atmosphere of complacency that had largely prevailing in the public sector during and after the Second World War. In the early postwar years, civil servants had relatively little interest in joining unions because of job stability, high employment, and regular wage increases, displaying a general indifference towards their appeal of workplace solidarity and progressive labour reforms.31 Ottawa also actively discouraged union activity,

26 “Editorial: Object lesson in labor [sic] relations for the DOT,” Canadian Aviation, October 1965, 19. 27 “Air traffic controllers begin voting on strike,” Globe and Mail, 12 December 1966, 9; “Air controllers accept offer 419 to 180,” Globe and Mail, 19 December 1966, 4. 28 Commission of Inquiry into Conditions of Employment of Air Traffic Controllers (Ottawa: Commission of Inquiry, 1966). 29 “Aviation news digest: Call for independent ATC,” Canadian Aviation, February 1968, 39. 30 “Editorial: Our main concern is for the passenger’s health!” Canadian Aviation, March 1968, 9. 31 Anthony Thomson, “From Civil Servants to Government Employees: The Nova Scotia Government Employees Association, 1967-1973,” in Michael Earle, ed., Workers and the State in Twentieth Century Nova Scotia (Fredericton: Acadiensis Press, 1989), 218.

136 denying workers the right to unionize and instead settling any issues between labour and management through consultative sessions that were hosted by bodies known as joint councils.32 However, by the 1960s the attitudes of public sector workers towards unionization had begun to shift. This in part reflected growing labour militancy across the country during the 1960s, spurred by younger workers imbued with a new spirit of radicalism.33 During this period, labourers in the private sector won substantive wage gains through collective bargaining, a dispute-resolution tool the Treasury Board forbade civil servants from using to negotiate labour contracts. The right of trade unions to bargain collectively was part of the post-war settlement between the state, unions, and business to stabilize and grow the economy and offer workers financial stability.34 These wage gains also narrowed traditional salary differences between the public and private sector, causing civil servants to reconsider their traditional aversion to unionism as a bargaining agent as they sought to determine how to achieve comparable gains of their own. In other words, as Anthony Thomson has noted, because the value of public sector labour had begun to decline in comparison to the private sector, “some of the traditional benefits [in civil service] lost their saliency and contributed less to the maintenance of a conservative outlook.”35 In 1967 the federal government passed the Public Service Relations Act, giving employees collective bargaining rights and the right to settle labour contract disputes either through arbitration or a strike action.36 Many unions quickly capitalized on this gain, winning new contracts through collective bargaining, including the CATCA in

32 Craig Heron, The Canadian Labour Movement: A Short History, 3rd edition (Toronto: Lorimer, 2012), 94; Gilles Trudeau, “Labour Relations Rules in the American and Canadian Federal Governments: The Case of Air Traffic Controllers,” Wayne Law Review 29 (1982-83), 1379. In 1955, the Civil Service Association (CSA) asked Ottawa to create a Royal Commission to establish collective bargaining for civil servants, but the government declined, saying the CSA could handle any issues itself. Public Service Commission of Canada, 100 Years of the Public Service Commission of Canada (Ottawa: Public Service Commission of Canada, 2008), 13. 33 Ian Milligan, Rebel Youth: 1960s Labour Unrest, Young Workers, and New Leftists in English Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014). 34 Peter S. McInnis, “‘Hothead Troubles’: Sixties-Era Wildcat Strikes in Canada,” in Lara Campbell, Dominique Clément, and Gregory S. Kealey, eds., Debating Dissent: Canada and the Sixties (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 155-56. 35 Thompson, “From Civil Servants to Government Employees: The Nova Scotia Government Employees Association, 1967-1973,” 219. 36 “Commons approves bargaining bill for civil service,” Globe and Mail, 21 February 1967, 31.

137 August 1968.37 And as the CATCA and other public sector workers unionized in large numbers during the 1960s, they gradually tipped the scales of union membership in Canada towards the public sector. Union membership among the non-agricultural workforce rose from below 30 percent in 1961 to nearly 37 percent by the mid-1970s. By 1975, nearly half of unionized workers worked in the public sector, a significant landmark in Canadian labour history.38 Changes in the job environment also played a role in stimulating a new public-sector labour consciousness. To extract more labour productivity using less overhead, the government introduced new management strategies. Workers viewed these changes as regressive and conducive to a larger, more impersonal workplace, one more reminiscent of the private sector.39 This growing sense of alienation helped foster a new collective restiveness that soon coalesced into demands for more concessions from their employer. Contemporary observers noted this shift as the culmination of white-collar militancy and unionism whose workplace grievances were analogous to the rhetoric of industrial unions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Donald Wood, Professor at Queen’s University, noted that “white-collar workers, as well as blue, are paid wages, have specific hours of work, work under supervision, are subject to discipline, have misgivings and fears about job security, and want to have some voice in institutional policy and practice affecting their job and employment.”40 Dennis McDermott, International Vice-President and director for Canada of the United Auto Workers of America concurred: “they [white-collar and professional workers] are finding out that in an economic crunch, status no longer buys groceries…Professionals are waking up and saying, ‘Fine, we have status and sabbaticals but we need bread.’ So they are shopping around. And they are picking the traditional union route.”41 For the CATCA, these sentiments had come to resonate deeply by the end of the 1960s as controllers saw themselves as uniquely exploited white-collar civil servants whose rapidly deteriorating

37 “Management told it faces stronger unions,” Globe and Mail, 29 August 1968, B2. 38 Heron, The Canadian Labour Movement: A Short History, 98. 39 Heron, The Canadian Labour Movement: A Short History, 94; Thompson, “From Civil Servants to Government Employees: The Nova Scotia Government Employees Association, 1967-1973,” 219. 40 Quoted in CATCA Archives, “New Frontiers in White-Collar Unionism,” CATCA Newsletter, February 1968. 41 “The revolt of the middle-class worker,” Maclean’s, 23 February 1976, 32-33.

138 job conditions had begun to transform their workplace into a high-stress, alien environment.

Workplace Stress and Emotional Labour in Air Traffic Control Towers Air traffic controllers spoke more fervently about and mobilized against a growing number of workplace problems in the 1970s. Their actions formed part of a rising conflict between capital and labour at major airports, and in other workplaces, with unions inside and outside Canada decrying a series of fiscal and technical changes, such as governmental austerity and deindustrialization, that had left workers feeling increasingly uncertain about the future of their jobs.42 This conflict played out at specific national airports through a number of legal and wildcat strikes involving different groups of workers.43 These included 900 Air Canada maintenance and ground workers across the country in July 1971, 600 Air Canada machinists at Vancouver, Edmonton, and Calgary in 1973, 1,300 machinists, mechanics, ramp crews, baggage handlers, and cleaners with Canadian Pacific Air at twelve major airports in 1973, and 100 Air Canada baggage handlers at Toronto in 1977.44 Different labour groups at airports also staged sympathy strikes, staying off the job not to bring attention to their own workplace grievances, but to those of others. For example, in January 1973 2,600 service workers employed in refuelling, baggage handling, and food supply at Toronto staged a 24-hour walkout to support an ongoing strike by stewardesses.45 Unionized workers at Canadian

42 Steven High, Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt, 1969-1984 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). 43 Most of these strikes were geared towards protesting austerity policies that the Trudeau government introduced in the early 1970s to battle and economic stagnation and advocating better working conditions and wage increases as a correction. 44 The Air Canada ground workers had staged a series of rotating strikes across the country, including a 24- hour strike at Toronto, to protest the slow pace of negotiations between their union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, and the government-owned airline. “474 miss flights as air strikes hit Toronto first,” Toronto Star, 17 July 1971, 1, 4. After the Air Canada machinists went on strike in 1973, 3000 other machinists across the country staged a series of rotating sympathy strikes at various airports, including a 24-hour strike at Montreal-Dorval. “9 flights cancelled as Air Canada men walk out in Montreal,” Toronto Star, 4 June 1973, 1. The 1973 Canadian Pacific Air strike was the first in the airline’s history; after two months, the walkout was settled by federal mediation. “CP Air service is cut by 60% as strike begins,” Toronto Star, 26 July 1973, 1, 4. The 1977 baggage handler strike occurred after Air Canada dismissed or suspended several baggage handlers. “Truce at Malton, planes are moving,” Toronto Star, 11 February 1977, A3. 45 Wardair operated from 1953 to 1989 when it was sold to Canadian Airlines. See Max Ward, The Max Ward Story: A Bush Pilot in the Bureaucratic Jungle (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991). The strike went forward, albeit with less support than originally anticipated because 1,000 service workers ultimately

139 airports thus acted independently or in concert to highlight grievances in their workplace that had grown more numerous and severe in recent years, complicating how they identified with and performed their work. Air traffic controllers also took their turn on the lines, striking in January 1972 for nine days before going to arbitration, where they were awarded a more than 15% wage increase.46 Like other unions, controllers were motivated to strike by a growing sense that they had become cheated by a technical system that relied heavily upon their labour and made their workplace more challenging. Controllers in other countries, particularly the United States, shared these feelings, which culminated in the failed 1981 wildcat strike by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization and its decertification that same year.47 As discussed earlier, the roots for discontent amongst air traffic controllers in Canada and in other countries lay in the growing sophistication and complexity of air traffic control work itself during the 1960s. This situation was soon compounded by emerging physical and psychological challenges in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which exacted heavy tolls on controllers stationed at major Canadian airports. Workplace grievances multiplied as airspace congestion worsened and staff shortages continued, leaving controllers vulnerable to a host of stress-induced effects as they struggled to move higher volumes of aircraft and travellers safely within a limited airspace. A psychologist who was sympathetic to the controllers’ position declared that this development was inevitable given the pressure-filled and heavily fatiguing experience of working in a busy airport control tower for several hours at a time: There are not many professions, in which the sense of responsibility for the lives of others is generally so highly developed…At the present time, air traffic controllers work at the focus of air traffic, often up to the limit of the strain they are capable of supporting, for reliable accomplishment, pressed for time as they are and under the pressure of great responsibility.48

showed up for work, unconvinced of the walkout’s efficacy. “Unions threaten 24-hour shutdown at Toronto Airport,” Toronto Star, 23 January 1973, 1; “Walkout fails, airport keeps running,” Toronto Star, 24 January 1973, 3. 46 Trudeau, “Labour Relations Rules in the American and Canadian Federal Governments: The Case of Air Traffic Controllers,” 1401; “Air strikers begin vote but acceptance doubtful,” Globe and Mail, 24 January 1972, 1. 47 Ronald Reagan fired over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers two days after they refused his order to return to work. See Joseph A. McCartin, Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 48 CATCA Archives, “The Human Factor in Collision Prevention,” CATCA Newsletter, May 1962, 2-3.

140 In light of these developing circumstances, contemporary observers soon came to characterize air traffic control as a high risk, low reward type of labour. The Toronto Star contended that air traffic controllers now found themselves employed in the “ulcer business”, experiencing the rigours of their work through declining physical and mental health.49 This characterization aptly described the multi-faceted challenges facing controllers in their changing workplace. Working conditions had worsened because jet aircraft were much faster than older and smaller planes, forcing controllers to be particularly sensitive to the total airspace for which they were responsible and to anticipate possible incidents well before they might materialize, including requests from aircraft for an altitude change or the arrival of bad weather that would necessitate detours and reroutes. As a result, controllers had, as the Globe and Mail described, “no margin for error. Decisions must be made swiftly and must be accurate…A routine situation can, in seconds, become a nightmare.”50 Because of this, working conditions could turn on a dime with little to no warning, leaving controllers forced to suddenly grapple with complex situations that were fraught with risk and contained many variables. In August 1968 controller A. Golitz recounted one such overnight shift in August 1968 at the Toronto Centre control tower in which he handled a higher amount of air traffic than usual because bad weather to the south forced more planes to divert to the Toronto area: After nine hours I don’t remember being so exhausted. I didn’t get out of bed the next day until eleven o’clock, my neck stiff from looking up the radar and back to the board…All I could do was shake my head and wonder how we did it…At times like the above I feel I am getting old and yet I have twenty-nine years to go before retirement! If traffic keeps up without more men and updated equipment I will be lucky to last another five years.51

The fluidity and instability that had seemingly become intrinsic to air traffic control work gradually led more controllers to perceive that their job had begun to deliver diminished returns, leaving them overtaxed and ill-equipped to carry out their labour at the level of proficiency required to manage more crowded airspaces. Controllers grew more anxious as they managed more risk in their changing workplace. These developments placed them at the flashpoint of an emerging risk

49 “Air controllers: They’re in ‘the ulcer business’,” Toronto Star, 14 December 1966, 25. 50 “Air controllers unsung heroes in ulcer-producing job,” Globe and Mail, 19 December 1966, 4. 51 CATCA Archives, “It Happened One Night: Toronto Centre, August 8, 1968,” CATCA Newsletter, October 1968, 6.

141 society, which celebrated the use of expertise to manage and control possible risks to people in order to create a more advanced society. As Christopher Dummitt wrote, this approach was preventative in that it worked to identify and assess risks before they evolved into real dangers: “to call something a risk means that one is trying to control it, that one assesses it, calculates the probabilities of harm, establishes mechanisms and routines to minimize difficulty, and thoroughly examines anything that goes wrong in order to learn from mistakes and improves safety in the future.”52 Responsible for air safety at a time of rapid growth, controllers played a critical role in mass aeromobility because they had to confront risks in their workplace daily. At the same time, the modernist emphasis on risk management could also produce greater uncertainty and new risks, since “the one-dimensionality of the modernist project, with its excessive promise of control, radicalizes the potential for its opposite.”53 This was especially true for controllers because the rapid decisions that they had to make to protect air travellers meant that the stakes of individual actions were very high with little to no margin of error. The prospect of a disaster from the failure to control risk, then, loomed over controllers in their workplace on a daily basis. The nature of workplace anxiety in the control towers also had gendered connotations. Controllers were employed in a profession that had become linked to a particular modern form of masculinity. Canada’s air traffic controllers were overwhelmingly men in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1976, data from the Public Service Commission Annual Report revealed that men made up 98.4% of the more than 2000 controllers employed across the country, a number that remained constant the following year.54 Moreover, prevailing ideas of masculinity represented the modern man as rational, organized, controlled, and capable of taking calculated risks.55 In many respects, air traffic control work aligned squarely with these ideals. The preponderance of men in control towers, coupled with the fact that the skills needed to perform their labour, like mechanical detachment and advanced psychomotor skills, had been traditionally

52 Christopher Dummitt, The Manly Modern: Masculinity in Postwar Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007), 13. 53 Dummitt, The Manly Modern, 13. 54 CATCA Archives, “Public Service Commission Annual Report 1977,” CATCA Newsletter, June 1978, 4. The gender disparity in air traffic control in Canada began to shift only in the late 1980s and 1990s. 55 Dummitt, The Manly Modern, 1-27.

142 gendered as male behaviour, helped lend credence to the prevailing belief that air traffic control was men’s work.56 Federal officials also reinforced this connection by describing the ideal air traffic controller as one who embodied modern masculinity in an almost robotic sense. Said Ed Smith, Chief Instructor of the federal air traffic control training program, in May 1971: “People get the impression of a controller sweating profusely, with his tie ripped off and screaming at the top of his lungs. It’s the school’s duty to see that people who react in this way through panic or indecision don’t become controllers.”57 In the best of times, controllers embodied these traits in the workplace, which reinforced their sense of belonging to a modern and heavily masculinized profession. On the other hand, the fact that air traffic control had been gendered in such rigid terms paradoxically meant that some men interpreted signs of labour fatigue or alienation through this very same masculine lens, leading them to see it as an emasculating experience that signalled their lack of fitness for air traffic control. Initially, some tried to soften the image of the manly controller by de-emphasizing its mechanical element. In a send-up of the Ten Commandments, one wrote: 1st commandment – Remember the Controller, he beeth only a human and shouldst not be likened unto a machine, or that which is beneath the earth or in the heavens above. 2nd commandment – Therefore, show thy mercy unto him, for he beeth sorely tried by all manner of documents, procedures, and manuals, as well as his fellow man, whom he may pleaseth not.58

As time passed, however, sustained workplace pressures forced more controllers to confront and question a notion of manhood that was intrinsically tied to their status as white-collar workers in an overwhelmingly male profession. That was why, according to Jim Livingston, CATCA President in the mid-1970s, when a controller first realized that mental pressures were affecting his work performance, he could suffer “an immediate loss of confidence in himself and his abilities…He feels washed up, begins to fear the loss of livelihood…the pressures on him become extremely severe, resulting all too often in emotional breakdown, marriage breakup, alcoholism, and in some cases even

56 Postwar schooling in Canada reinforced a notion of gender that was biologically determined, casting boys as more intellectual and less emotional than girls. See Christopher J. Greig, “Boys’ Underachievement in School in Historical Perspective,” in Christopher J. Greig and Wayne J. Martino, eds., Canadian Men and Masculinities: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2012), 99-115. 57 “No ‘traffic cops’ here,” Canadian Aviation, May 1971, 31. 58 CATCA Archives, “ATC Salaries,” CATCA National Council Bulletin, April 1963.

143 suicide.”59 For some air traffic controllers, growing labour alienation was thus tied to a perceived loss of manhood that transcended the workplace. By the beginning of the 1970s, many Canadian air traffic controllers began to grow alienated from their labour, convinced that the federal government had failed to adequately address their workplace grievances. How controllers redefined themselves as an exploited public workforce destabilized by rapid advances in commercial aviation was more nuanced and multifaceted than at first glance. Like many other labour groups that had been influenced by the progressive language of labour reform, including industrial workers in the early twentieth century, controllers evoked an image of the sick, injured worker to explain their own alienation and call for substantive reform.60 But in subscribing to these traditional ideas, however, they nonetheless defined the source of workplace injury and sickness in more emotional than physical terms, a result of the work of air traffic control and its connection to both the shifting labour economy and the modernist project in the late twentieth century. Unlike many occupations in industrial capitalist society that relied on human physical labour and imposed undue hardship on working bodies, air traffic control required intensive cognitive engagement.61 Controllers had to rapidly and frequently communicate with various numbers of aircraft across radio airwaves, forcing them to mentally process shifting data and information blocks with an incredibly high degree of skill and precision. The emergence and growing sophistication of air traffic control was part of a broader shift in the postwar era from an industrial model centred on the factory to a post-industrial society characterized by more flexible labour processes, the decline of mass production, and commercial, technological, and organizational innovation. This dramatic transition carried with it a new labour paradigm in which work came to be dominated by mental, rather than physical, faculties in new sectors of production,

59 CATCA Archives, “The Pro Shop: Air Traffic Control IS a Young Man’s Game,” CATCA Journal, Spring 1978, 28. 60 On the language of labour reform in capitalist industry society in the early twentieth century, see Edward Slavishak, Bodies of Work: Civic Display and Labor in Industrial Pittsburgh (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 61 On the industrial labouring body, see Daniel E. Bender, Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004).

144 particularly in the burgeoning service industry.62 In other words, the late twentieth century workplace came to be characterized less by working-class, and sometimes racialized, labouring bodies that were the cornerstone of industrial capitalism than by rising numbers of white-collar, skilled, and specialized labouring minds who were representative of a new post-industrial economy and who came to value and identify with their work on the basis of its mental demands, not physical rigours.63 The work of air traffic control embodied this shift in a very real sense. Controllers continually processed information about aircraft coordinates and movements, relaying pertinent details to affected pilots and managing and negotiating the specific and shifting requirements of multiple aircraft within a delineated airspace. Aviation safety was contingent on the controller and pilot following a carefully orchestrated script, relaying and interpreting information back and forth with clarity and precision; any wrinkles in these exchanges increased the chances of an accident, a prospect not easy to ignore.64 The spectre of an in-air collision that resulted from a communicational or observational error weighed heavily on the minds of air traffic controllers, particularly as they laboured longer and more frequently while managing higher traffic volumes.65 As a result, controllers were just as prone to emotional breakdown as physical injury because of the nature of their work, waging constant mental and psychological battles in the workplace and drawing from these experiences to redefine air traffic control as exploitative and alienating labour. It was sick minds as much as sick bodies, then, that represented both the cause and effect of labour restiveness in many of Canada’s air control towers by the late 1960s and early 1970s. The fact that air traffic control had become both more challenging and responsible for traveller safety ultimately came to shape controllers’ affective responses to their changing workplace. Arlie Russell Hocshchild has shown that some service workers,

62 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: an enquiry into the origins of cultural change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 147. 63 The literature on the historical relationship between the body and industrial work is extensive and theoretically diverse. For a summary of recent historiographical trends, see Joan Sangster, “Making a Fur Coat: Women, the Labouring Body, and Working-Class History,” International Institute for Social History 52, 2 (2007), 241-48. 64 Maurice Nevile, Beyond the Black Box: Talk-In Interaction in the Airline Cockpit (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub., 2004), 167-222. 65 There have been several notable accidents in aviation history because of miscommunication between air traffic control and aircraft, including the Tenerife disaster in the Canary Islands in March 1977.

145 including many in the airline industry, regularly practice a form of “emotional labour” that is shaped both by the nature of their work and workplace as well as by frequent contact with consumers.66 Hocshchild defines emotional labour as “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display…[which] is sold for a wage and therefore has exchange value.”67 This display is designed to put people at ease and convey a “sense of being cared for”.68 In commercial aviation, flight attendants are the group most frequently associated with emotional labour, acting as “hostesses” for particular airlines and offering a personalized form of customer service.69 Since the majority of flight attendants were and are women, their emotional labour and public image has not only often been deeply gendered and linked to cultural notions of female domesticity and nurture, but also at times hyper-sexualized to cater exclusively to a masculine gaze.70 The critical element uniting these different strands of emotional labour is the fact that airlines and travellers expect flight attendants to enhance the air travel experience through an outward set of positive behaviours and actions. In their own workplace, however, air traffic controllers found themselves performing anti-emotional labour more often than not. While it was also their responsibility to look after the travelling public and project positivity and assurance, the fact that they had to regularly confront unique challenges and conditions in their workplace meant that the range of their responses was less oriented towards customer service than flight attendants and other airline workers.71 In particular, controllers had to present an image of assurance, control, and mechanical calm in responding and relying instructions to pilots in a real-time environment, a set of behaviours and practices that

66 Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 67 Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 7. 68 Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 7. 69 Johanna Omelia and Michael Waldock, Come Fly With Us! A Global History of the Airline Hostess (Portland: Ailemo Books, 2013). 70 Some women flight attendants acquired power through these practices and used it to push for an end to workplace discrimination and gender-based hiring practices. See Kathleen Berry, Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), introduction. On women flight attendants and sexuality, see also Victoria Vantoch, The Jet Sex: Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 71 On customer service in the airline industry and its relationship to emotional labour, see Drew Whitelegg, “Cabin Pressure: The Dialectics of Emotional Labour in the Airline Industry,” Journal of Transport History 23, 1 (2002), 73-86; Claire Williams, “Sky Service: The Demands of Emotional Labour in the Airline Industry,” Gender, Work and Organization 10, 5 (November 2003), 513-550.

146 lacked personality, expressiveness, and room for improvisation much of the time.72 Moreover, controllers operated out of the public eye and could not be physically observed by anyone other than their colleagues. They communicated exclusively with pilots and any image they chose to project came only through the tone and tenor of their voice that carried through the airwaves, which magnified the need to discard emotion while at work. But the pressures that controllers faced to be unemotional were much the same as those for workers engaged in emotional labour, only in an inverse way. As Hocshchild noted, performing emotional labour, particularly over time, can irrevocably reshape and even sever one’s relationship to their work if they begin failing to genuinely identify with and channel the emotional requirements tied to their labour. In this case, an individual worker “can become estranged or alienated from an aspect of self – either the body or the margins of the soul – that is used to do the work.”73 In other words, losing the skill to detach oneself, and banish particular feelings, from the labouring experience, and the performance it requires in the workplace environment, can lead to an “emotive dissonance” where a person can no longer privately sustain the emotional behaviour they are expected to publicly display.74 Once this happens, the personal costs of maintaining this public performance become too taxing and the person gradually loses the ability to effectively summon the required emotional energy for work, precipitously souring their relationship to their labour and deepening their sense of alienation.75 For controllers, the opposite was true. It was only when they became emotional that they grew alienated. By the early 1970s, more Canadian air traffic controllers identified with and experienced this tension. While some controllers could navigate the gendered expectations of their job and project a measured and steadfast persona in the workplace, others, particularly at the nation’s largest airports, faced greater challenges. This is not to suggest that controllers in quieter towers could not also become anxious in their workplace, or that controllers in larger, busier towers were always distressed. Rather than a by-product of a specific set of workplace conditions, controller alienation was inherently a subjective experience dependent on and shaped by factors rooted in

72 Claudia Sassen, Linguistic Dimensions of Crisis Talk: Formalizing Structures in a Controlled Language (Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Pub., 2005). 73 Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 7. 74 Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 90. 75 Hochschild, 17.

147 individual worker minds and bodies. Generally speaking, however, controllers in control towers at or near high-traffic airports incurred the highest psychological costs from the constant pressure to be unemotional. At these key control towers, air traffic controllers’ alienation from their labour derived from many factors specific to the airport workplace. One major longstanding grievance lay with the federal government and its perceived failure to solve the emerging crisis in air traffic control. In 1967, the Department of Transport brought in a new air traffic system that was more technologically advanced than its predecessor, designed to improve air safety and aid controllers by using improved radar to reduce the possibility of collisions between commercial aircraft and smaller, private planes.76 With the permission of the government, controllers also took steps to bring greater efficiency to their operations, improving the process by which planes flying under instrument flight rules, primarily commercial aircraft, and others, usually smaller aircraft, flying under visual flight rules, or without the aid of instruments, communicated with the control tower.77 Over the course of the 1960s, the government also ended its hiring freeze, bringing on board more than 200 new controllers to address the ongoing staff shortages.78 The problem, however, was that the new hires were offset by steady annual increases in air traffic using instrument flight rules, an alarming development because most of these new planes were faster jets carrying between 100 and 150 passengers. As a result, the state’s technical investments remained inadequate and reactive more than anything else, unable to sufficiently bolster an air traffic control system that was now under heavy and sustained pressure to manage greater airspace congestion. This led the CATCA to

76 “New air traffic system claimed safety aid,” Globe and Mail, 19 December 1967, B7. The new system was called extended terminal control, first introduced at Toronto International Airport and later expanded to other airports. It introduced a new radio frequency for controllers to communicate with smaller, private aircraft that at the time were permitted to fly using visual flight rules (VFR), meaning using the pilot’s visual sight only. Control towers had previously been unable to contact these planes, leading some to narrowly miss colliding with larger aircraft that were flying using internationally-mandated instrument flight rules (IFR), meaning the pilots relied on instruments only to fly the plane, around busy airports. 77 “Toronto: Tighter rules help fight a growing congestion,” Toronto Star, 13 April 1968, 9. On the difference between IFR and VFR, see also L.D. Reid, “The Control of Air Traffic Near Airports,” in Readings in Airport Planning: a Series of Lectures Presented by the Centre for Urban and Community Studies and the Department of Civil Engineering, University of Toronto (University of Toronto: Centre for Urban and Community Studies, 1972), 54-57. 78 CATCA Archives, “Editorial: You can’t economize on air safety,” CATCA Journal, December 1969, 3.

148 bemoan the unfolding situation: “an inadequate, unreliable system is like forcing traffic to use a two-lane, pot-holed road, when a six-lane freeway is needed.”79 The CATCA also raised concerns about environmental issues in the workplace and the dangers they posed to the physical and mental state of controllers. In 1969, Pierre Marcotte, Chairman of the CATCA’s Montreal Regional Safety Committee, argued that the controller workplace contained a number of occupational health problems, including excessive noise, noxious smells, and possible exposure to radiation. Observing the situation at the Montreal Centre control tower, Marcotte described an inhospitable environment for labouring workers: [At Montreal] the air traffic is very heavy; the noise level is extremely high, the cause of this being that our control boards, strip holders, walls and chairs are metal. There are no acoustic tiles, the flooring is cement, the ceiling is extremely low, and hot mike and radio receivers are non-directional and poorly located. Due to the possibility of hearing impairment, numerous controllers refuse to wear headsets. There is no attempt to bleed off the noise generated by the radar equipment.80

Seeing excessive noise as inhibiting job performance and fraying controller nerves, Marcotte recommended a series of mitigation measures, including the adoption of a noise conservation program to identify noise-hazardous areas as well as stimulate noise abatement procedures in the workplace to help detect the onset of permanent hearing loss.81 In 1971, moreover, the union’s national safety commission red-flagged several items at Edmonton International Airport’s control tower that jeopardized the efficacy of air traffic control operations in the area. Like Marcotte, the national safety commission identified noise from aircraft engines as an interference with tower communications. But it also went further by noting that controllers at the tower had to grapple with visibility restrictions, including the obstruction of one of the runway approaches because of a large chimney near the south end of the control tower, and of the intersection of the airport’s

79 CATCA Archives, “Editorial: You can’t economize on air safety,” CATCA Journal, December 1969, 3. 80 CATCA Archives, “Report on the Canadian Labour Congress Sixth Annual Health and Safety Conference,” CATCA Newsletter, October 1969. 81 CATCA Archives, “Report on the Canadian Labour Congress Sixth Annual Health and Safety Conference,” CATCA Newsletter, October 1969.

149 two runways by the high tails of Boeing 737 and other narrow-body jet airliners then in service.82 Air traffic control towers across the country sometimes experienced equipment breakdowns and malfunctions for significant periods of time. During January 1966, the radar system used for landings in bad weather, known as Precision Approach Radar, was off-line for a total of 641.5 hours at three airports: Halifax, Vancouver, and Toronto. Similarly, during one shift at Toronto Centre around the same time, an alarm from an emergency system that alerted controllers to aircraft entering another plane’s airspace falsely sounded every seven minutes for some time.83 For controllers, grappling with these various issues served only to alienate them further from their labour and increase the strains under which they worked each day. It was not surprising that controllers drew a connection between job performance and physical and mental health, one that grew more tenuous the longer one worked in a control tower. As controllers aged and suffered the accumulating stresses that had now become more common to their profession, many developed serious physiological health issues such as high blood pressure, ulcers, and heart attacks.84 Moreover, as mass aeromobility reconfigured air traffic control into a much more demanding line of work, the average age of Canadian air traffic controllers dramatically decreased. In 1966, 75 percent of controllers in Canada were between 25 and 32 years old, with no controllers in their 50s actively working. In other words, as the Globe and Mail observed, air traffic control had become “a young man’s profession, but a profession in which young men grow old fast”, marked by premature burnouts and career switches.85 Health problems represented a significant source of anxiety for controllers because they had to pass annual medical exams to continue working in the control tower. The stakes were especially high in this regard because if a person failed the exam, the government did not reassign them to another position in the civil service. Nor did it provide a full pension for those with less than thirty years employment, which left some unfortunate controllers with few options. In 1971, J.G. Wilson, a controller in his late

82 “CATCA blasts two towers,” Canadian Aviation, February 1971, 37. 83 “We’re cracking up down here!” Maclean’s, June 1969, 32. 84 CATCA Archives, “Hypertension, Peptic Ulcer and Diabetes in Air Traffic Controllers,” CATCA Journal, Fall 1973, 20-22. 85 “Air controllers unsung heroes in ulcer-producing job,” Globe and Mail, 19 December 1966, 4.

150 30s, lost his job after failing his annual exam and received only meagre job severance pay because of his young age. Wilson angrily lashed out at the government’s pension rules, arguing that air traffic control deserved special status as a career with a shorter life span than other governmental work, advocating early retirement as a solution specifically tailored to meet the uniquely shifting demands and stresses of his occupation. Otherwise, Wilson argued, the lack of a stable early retirement option in a high-stress profession could only serve to exacerbate those very stresses in aging controllers: “to the senior controller in his upper 30s who is still on active control duties, every passing year leads to his level of worry and insecurity, while his contemporaries in other occupations become more stable and secure.” For him, as it stood air traffic control was less a professional career than a “gilded, dead-end job…which is a trap by virtue of the unique and specialized skills it develops.”86 By the end of the 1960s, the declining mental and emotional state of air traffic controllers had entered the broader public consciousness, shining greater light on the myriad pressures permeating their workplace, the inadequacy of the nation’s air traffic control system to handle the demands of mass aeromobility, and the possibly dangerous ramifications for air safety. In 1968, the Toronto Star ran a piece entitled “How safe are our crowded skies?”, which observed the ramifications of growing air congestion and staff shortages at control towers: “there are too many planes, too few airports and overworked – to the point of nervous breakdown – ground crewmen [controllers].”87 According to one controller quoted in the article, people in his profession were overworked because they spent too many consecutive hours on the job without relief, which adversely impacted their job performance and pushed many to the brink of mental collapse over fears of making an error: I know when I’m on a radar scope [tracking numerous aircraft within a delineated airspace on a radar screen] more than two hours, I’m starting to slip. When you’re on scope four hours, you get worse. And when you’re on a scope six hours, which has occurred, it’s hell. Your insides start to boil.88

86 CATCA Archives, “A Career in ATC?” CATCA Journal, Fall 1971, 21. 87 “How safe are our crowded skies?” Toronto Star, 13 April 1968, 9. 88 “How safe are our crowded skies?” Toronto Star, 13 April 1968, 9.

151 Based on testimonies like these, the Star concluded that the future of aviation safety in Canada was closely intertwined with the labour performance and mental health of its air traffic controllers. In other words, if controllers started to regress on the job, flying became a riskier proposition for everyone. While engaging in some unnecessary fear- mongering, the Star nonetheless offered for public consumption a terrifying prospect: flying could be unsafe as much because of circumstances occurring on the ground as in the air. In a long exposé in Maclean’s the following year, contributor Walter Stewart took this idea further, decrying the state of air traffic control in Canada and the decaying mental health of its workforce as the primary threat to national aviation safety, a point unequivocally conveyed in the headline: “Control tower to pilot, Control tower to pilot, ‘We’re cracking up down here!’” Discussing the growing frictions in control towers, Stewart offered a narrative that the CATCA itself would have endorsed, arguing that the federal state had jeopardized the safety of passengers by failing to reform the air traffic control system, leaving controllers to resemble an overworked, unhinged, and exploited labour force. “Too often,” he wrote, “overburdened men break down under constant tension; too often, dangerous situations in the air are resolved more by good luck than good management; too often, the federal Department of Transport…shrugs off the complaints of its critics.”89 Stewart’s tone was decidedly alarmist from start to finish, designed to arouse and direct public attention to the indispensability of air traffic control to aviation safety. Citing statistics that showed a jump in the number of accidents and deaths in the 1960s as air traffic increased, Stewart predicted the likelihood of more frequent and catastrophic in-air incidents as controllers succumbed to rising stress and the skies continued to grow more crowded. Stewart pointed out several recent near-misses, or instances where planes got too close to each other, including a February 1969 incident when two jets narrowly passed each other at 35,000 feet near London, Ontario, leaving one plane shaken by the turbulence of the other aircraft, and another instance that same month where an Air Canada jet flew on a transcontinental route at the wrong altitude, miraculously without encountering another aircraft, after receiving erroneous instructions from the control

89 “We’re cracking up down here!” Maclean’s, June 1969, 60.

152 tower regarding its assigned cruising altitude.90 For Stewart, these were not random examples, but part of a larger pattern of growing dysfunction in the nation’s air traffic control system, underlined by federal disinterest in effectively addressing glaring workplace problems in control towers nationwide. To reinforce his argument, Stewart also included a number of testimonials from air traffic controllers who worked at major airports and managed some of the country’s critical, most congested airspaces. Each painted a picture of a workplace where psychological breakdowns had begun to intensify, some in the middle of shifts. One controller described the experience of watching a colleague become emotionally unglued: There is usually nothing dramatic. You just see a guy begin to back away and back away from his job…We had one guy you could see just standing there, staring at his radar screen, and you could tell it was getting to him. After a while, he began to have stomach troubles – ulcers. Then he began to call in sick. Every time the weather was bad, which means trouble for us, he’d call in sick…Sometimes he’d be okay for part of a shift and then it would hit him. He got so he wouldn’t even answer the telephone because that meant making another decision…He developed a cough, and the more hectic it got around here, the more he’d cough. One day he got coughing so bad he couldn’t do anything. Then he went away.91

Others described similar incidents that were the outcome of recurring tension in the workplace and chronic staff shortages, including one mentally distraught controller believing and acting as if he was under government surveillance and another colleague collapsing through a glass window, cutting himself severely. According to one person, witnessing these events dealt a heavy blow to workplace morale, serving only to further entrench controllers’ idea of themselves as a uniquely exploited public white-collar workforce: I find myself aroused to annoyance…I think of humans being used the way we are. It is assumed that we can cope with whatever extra traffic turns up, that we are infinitely absorptive sponges who can make the system work regardless of the fact that little planning appears to be being done to update it. Any thought that there is a limit to the man capacity, that fatigue effects can compromise safety, is viewed as heresy.92

90 “We’re cracking up down here!” Maclean’s, June 1969, 60. 91 “We’re cracking up down here!” Maclean’s, June 1969, 61. 92 “We’re cracking up down here!” Maclean’s, June 1969, 64.

153 Stewart also nearly witnessed a major catastrophe after having secured permission to visit the air traffic control tower at Toronto one afternoon. He described an atmosphere of palpable tension and unpredictability, underscored by swift air traffic build-up, three separate power outages within a half hour, and a near accident as a small, privately operated aircraft attempted a landing on the wrong runway. The power outage, in particular, strained the fortitude of those on duty, leading one to claim that they were “bloody lucky” to have avoided an accident while the instruments were unusable.93 Stewart envisioned more of these chaotic scenes unless swift remedies could be found for a workplace environment where tensions ran deep. One controller agreed, predicting that because of a lack of reform to the system and workplace, “one of these days, we’re going to have the most godawful mid-air collision you ever heard of, and then perhaps people will realize what a mess we’re in.”94 The sense of being misunderstood and ignored by their employer and unable to enjoy much respite from a perpetually demanding and unpredictable job not only left many controllers suffering from constant fatigue, but also contributed to a generally weak and dispirited constitution that left them feeling they had become tethered to a profession that had begun to deliver vastly diminishing returns. In a poem entitled “Controller’s Lament”, one anonymous controller described the struggle to derive meaning and satisfaction from work while expressing regret for having chosen it in the first place: When I consider how my nights are spent –/And half my days – in this dark world and wide/Watching the radar pulses slowly slide/Across the scope, while equally intent/On garbled voices from the firmament/That din one ear, while the other side/The supervisor cuttingly doth chide/About the clearances I haven’t sent - /Meanwhile my sandwiches are getting stale/My bladder’s bursting and I’m soaked with sweat/And both my hams are welded to the seat - /I wonder why I don’t deliver mail,/Or peddle milk, or sell insurances yet,/Or grow a bear and lounge/around the street.95

By the early 1970s, Canadian air traffic controllers expressed these sentiments with greater regularity and intensity than ever before. As mass aeromobility laid bare the emotional costs of their labour, more controllers began to self-identify as vulnerable and exploited workers who could no longer meet workplace expectations. Amidst a state-

93 “We’re cracking up down here!” Maclean’s, June 1969, 64. 94 “We’re cracking up down here!” Maclean’s, June 1969, 64. 95 CATCA Archives, “Controller’s Lament,” CATCA Journal, Spring 1972, 31.

154 sponsored makeover of the nation’s major airports, many air traffic controllers employed at these very same places felt like they had been left behind in another era.

Labour Alienation and Official Bilingualism in Air Traffic Control Towers Growing labour frictions in control towers across the country soon began to intersect with broader national and international developments in the 1970s. The catalyst was the Trudeau government’s move to introduce French as a language of air traffic control communications in Quebec as part of its policy of official bilingualism, which involved making services offered by the federal government fully bilingual. The federal bilingualization of Quebec’s control towers proved extremely divisive not only with many air traffic controllers in and outside the province, but also amongst the larger Canadian and international community, which was growing more aware of the pivotal role that controllers now held in the jet age. The resulting public furor over bilingualism in air traffic control highlighted the ways in which shifting national language politics in the 1970s amplified labour alienation in control towers and public concerns about air safety. Federal interest in bilingualism predated the 1970s, a product of a much longer historical conversation about English-French relations and Quebec’s place in Canada.96 But officials began to have serious discussions about formulating an official bilingualism policy in the 1960s as more Francophones pushed for changes to federal language policies. On the one hand, Francophones sought greater federal recognition of their distinct linguistic and cultural status. This growing restiveness in part sprang from the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, where the Liberal government under Jean Lesage embarked on a modernization program of re-francizing the province’s economy and society.97 At the same time, Francophones also desired an end to structural inequalities in the Canadian and Quebec economy where one often had to learn English to advance their career. The federal civil service had a reputation at the time as an Anglophone domain where, as Matthew Hayday notes, Francophones were “numerically underrepresented, particularly

96 See Marcel Martel and Martin Pâquet, Speaking Up: A History of Language and Politics in Canada and Quebec (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2012). 97 On the Quiet Revolution, see Kenneth McRoberts, Quebec: Social Change and Political Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

155 at the level of senior management” through the early 1960s.98 In Montreal, moreover, Francophones were often paid far less than Anglophones and shut out of the highest paying jobs more frequently. This led to a 51 percent wage gap between Anglophones and Francophones in 1961 that saw Anglophones comprise just 24 percent of the labour force but 56 percent of the top salary bracket of over $15,000 annually. Francophones, on the other hand, made up 60 percent of the city’s male labour force in 1964, but constituted only 37 percent of the highest earners.99 Francophone interest in bilingualism, then, was as much about rectifying labour inequalities in the public and private sector as it was about being legally recognized as historically distinct peoples. In 1963, the Pearson government formed the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism to study the prospect of addressing economic inequalities and recognizing new rights and protections for French-speaking peoples in Canada.100 The Commission met for six years and issued a series of recommendations, including the creation of a series of bilingual districts across all provinces where government services would be available in both English and French.101 In 1969, the Trudeau government duly obliged, passing the Official Languages Act, which declared English and French to be the country’s two official languages and mandated the bilingualization of the federal civil service. The Act represented a clear federal assertion of responsibility for language rights and the rejection of a more decentralized approach favoured by Quebec that would see this power entrusted to the provinces.102 As federal civil servants, the Official Languages Act theoretically impacted air traffic controllers across the country. Under the new stipulations, controllers in every province would now be required to communicate in either English or French based on the choice made by pilots who entered their airspace. In practice, however, integrating the

98 Matthew Hayday, Bilingual Today, United Tomorrow: Official Languages in Education and Canadian Federalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 28. 99 Marc Levine, The Reconquest of Montreal: Language Policy and Social Change in a Bilingual City (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 23-24. 100 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, Report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, Preliminary Report and Volumes 1-11 (Ottawa: The Commission, 1969-1971). 101 Hayday, Bilingual Today, United Tomorrow, 38. 102 Matthew Hayday, “Reconciling the Two Solitudes? Language Rights and the Constitutional Question from the Quiet Revolution to the Victoria Charter,” in Lara Campbell, Dominique Clement, Gregory Kealey, eds., Debating Dissent: Canada and the Sixties (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 231- 246.

156 Official Languages Act into daily operations at control towers proved to be more protracted and complex than envisioned, causing tensions amongst controllers who resisted the introduction of French in their workplace because it clashed both with their personal feelings towards bilingualism and their belief that minority language rights had no place within an internationalized airport workplace. Quebec formed the epicentre of these frictions, where the use of French was more ubiquitous than in any other province and where the protection of language and cultural rights was sacrosanct in the collective French-Canadian imagination.103 Quebec thus came to constitute the battleground for a national dialogue about the merits of the Official Languages Act and the utility of enforcing it in air traffic control towers that were now governed by global regulations. As a rapidly globalizing mode of transportation, air travel created new regulatory dilemmas, particularly in terms of safety, for aviation officials, air traffic controllers, and pilots. This placed the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the body responsible for regulating commercial air travel globally, in a difficult situation.104 Since many countries in the international aviation community officially recognized multiple languages, the ICAO feared that if pilots were forced to respect national rules and communicate in multiple languages with air traffic controllers over the course of a single flight, commercial air travel would be left with a piecemeal regulatory system that would jeopardize safety and efficiency. In 1950 it mandated English as the language of aviation worldwide, requiring airline pilots and air traffic controllers in ICAO countries to possess an elementary understanding of English and knowledge of key terms.105 Regional flights travelling within a particular country could still utilize a local or national dialect as a language of air traffic, but all international commercial flights, meaning any aircraft that crossed multiple national airspaces during its journey, were required to communicate in English with control towers. The ICAO directive occurred at a time when English had emerged as the language of globalization. By the later half of the twentieth century, it was, or on its way to

103 Levine, The Reconquest of Montreal. 104 On the ICAO, see David Mackenzie, ICAO: A History of the International Civil Aviation Organization (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). 105 Atsushi Tajima, “Fatal miscommunication: English in aviation safety,” World Englishes 23, 3 (2004), 453.

157 becoming, the lingua franca of politics, science, business, and technology worldwide.106 The appeal of ‘global English’ resonated in aviation circles, offering a means for pilots and controllers from different linguistic backgrounds to safely communicate using a simplified dialect. Even then, however, communication problems could occur because global English in an aviation context contained words that sounded the same but meant different things, including ‘to’ and ‘two’, and “break’ or ‘brake’, or had multiple meanings, such as ‘gate’ and ‘taxi’.107 Moreover, global English could also clash with and inflame local linguistic politics. As Peter Ives notes, global English has been an effective colonizing agent, operating as an “oppressive apparatus connected to global capitalism, cultural domination and imperialism.”108 In other words, global English embodied the cosmopolitanism of globalization that was oftentimes incompatible with socio-cultural systems in specific places. These tensions played out in Canada as the ICAO directive soon collided with official bilingualism and Francophone restiveness. The federal government tried to honour Canada’s obligations to the international aviation community while enforcing its commitment to French language rights. It did so by introducing a series of linguistic directives regarding language for air traffic control towers in Quebec. There were historical precedents governing this approach. Even prior to the Official Languages Act, the federal Ministry of Transportation had allowed the use of French as a language of air traffic communications in remote parts of Quebec after concluding that French did not pose a threat to air safety there because there were relatively few Anglophone pilots and little jet traffic operating in the vicinity, which rendered English translations superfluous.109 This specific directive revealed the uneven spatial impact of jet travel, connecting the busiest air corridors and the control towers responsible for monitoring

106 David Northrup, How English Became the Global Language (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 109-135. 107 Walter Seiler, “English as a lingua franca in aviation,” English Today 25, 2 (June 2009), 44; Tajima, “Fatal miscommunication: English in aviation safety,” 455; Hyejeong Kim and Catherine Elder, “Understanding aviation English as a lingua franca,” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 32, 23 (2009), 1-17. 108 Peter Ives, “Cosmopolitanism and Global English: Language Politics in Globalization Debates,” Political Studies 58, 3 (2010), 530. 109 French was used in aviation communications in remote parts of Quebec as early as 1962, when it was determined by bureaucrats in the MOT that usage of French did not pose a threat to safety, provided that pertinent information in English was also provided to other pilots flying in the vicinity. See Borins, The Language of the Skies, 22.

158 them through strictly enforced global regulations while leaving out far-flung, less travelled places. Nevertheless, in spite of this move Francophones played only a marginal role in aviation across Quebec in the 1960s, especially with respect to air traffic control and related operations. In 1963, within the province only 9 of 110 air traffic controllers, 15 of 135 radio operators, and 12 of 150 aviation electronics technicians were bilingual Francophones; the rest were Anglophones who had been hired over time as a part of a national, rather than regional, recruitment process. In 1965 the federal government finally altered its hiring approach, mandating that newly hired air traffic controllers and radio operators working in Quebec had to be bilingual. As a result, the number of Francophones in these positions grew accordingly.110 By 1977, 10.3% of Canada’s air traffic controllers identified themselves as Francophone, the vast majority of whom would have been based in Quebec because of the specific linguistic dimensions that were present there.111 Even before the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism had issued its recommendations, some English-speaking air traffic controllers, supported by the CATCA executive, began to oppose the prospect of bilingualizing the federal civil service. Aware of its implications for their workplace, these controllers specifically expressed concerns that the bilingualization of air traffic control would severely restrict their career opportunities. They feared having to learn French to earn future promotions, which was antithetical to the regulations and structures that they felt governed their profession. In 1966, for example, one aggrieved controller wrote that “air traffic is unique amongst the professions, in that it has a prescribed internationally spoken language – English.”112 The CATCA executive was not far behind in criticizing official bilingualism. President J.R. Campbell cautioned against the immediate implementation of the Official Languages Act in aviation workplaces, calling the introduction of French into air traffic communications “a controller’s nightmare” and recommending that exceptions be

110 Borins, The Language of the Skies, 23. 111 CATCA Archives, “Public Service Commission Annual Report 1977,” CATCA Newsletter, June 1978, 4. 112 CATCA Archives, “Point of View: Bilingualism,” CATCA Newsletter, April 1966, 4.

159 granted to certain segments of the civil service that were non-administrative and tied to operational efficiency, like air traffic control.113 Campbell’s argument essentially boiled down to a concern, accompanied by little evidence, that bilingualism would amplify the emotional costs of air traffic control work and deepen labour alienation in control towers. Other groups in the national aviation community echoed the CATCA’s position, including the Canadian Owners and Pilots Association, which endorsed English only in air traffic control towers countrywide in 1971.114 Upon passing the Official Languages Act, the Trudeau government, aware of Canada’s obligation to the ICAO’s global directive, deliberated over how to apply its new national program to air traffic control and other aviation workplaces. In the case of air traffic control, the government moved slowly to try and acclimatize English-speaking controllers working in Quebec to the changes that were to come. In 1974, the Ministry of Transport allowed the use of French at Quebec City airport and four smaller airports in the province, all of which were located outside the major civil air traffic corridor around Montreal-Dorval airport.115 Under these stipulations, French could only be used in the control towers that supervised the airspaces of these airports under Visual Flight Rules, meaning in conditions where pilots relied on their line of sight to operate the aircraft rather than on the plane’s instruments.116 All other control towers in Canada would officially remain English-only. In essence, the government’s directive mapped Canadian airspace linguistically, setting out conditions that governed where French could be used as a language of aviation within national borders. The CATCA reacted cautiously to these changes, approving the measure as long as the government did not decide later to extend it across Quebec to busier airports like Montreal-Dorval or Montreal-Mirabel, which was then still under construction. Aware of Canada’s responsibility to the international aviation community, federal officials also appeared unwilling to go further. Asked if further changes were in store, Transport

113 CATCA Archives, “The Bilingualism Issue,” CATCA Newsletter, September 1971, 3. 114 “Private pilots reject French for controllers,” Globe and Mail, 19 November 1971, 5. 115 The five designated airports were Quebec City, St. Jean, Sept-Iles, Baie Comeau, and St. Honore. “French for some air-traffic control,” Globe and Mail, June 12, 1974, 9; Borins, The Language of the Skies, 38-46. 116 Most commercial aircraft operate according to Instrument Flight Rules, meaning that pilots fly the plane by relying on instruments, not their visual reference points. Visual Flight Rules are normally reserved for smaller aircraft travelling at lower altitudes in light-traffic areas.

160 Minister Otto Lang replied: “at first sight, I don’t see how we can make French official in Montreal with all the international and domestic flights it gets.”117 Nonetheless, pressure from Quebec to respect the terms of the Official Languages Act soon compelled Lang to explore more options. This was particularly true once the province passed Bill 22 in 1974, which made French the official language of Quebec and mandated, among other things, that it be the province’s language of work and be posted on all commercial signs.118 In 1975, Lang announced the formation of the Bilcom (Bilingual Communications) Task Force to tour the country and solicit public input on the possibility of further integrating French in air traffic communications across Quebec, and also promised that bilingualism would only be implemented on a wider scale if it were proven safe. Lang’s plan met resistance within national aviation circles. Ken Livingston, the CATCA President, retorted that any pilot operating in Canadian airspace should be fluent in English.119 Many opponents also emerged at the Bilcom meetings nationwide to lambaste bilingual air traffic control as an acute threat to air safety. For instance, pilots employed by various Canadian air carriers mobilized in significant numbers to protest any extension of French across Quebec or the rest of Canada. At a Bilcom session in Dorval, one pilot evoked the spectre of new dangers and risks if French became a more widespread language of air communication, telling those in attendance: “I might be carrying your mother on my plane. How would you like an accident to happen because of the use of French?” Similarly, another pilot stressed the ubiquity of English in international aviation: “anyplace that accommodates an airliner must be served in English – when I go to Quebec with my DC-9 [a jet aircraft], I want to be spoken to in English. I don’t care about Baie Comeau or Sept-Iles [two of the five airports where French could be spoken].”120 Politicians and elements of the national news media also began to claim that introducing French to control towers across Quebec would make the work of controllers even more dangerous and thereby create unforeseen safety risks. The Globe and Mail

117 “Controllers may join pilots in walkout over French use,” Globe and Mail, 9 August 1975, 3. 118 Levine, The Reconquest of Montreal, 98-100. 119 “End bilingual service, air controllers urge,” Globe and Mail, 27 May 1975, 10. 120 “More than 100 pilots speak at Montreal meeting on Bilcom,” Canadian Aviation, March 1975, 41.

161 argued that introducing a second language would complicate and intensify the emotional labour costs in the workplace: “Even if controllers had the time to be translators of every communication they receive, this would be a terrible onus to put on them – to be not just bilingually fluent, but bilingually infallible.”121 One Conservative MP put it more bluntly, predicting that if the federal government opted to bring in more French, “you will get somebody killed, eventually.”122 The federal government clouded the debate further by refusing to commit either way to a future plan, contending it needed time to study the matter more thoroughly before authorizing any additional changes.123 Opponents pointed to rising English-French tensions at air traffic control towers in Quebec as evidence that official bilingualism was a nationally divisive policy. Although the vast majority of Canadian air traffic controllers were Anglophones, only a small minority worked in Quebec. At the Montreal Centre control tower, for example, twenty English-speaking controllers worked alongside 240 bilingual Francophones.124 Not surprisingly, then, the propensity for disagreements rooted in the linguistic and cultural divide between English- and French-speakers in Canada were much higher in Quebec control towers where Anglophones were outnumbered but not always willing to recognize their minority status in these environments. Controllers regularly exchanged insults and even physical encounters became more commonplace. In 1975, a Francophone controller called an Anglophone colleague a “maudit juif” (cursed Jew) and in another heated moment an Anglophone controller pulled a Francophone co-worker from his chair.125 The CATCA also alleged that it had been quietly approached by a “substantial number” of English air traffic controllers requesting an out-of-province transfer to escape working conditions that they characterized as insufferable.126 Meanwhile, fearing their voice was being silenced within the national organization, the majority of Francophone controllers withdrew from the CATCA in 1975 to form a breakaway union, l’Association des Gens de l’Air, to defend their interests.127 Their

121 “Editorial: Sky talk,” Globe and Mail, 17 October 1975, 6. 122 “Backbenchers attack policy on French use,” Globe and Mail, 10 December 1975, 10. 123 Borins, The Language of the Skies, 70-72. 124 “Language tensions in Dorval control tower threaten safety of passengers, Spicer says,” Globe and Mail, 13 December 1975, 15. 125 Borins, The Language of the Skies, 72. 126 “Bilcom problems,” Canadian Aviation, January 1976, 2. 127 Borins, The Language of the Skies, 61.

162 action rendered visible the struggle of being a Francophone and yet made to speak English in a colonized province. Les Gens de l’Air had strong support in the Quebec National Assembly too. That same year, Parti Québécois MNA Marcel Léger questioned why the federal government had not already approved French in the air across the province, claiming that its reticence not only denied Francophones the right to work in French, but also represented a “federal intrusion into Quebec’s cultural sovereignty”.128 The many psychological strains from air traffic work, then, fused with escalating tensions between Anglophones and Francophone controllers over language rights in the workplace to create an untenable and potentially explosive situation. Anglophone pilots and Francophone controllers also sometimes directly clashed over the new language directive in Quebec. Soon after the policy change some controllers reportedly began to speak French in non-designated airport control towers and rebuffed requests from Anglophone pilots for translations, informing them that the conversations were irrelevant for their purposes. Angered by what they perceived as a flippant and disrespectful response, pilots jammed the radio frequency whenever they overheard conversations in French and failed to receive subsequent translations, an act that temporarily interrupted all air traffic communications in the area.129 This situation boiled over in December 1975, when the federal Department of Transport suspended two air traffic controllers in Montreal for speaking to each other in French.130 A colleague speaking on behalf of the suspended workers was also threatened with a one-day suspension if he continued using French in the workplace.131 Outrage in Quebec followed, with Parti créditiste MNA Camil Samson criticizing Premier Robert Bourassa for not doing enough to protest the government’s move: “I think it goes beyond the federal civil service. This is the French language in Quebec…I think that’s beyond the limits.”132 Thus as the federal government struggled to apply and enforce the spirit of the Official Languages Act, formerly separate debates about national language rights and rising labour frustration in air traffic control towers became intertwined as more air

128 Quebec, Assemblée Nationale, Journal des débats, 18 November 1975, Vol. 16, No. 2. 129 Borins, The Language of the Skies, 58. 130 The CATCA later claimed that federal officials had almost shut down the Montreal tower that day because tensions between controllers had run so high. “Dorval was almost shut: Air controllers,” Montreal Gazette, 8 July 1976, 1. 131 “Denying use of French called inadmissible,” Globe and Mail, 10 December 1975, 10. 132 Quebec, Assemblée Nationale, Journal des débats, 9 December 1975, Vol. 16, No. 74.

163 traffic controllers, particularly Anglophones, began to see bilingualism as analogous to other psychological and emotional challenges in their workplace. The suspensions prompted Keith Spicer, Canada’s Official Languages Commissioner, to visit the Montreal-Dorval air traffic control tower.133 After touring the facility and speaking to several controllers, Spicer described its workplace as a “general climate of indiscipline” that had begun to impact controllers’ labour performance and, by extension, threaten public safety. Sympathizing with the two suspended Francophone controllers, Spicer declared that they were “to a certain extent victims of a situation which had been allowed to deteriorate for too long. Indeed, the suspended persons were working in an atmosphere where insults and provocations between certain Anglophones and certain Francophones were commonplace.”134 Spicer drew a clear line between labour frustration at control towers and national linguistic and sociocultural cleavages, suggesting that bilingualism was fomenting more labour unrest amongst controllers on both sides of the issue. As workplace conditions worsened in 1976, Anglophone pilots and controllers sharpened their attacks against bilingualism by drawing on reference points that went beyond national politics and language rights to encompass international aviation rules and regulations. More specifically, these critics cast bilingualism as a threat to air safety because its very spirit contravened the ICAO’s English language directive worldwide. Canadian Aviation, one of Canada’s biggest aviation periodicals and a staunch advocate of English-only air traffic communications, editorialized this sentiment early in 1976: Canada should not degrade its air traffic control system by introducing a second language that will lead to confusion in an element where there is simply no room for confusion or misunderstanding…But if the government continues down the senseless road to complete bilingualism in aviation in Quebec, non-French- speaking pilots entering provincial airspace will have to use the same caution as they would when entering the airspace of a foreign country with an unfamiliar language.135

133 Spicer was Canada’s first Official Languages Commissioner. On his tenure, see Matthew Hayday, So They Want Us To Learn French: Promoting and Opposing Bilingualism in English-Speaking Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2015), 54-75. 134 “Language tensions in Dorval control tower threaten safety of passengers, Spicer says,” Globe and Mail, 13 December 1975, 15. 135 “Editorial: Bilcom a threat to public safety,” Canadian Aviation, February 1976, 2.

164 For some, then, the prospect of total bilingualism in Quebec effectively meant creating a two-tiered Canadian airspace that was starkly divided by language, placing Quebec outside the borders of an imagined Canada that recognized English only in deference to the global aviation community. In March 1976, at the behest of the CALPA the International Federation of Air Line Pilots Association organized a two-day International Symposium on Air Safety in Ottawa, at which the federal government and many supporters of bilingualism were conspicuously absent. An appointed three-person symposium committee heard presentations on the viability of fully bilingualizing air traffic control in Quebec and afterwards issued a report recommending that Quebec return to English-only air communications. Several symposium presentations evoked the idea of language transcending space and borders in the jet age. “Aviation by its very nature knows no boundaries,” argued Jim Livingston, President of the CATCA, “which is why English has become the common language of international aviation.”136 Livingston claimed that bilingualism in the air would impose further strains on air traffic controllers, creating more congested radio frequencies because more messages would need to be translated between English and French. Other participants at the conference, many from outside Canada, concurred. J.J. O’Donnell, president of the Air Line Pilots Association in the United States, postulated that bilingualism was antithetical to the linguistic universality that had come to define aviation in the late twentieth century: It appears that a political judgment is being made to downgrade aviation safety for other national objectives. However, it must be recognized that this judgment has international ramifications, for the resulting degradation in safety will affect every flight operating in Canadian airspace. Everyone travelling by air is being forced to pay a very high price to achieve logical consistency in resolving a local political problem.137

Henk Vermeulen, a Dutch pilot and vice-president of the International Federation of Air Line Pilots Association, echoed O’Donnell’s point. For Vermeulen, language in aviation was essential for consolidating its expansion worldwide, and

136 CATCA Archives, “Two Languages in Air Traffic Control: A Position of Protest,” CATCA Journal, Spring 1976, 22. 137 “Symposium panellists conclude that one-language ATC is best,” Canadian Aviation, April 1976, 43.

165 by rejecting bilingualism Canada would signal its commitment to this fundamentally global process. “Help us”, Vermeulen exclaimed in a burst of rhetorical flare, “who have become world citizens, who, suspended above the earth, need each other when the going gets rough; help us understand each other; help us to make communication easier, not for the individual, but for all of us from the North to the South Pole.”138 Vermeulen later repeated this mantra: “adding a second language is self-defeating, because it sets out to destroy what aviation is trying to accomplish.”139 Symposium participants also stressed that linguistic uniformity in the air improved safety. Max Karant, president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association in the United States, warned that he would recommend his members repeatedly speak English if addressed in French when flying in Quebec until they received an English response. Russ Beach, president of the Canadian Owners and Pilots Association, also requested that the government assist Francophone pilots in learning “ICAO English” by providing them with take-home lessons on tape.140 These sceptics positioned Canada and national socio-cultural issues within the context of a globalized aviation, contending that their quarrel was not with bilingualism itself, but with its incompatibility with mass air travel from a safety standpoint. This position actually placed them at odds with the ICAO, however, which did permit the use of more than one language within national airspaces in some cases.141 It also gave ammunition to some Quebeckers to use this argument against them, particularly after the province passed Bill 22. “If the use of one language is more advantageous from the point of view of safety in the air,” remarked Parti Quebecois MNA Jacques-Yvan Morin, “given the Francophone majority living in Quebec, is it not that this language must be French? It is not bilingualism.”142 However, although Anglophone critiques of bilingualism in the air ostensibly revolved around safety, their rhetoric in some cases was still very much informed by

138 Borins, The Language of the Skies, 89. 139 CATCA Archives, “Two Languages in Air Traffic Control: A Position of Protest,” CATCA Journal, Spring 1976, 28. 140 “Symposium panellists conclude that one-language ATC is best,” Canadian Aviation, April 1976, 43. 141 The ICAO permitted the use of multiple languages at many international airports in countries where the dominant language was not English. One example was Paris’s Charles De Gaulle Airport, where controllers and pilots could speak French or English. Another example was Switzerland, which recognized four languages, all of which could be used in air traffic communities in the country. See Borins, The Language of the Skies, 31-36. 142 Quebec, Assemblée Nationale, Journal des débats, 21 June 1976, Vol. 17, No. 52.

166 ethnic nationalism. Some of the rhetoric reflected the troubled limits of pan-Canadian nationalism at the time and a fear that bilingualism would be the death knell for an older national imagery of Canada as a predominantly Anglophone nation of British values and traditions that had already begun to recede by the 1970s.143 In its report the air safety symposium committee acknowledged and defended this sentiment: I must confess a bias in favour of a single-language system, based on the present form of ‘aviation English’. After all, there can be little argument that it would be more convenient if everyone spoke the same language, not just in aviation but in everything. In Canada, we would have been spared the hassle of the Official Languages Act…or the present controversy over bilingual ATC. But we don’t all speak the same language.144

Implicit in this commentary was a discomfort with accommodating and institutionalizing minority cultural and linguistic rights, an idea that represented the spirit and essence of the federal government’s bilingualism policy. While the symposium report did not go so far as to endorse assimilation in order to perpetuate dominant sociocultural values, it still gestured towards the notion that policies emphasizing and championing majority rule would eliminate the need for contemporary conversations about the need for and viability of bilingualism. Thus while some people deployed the language of safety to critique bilingualism because of genuine concerns that risks to planes and passengers would increase, others were more inclined to appropriate this rhetoric to advance an imagined representation of Canada that was more unilingual and mono-cultural than not. The Toronto Sun envisioned a similar national community organized along ethnic lines in a May 1976 editorial condemning official bilingualism as a national policy as well as the specific use of French in air traffic communications. While the Sun sought to emphasize the safety risks of a two-language system, its argument belied an idea of Canada, and the wider world, that was refracted through a stark Anglo-centric lens: This is an English-speaking continent, and it seems to us that if you start mixing the airwaves over Montreal with French and English instructions, the risk of crash or accident is increased….We prefer to gamble with the tried and tested – even if some construe it as a slap at bilingualism. The whole thing is ridiculous…Throughout Europe, Africa and Asia, English is the lingua franca of

143 Jose Igartua, The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities in English Canada, 1945-71 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006). 144 “Symposium panellists conclude that one-language ATC is best,” Canadian Aviation, April 1976, 41.

167 pilots. It isn’t Anglo-Saxon imperialism, but the language of convenience. To make it into a ‘French-rights’ issue is to do a disservice to everyone.145

Dutifully ignoring the millions of people across North America who did not identify English as their mother tongue, the subtext of the Sun’s commentary suggested that mass aeromobility contained a recognizable socio-cultural dimension, functioning as an Anglo- centric global phenomenon that superseded national questions about minority rights. In Canada’s case, this logic effectively marginalized the historical battle Francophones had waged over the protection of distinctive language and culture rights in favour of constructing a unilingual, monocultural international mobility network. Roger Demers, president of l’Association des Gens de l’Air and one of the few pro-bilingual speakers at the symposium, pointed out the fallacy of this position, and the colonial mentality underpinning it, during his presentation: It is obvious that if all francophones had a perfect comprehension of, and used with ease, the English language, one could reasonably suggest that the use of one language would be more desirable than the use of two. But we do not live in a world of ‘if’. We must remember that what is and what we would desire are not always the same; one may regret that North America contains not only persons who speak English, but also those whose mother tongue is French or Spanish.146

Demers reinforced this point later on, attacking Anglophones for projecting an image of sociocultural and linguistic superiority that deliberately overlooked the presence of other communities. “But what is their problem?”, he rhetorically asked. “Perhaps, as privileged unilingual Anglophones, they cannot perceive the problem of comprehension, because they have always understood everything.”147 As the debate over bilingualism in aviation raged on, the Trudeau government, following recommendations from a federal conciliation board, ordered a commission of inquiry on the issue in May 1976. The CATCA, in the midst of collective bargaining over a new contract with the Treasury Board and believing the terms of reference for the inquiry to be too narrow, threatened a strike action.148 Union support was high, but starkly divided along linguistic lines; 77% of the membership voted in favour, but 78% of

145 “Editorial: Fly-lingual,” Toronto Sun, 18 May 1976, 10. 146 “Symposium panellists conclude that one-language ATC is best,” Canadian Aviation, April 1976, 43. 147 Borins, The Language of the Skies, 66. 148 The CATCA argued that the terms of inquiry were only concerned with assessing whether bilingualism could be safely implemented.

168 controllers working in Quebec, the vast majority being Francophones, opposed.149 Seeing the strike vote as a tacit rejection of bilingualism, Transport Minister Otto Lang pointed to its ramifications for national unity: “if I were a 21-year-old Francophone, I wouldn’t stand for that in my national government. And they [Francophones] won’t either.”150

The 1976 CALPA Strike and (Anti-)Bilingualism On June 20, 1976, the federal government used a court order to block the CATCA’s threatened strike, declaring it illegal because the union had previously voted to ratify, but never signed, a contract that had been negotiated during an earlier phase of collective bargaining. The action not only enraged the CATCA (and led 2,200 controllers to stay home for two days in defiance of the court order), but also moved the CALPA to strike, commending an eight-day walkout by pilots employed by Canadian air carriers.151 The CALPA stood by its move, contending that controllers, many already under enormous psychological stress, had become too distracted by language politics. Robert Crossley, the union’s western regional director, blamed bilingualism for pushing controllers to a mental breaking point: “our life depends on these people [the controllers], they’re professionals…But there is some outside pressure breaking down our system and we don’t have to go far to figure out what it is. [They] don’t have their mind on their work. The air is not a safe place to be right now.”152 The CALPA argued that language politics had begun to migrate to other workplaces outside Quebec and destabilized the country’s entire airspace, citing a recent near-accident between an Air Canada and a Canadian Pacific Airlines aircraft at 37,000 feet over North Bay, Ontario.153 The pilots’ refusal to fly, then, stemmed from a belief that bilingualism had compounded labour frustration at

149 “Airport walkout set for June 1 after vote by controllers,” Globe and Mail, 19 May 1976, 1. 150 “Lang adamant on French at airports in Quebec,” Globe and Mail, 22 May 1976, 55. 151 The controllers returned to work after two days because the federal government threatened to prosecute those who violated the court order. “Pilots stay out; controllers back,” Montreal Gazette, 22 June 1976, 1. The CALPA strike ended only after the federal government promised to amend the terms of the Bilcom Commission of Inquiry. It was settled by an agreement signed between the government, CATCA and CALPA that stipulated the addition of a third member to the Commission of Inquiry, a requirement that the Commission must agree unanimously on the viability of bilingual air traffic control, and a free vote in the House of Commons on the issue should the Commission reach unanimity. See Borins, The Language of the Skies, 144-51. 152 “Flights cancelled by Air Canada, CP,” Globe and Mail, 21 June 1976, 2. 153 Borins, The Language of the Skies, 126.

169 control towers nationwide, making existing and unresolved workplace issues too serious to continue to ignore. The pilots’ strike over the state of the nation’s air traffic control workplaces intensified the public schism around official bilingualism across the country and revealed competing national imaginaries that drew from radically different reference points. It also showed how large-scale, global processes, in this case the internationalization of mass air travel, could alter the terms and heighten the stakes of contemporary national reflections on language and identity politics and the status of Quebec in Canada. At the height of the strike, the pilots received significant domestic and international public support. Numerous international airlines that respected the English-only language rule in international air travel, including British Airways and KLM, refused to allow their pilots to fly into Canadian airspace. Ten airlines based in the United States also announced a “quarantine” of Canadian airspace, suspending all flights into Canada, while American Airlines cancelled its flights in and out of Toronto.154 To avoid losing passengers during their boycott, participating airlines used buses to transport their passengers between Toronto and Buffalo, where flights were unaffected. The airlines were motivated to avoid Canada because they believed that bilingualism undermined the standardization that mass aeromobility required for air safety and efficiency across borders. “The entire world”, John Leyden, President of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association in the United States argued, “has recognized the need for only one language in air traffic control and that language is English.”155 Many Canadians echoed these sentiments, taking pains to argue that they saw bilingualism as a national liability only in the context of the CALPA strike. For some people, bilingualizing air traffic control would undercut the country’s international aviation obligations and increase the risks of flying through its airspace, thereby harming its reputation abroad. Toronto resident Stephen Franklin believed bilingualism simply clashed with the realities of air travel. “There is an internationality which transcends national concerns,” he declared, “and this is nowhere of more concern than in the swift

154 “U.S. pilots refuse to fly into Canada,” Montreal Gazette, 25 June 1976, 1. “Pilots from 10 airlines join walkout in Canada,” Globe and Mail, 25 June 1976, 1. 155 “Thousands of airline and hotel workers laid off as grip of Canada’s air tieup tightens,” Globe and Mail, 26 June 1976, 11.

170 and crowded airlines of the world…That English is the international language of aviation is entirely unrelated to Canada’s constitution or laws. It transcends them as it would if all pilots and ground controllers conversed in Swahili.”156 Newfoundland Premier Frank Moores also waded into the issue, characterizing French in the air as “dangerous stuff” that made the pilots’ decision to strike understandable: “Here we are in Canada, just to appease Quebec, putting in French to control the traffic around Montreal. I think it is a wrong policy…based on theory and not on pragmatic facts.”157 And William F. Shaw of Pointe Claire, Quebec concurred: “These men [controllers] are not racist. They are responsible professionals trying to make air travel and transport as safe and as dependable as possible…and feel strongly that it is far more rational for a few pilots to accept that aircraft communications jargon is English-based rather than risk the lives of millions of air travellers…”158 But public defenses of English-only air traffic communications like these that explicitly disavowed Francophone rights also belied scepticism, especially from English Canadians, about bilingualism as a federal policy as well as the sociocultural change it presaged in the late twentieth century.159 In response, they drew from an older, ethnic- based national imaginary and narrative of belonging that was in decline by the 1970s, which privileged assimilation over accommodation and monoculture over diversity.160 This parochial imaginary celebrated Canada’s British historical character and downplayed the equal status sought by French Canadians within the country’s foundational historical narrative.161 The seeds of Anglophone unease with official bilingualism were present before the strike. According to a Gallup poll released on the eve of the CALPA strike in May 1976, 73% of Anglophones surveyed thought federal officials and other supporters had placed too much emphasis on the merits of bilingualism, while 12% said it was just right and 10% insufficient. In contrast, half of Francophones who participated in the survey felt that national attention to bilingualism

156 “Letter to the editor: Air traffic control,” Globe and Mail, 26 June 1976, 6. 157 “Most side with pilots on bilingualism and safety,” Globe and Mail, 26 June 1976, 2. 158 “Letter to the editor: Special air jargon not disrespectful of French,” Montreal Gazette, 26 June 1976, 8. 159 On anti-bilingualism activism, see Hayday, So They Want Us To Learn French, 76-98. 160 Iguarta, The Other Quiet Revolution. 161 Some recent historical scholarship has been more sympathetic to this imaginary. See C.P. Champion, The Strange Demise of British Canada: The Liberals and Canadian Nationalism, 1964-68 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).

171 had been insufficient.162 Given the disconnect between Anglophones and Francophones regarding bilingualism, it is fair to suggest that the subsequent pilots’ strike helped to normalize anti-bilingual sentiment across Canada by giving some people the means to attack the prospect of French in the air without appearing guilty of demagoguery and anti-franchization rhetoric. Nevertheless, the nature of these critiques revealed a general disinterest in accommodating official minority groups, hostility towards government, and in some cases overt racism, all of which evoked ideas and narratives of national belonging that were severely at odds with the spirit and essence of bilingualism. formed the locus of rising English-Canadian disenchantment with bilingualism. By the early 1970s a new prairie identity had begun to form in this region of the country that opposed not only the political and economic dominance Ontario and Quebec had traditionally enjoyed in the federation, but also the Trudeau government’s conception of Canada as bilingual and multicultural.163 Alberta Premier Ernest Manning confirmed as much in 1968 when he declared during a first ministers’ meeting that the province “does not accept the proposition that Confederation was a union of two races or two cultures.”164 Unsurprisingly, there was strong support in the West for English-only air traffic communications nationwide. In the spring of 1976, air traffic controllers at Calgary International Airport sponsored a large billboard at the airport that read “English is the International Language of Aviation”. Pacific Western Airways, a mid-tier Canadian air carrier, also had its stewardesses wear buttons with the same motto on flights between Calgary and Edmonton.165 Strong support for English- only in the air in places like Alberta underlined how anti-bilingualism and rising regional alienation were inextricably linked in the minds of some Anglophones in the Prairie Provinces. Many Anglophone sceptics also cast bilingualism at odds with their sense of Britishness, mistakenly believing that the federal government intended to use bilingualism to sever Canada’s historical connection to the English language and British

162 Borins, The Language of the Skies, 97. 163 John Richards and Larry Pratt, Prairie Capitalism: Power and Influence in the New West (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979). 164 Hayday, “Reconciling the Two Solitudes,” 241. 165 “Aviation news digest,” Canadian Aviation, July 1976, 10.

172 culture.166 “It [the pilot walkout] is going to tear the country into two,” decried Rienk Pott of Wyoming, Ontario. “If the people in Quebec want French then why don’t they go back to France?”167 Others were similarly concerned that bilingualism represented a superfluous gesture towards Francophones. Said Douglas Sim, an appliance store manager in Kentville, Nova Scotia: “One language should be enough. I don’t think we should have to cater to someone who wants us to speak to him in his own language. They don’t put themselves out to speak English in Quebec so why should we have to speak French?”168 Chester Lightfoot, a security system distributor in New Minas, Nova Scotia, acknowledged the prevalence of Francophones in his province, but suggested that they, unlike Quebec Francophones, were less concerned with asserting their rights than conforming to the dominant cultural and linguistic values and traditions in their communities. “We have a lot of French-speaking people living in parts of Nova Scotia, but they’re not crazy like the ones in Quebec,” he said. “They can speak both French and English and they’re the nicest people you’d ever want to meet. If you can’t speak French, they don’t treat you like you’re second class. They just talk to you in English.”169 Lightfoot’s comments implied that bilingualism threatened a double standard towards language rights and protections in the country that some Anglophones were unwilling to acknowledge, a position grounded in a preference for cultural assimilation. In other words, these people believed that it was imperative that minority Francophones meet the majority Anglophone community on its linguistic and cultural terrain to reinforce a national vision that was relatively unilingual and mono-cultural. Across the country, more visceral and hostile reactions towards bilingualism also surfaced, driven by a grave distrust of the Trudeau government and its purported accommodation of minority rights. 25 of 30 residents in British Columbia interviewed by the Globe and Mail as part of a series of cross-country surveys about bilingualism claimed that it was a flawed initiative. Said Jack Ballander, a retired farmer in the province from Chilliwack: “French is being rammed down our throats. Believe me. I

166 On Britishness as an historical identity in English-speaking Canada, see Kurt Korneski, “Britishness, Canadianness, Class, and Race: Winnipeg and the British World, 1880s-1910s,” Journal of Canadian Studies 41, 2 (2007), 161-184. 167 “Most side with pilots on bilingualism and safety,” Globe and Mail, 26 June 1976, 2. 168 “Anti-French backlash sparked by airport bilingualism issue,” Globe and Mail, 5 July 1976, 1. 169 “Nova Scotia: ‘I get upset at people trying to push it on you’,” Globe and Mail, 5 July 1976, 9.

173 speak for everyone in BC when I say this.” Jacob Derksen, another resident of Chilliwack, rejected bilingualism as an affront to Canada’s English majoritarian character: “One country, one language. Let the majority rule.”170 Meanwhile, Bill Black, a rancher from Longview, Alberta, congratulated Anglophone controllers on their anti- bilingual stance: “More hair on them [the controllers], I say. I get fed up every time I buy a quart of oil and see the French.” Another anonymous Albertan not only disavowed any interest in legal protecting and affirming Francophone rights in the country, but also called for Quebec’s removal from Canada: “as far as I’m concerned we should take a chainsaw to Quebec and cut it off. Let it float right down the St. Lawrence.”171 Some Anglophones in Quebec, too, took a similar position. “Why must 17 million English- speaking Canadians be dictated to by six million French who refuse to accept the rule of majority in Canada, but demand it for the province of Quebec?” asked P. Baxter of Montreal. “It’s high time Canadians speak out for their country and language instead of giving lip service to the myth of Canada being a bilingual country.”172 English Canadians who expressed these views doggedly subscribed to a national imaginary of Canada as culturally British and linguistically English, a narrative of belonging and political nationality that they could not easily reconcile with official bilingualism. Quebec’s changing relationship with the rest of Canada also fundamentally shaped Anglophone hostility to bilingualism and greater recognition of Francophone rights. In the wake of the Quiet Revolution, Quebec became a hotbed of multiple, conflicting strands of political activism in the 1960s and early 1970s that sought either a greater role for Quebec within the federation as the guardian of a historically distinct society or the province’s removal from Canada altogether.173 Moreover, as the 1960s progressed Francophones in Montreal came to see themselves as historically colonized subjects in their city and province, appropriating and deploying post-colonial rhetoric to speak out against their marginalized status.174 These developments played out in Quebec

170 “British Columbia: ‘One language, one country’,” Globe and Mail, 5 July 1976, 9. 171 “Alberta: ‘We should take a chain saw to Quebec and cut it off’,” Globe and Mail, 5 July 1976, 9. 172 “Letter to the editor: Canadian aviation dictated to by a small minority,” Montreal Gazette, 30 June 1976, 8. 173 Marcel Martel, French Canada: An Account of its Creation and Break-Up, 1850-1967 (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1998). 174 Sean Mills, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).

174 through the mid-1970s against the backdrop of provincial language reform, the birth of the Quebecois separatist movement, urban terrorism waged by the Front de Liberation du Quebec, and the 1970 October Crisis, as well as coinciding nationally with the passage of the Official Languages Act.175 Some English Canadians were angered by Quebec’s reawakening, interpreting the province’s demands for a new asymmetrical federal model and the gains being achieved by Francophones as politically explosive developments that threatened their idea of ethnic Canadian nationalism and belonging that was tied to historical Britishness. The most visible and shocking manifestation of this national imaginary was a full-page advertisement taken out in national newspapers during the CALPA strike by the Voice of Canada League, which described itself as a “group of private Canadian citizens from every province”.176 The League’s advertisement attacked official bilingualism as extreme cultural accommodation and an affront to Canada’s historical roots, accusing the Trudeau government of blatant discriminatory practices that bordered on apartheid in its push to recognize Francophone rights across the country. “Discrimination, in EITHER direction, on the basis of colour, language or origin is racism,” the League argued. “In its hysterical pursuit of bilingualism at ANY price, the present government has pursued a racist policy worthy of South Africa.” Attempting to disguise their contempt for bilingualism as only opposition to its application in airport workplaces, the League, like others, evoked air safety as its reference point: “which is more important: the ‘Cultural rights’ of 330 French-speaking Quebec air controllers or the safety of the lives of millions of Canadians and foreign visitors who speak many languages and fly in Canadian skies?”177 The League’s incredulousness over how other Canadians, namely Francophones, might see the dispute over French in the air not as an insular issue but as a symptom of divisive national language politics revealed itself later in the advertisement. “To suggest that the cultural rights of French-speaking Canadians in general are involved is to insult the public’s intelligence”, one section read. “The only persons properly concerned in the

175 Levine, The Reconquest of Montreal; Eric Bedard, “The Intellectual Origins of the October Crisis,” in Magda Fahrni and Robert Rutherdale, eds., Creating Postwar Canada: Community, Diversity, and Dissent (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008), 45-60. 176 “Our Government: Racist and Arrogant,” Globe and Mail, 25 June 1976, 9. Borins briefly discusses the League’s ad in The Language of the Skies, 140. For a brief history of the League, see Hayday, So They Want Us To Learn French, 85-86. 177 “Our Government: Racist and Arrogant,” Globe and Mail, 25 June 1976, 9.

175 matter are air pilots and air traffic controllers – a miniscule fragment in numbers.” Another paragraph concurred: “the withdrawal of services…is sorely related to the question of air safety. Be it noted that THESE MEN ARE ACTING TO PROTECT THEIR OWN LIVES, THEIR LOVED ONES, AND THE PUBLIC FROM THE GOVERNMENT AT THEIR OWN PERSONAL EXPENSE [text capitalized in original].”178 The League, like others then, tried to orient its concerns about bilingualism specifically around jet age air travel and its transformative impact on labour conditions. But the League lost this argumentative thread by the end of its advertisement, pivoting towards a direct assault on bilingualism and its mandate of recognition and accommodation. It chose to evoke the spectre of Tsarist Russia in order to frame bilingualism as a government plot to reshape the sociocultural fabric of late twentieth century Canada at the dubious cost of $500 million a year: “Is bilingualism in air-traffic only one more step in the decade-long process of gnawing away at Canada’s roots? Each little bite seemingly too small to justify public outcry, but cumulatively amounting to a vast subversion of Canada’s institutions and identity.” The League then called for a referendum on bilingualism, believing that its days were numbered if Canadians were consulted and allowed to register their opposition nationwide: “We believe that the Canadian people do not support the government’s programme of division and discord, [and] we believe that a majority of the Members of Parliament would oppose bilingualism if they knew that they had public support.”179 In this case, however, the League undermined its own credibility and professed support for democracy by demanding a simple majority vote through a referendum, which only increased the likelihood that minorities in favour of bilingualism could simply be outvoted and marginalized through legal means. As a result, the League’s advertisement worked to perpetuate sociocultural and linguistic divides by marginalizing Quebec and French Canadians outside a specifically racist national imaginary. Unsurprisingly, many pro-bilingual people within and outside Quebec were greatly alarmed by the normalization of Anglophone anti-bilingual sentiment in national public discourse during the strike, fearing it would fan the flames of burgeoning Quebec

178 “Our Government: Racist and Arrogant,” Globe and Mail, 25 June 1976, 9. 179 “Our Government: Racist and Arrogant,” Globe and Mail, 25 June 1976, 9.

176 separatism. As mentioned earlier, Prime Minister Trudeau chose to speak on television in the middle of the pilots’ walkout to try and defuse tensions and characterized Anglophone animosity to French in the air as a serious threat to national unity. He imagined the failure of official bilingualism as the death knell of Quebec’s relationship with the rest of Canada: “We can’t force Quebeckers to learn English, and if they don’t want to within their own province they will say, ‘Well this is basically the separatist issue. If we can’t operate even within our own province in our own language, then what the hell are we doing in this country?’”180 Federal Urban Affairs Minister Barnett Danson chimed in, accusing “rednecks” of using bilingualism in the air as a cultural wedge issue. “There are people around who are taking advantage of the air traffic controllers’ dispute to spread racism, hatred and bigotry for their own ends,” he stated. “Ads like this [the Voice of Canada League] will be seen in Quebec and they’ll be saying, ‘Why bother staying in the country?’”181 In Quebec, the strike and its aftermath generated substantive public outrage at Anglophone hostility as well as a defiant reassertion of Francophone pride, driven by news that the federal government had agreed to delay the implementation of French in the rest of Quebec’s control towers and change the terms of its commission of inquiry to make future changes more difficult in exchange for an end to the pilots’ strike.182 Parti Québécois Leader René Lévesque declared that the whole dispute was “the sad outcome of 100 years of federalism and eight years of French power…It’s proof that people who would have us believe in a bilingual Canada from sea to sea have failed.”183 Fellow Parti Québécois MNA Marcel Léger was outraged with the strike settlement, saying “the federal government has indeed fulfilled the requirements of Canada’s separatist and racist Anglophone pilots” and that “people can not afford not to work in their language at home.”184 Quebec MPs also lashed out against the deal, including key cabinet member Jean Marchand who submitted his resignation in protest.185 Federal Communications

180 “Air crisis is Canada’s worst since conscription, PM says,” Globe and Mail, 26 June 1976, 1. 181 “Air crisis is Canada’s worst since conscription, PM says,” Globe and Mail, 26 June 1976, 1. 182 Borins, The Language of the Skies, 144-51. “Strike off: it’s flying time again,” Montreal Gazette, 29 June 1976, 1. 183 “All political stripes in Quebec attack federal concessions on airport French,” Globe and Mail, 30 June 1976, 1; Borins, The Language of the Skies, 153. 184 Quebec, Assemblée Nationale, Journal des débats, 29 June 1976, Vol. 17, No. 56. 185 “Marchand quits over air control,” Montreal Gazette, July 2, 1976, 1.

177 Minister Jeanne Sauve, too, criticized her own government for dithering on bilingualism at a crucial moment of national disunity, accusing it of placating the fears of Canada’s English-speaking population towards bilingualism and “kneeling down to a bunch of fantatics”.186 Equally significantly, Sauve argued that Anglophones who stressed English only in the air as a guarantor of safety did not hold moral authority in the debate, pointing out that Francophones working in control towers and piloting aircraft cared just as much about protecting the public: “We don’t die less because we die in French”.187 Quebeckers expressed disappointment with both the federal and provincial governments, with many seeing the strike resolution as a capitulation to Anglophone majority interests and an undermining of both the Official Languages Act and Bill 22 in air traffic control towers and the airport workplace more generally. Les Gens de l’Air characterized the settlement as one that reinforced Francophones’ perceived second-class status in Canada. “The Government has been blackmailed by English-speaking pilots and controllers guided by pure racism,” Roger Demers, president of les Gens de l’Air thundered. “All over the world, except in Quebec, the language of a country is the prime language in air communication. What we want is nothing more than this fundamental right.”188 Quebec’s National Assembly held an emergency debate the day after the settlement and voted unanimously to support les Gens de l’Air and call for the institution of French in air communications in Quebec as soon as possible.189 During the debate, politicians of all stripes criticized the Trudeau and Bourassa governments for not doing enough to get a good deal for Quebec. “The future of federalism is seriously compromised,” argued Liberal MNA Jérôme Choquette, if this [federal] government fails in the essential objectives of recognizing the French language and French culture in Canada.”190 And days later, Premier Robert Bourassa declared that Quebec would use the dispute as fuel in its push for greater constitutional protection of linguistic and cultural rights.191 Coming at a critical time in Quebec’s relationship with Canada, these comments only served to confirm that more federalists and sovereigntists in Quebec had begun to

186 “Sauve angered by strike agreement but wants cabinet solidarity,” Montreal Gazette, 6 July 1976, 2. 187 “Kneeling to fanatics is painful, Sauve says,” Globe and Mail, 3 July 1976, 2. 188 “Les Gens de l’air menacent à leur tour de faire la grève,” La Presse, 29 June 1976, A1. 189 “Assembly backs French in controller-pilot war,” Montreal Gazette, 2 July 1976, 3. 190 Quebec, Assemblée Nationale, Journal des débats, 30 June 1976, Vol. 17, No. 57. 191 “Air crisis basic to repatriation: Premier,” Montreal Gazette, 5 July 1976, 4.

178 see the provincial government as the best guarantor of Francophone interests in the province.192 In Quebec, supporters mobilized against anti-bilingual sentiment and resistance to French in control towers by affirming the right to work in French and campaigning for the total implementation of official bilingualism within the province. The campaign represented a temporary truce between provincial federalists and separatists who downplayed stark ideological differences in favour of advancing a territorially defined political nationalism based on the full recognition of French within Quebec’s borders. Les Gens de l’Air was instrumental in mobilizing support and highlighting the stakes of the issue. It helped to create buttons containing the phrase “Il y a du francais dans l’air”, translated as “There is French in the air”, and distributed them to thousands of Quebeckers, including French-Canadian hockey legend Maurice Richard, who wore it prominently at media appearances. Office québécois de la langue francaise (the Quebec Board of the English Language) also launched an advertising campaign with the slogan, “De plus en plus ca se passé en francais”, which translated as “more and more it’s happening in French”.193 The Desjardins Co-operative Movement, too, got involved, collecting donations for Les Gens de l’Air at its 12,000 credit unions across the province.194 These initiatives aimed to infuse the bilingualism debate with a sense of urgency, conveying to Francophone Quebeckers in particular that French in air traffic control was part of a broader and longer historical struggle against Anglophone domination. Francophones, in other words, saw the crisis as a struggle for greater economic opportunity and against cultural and linguistic assimilation. As one Francophone controller succinctly remarked about the conflict, “if we lose this fight, it means we’re just another Louisiana”.195 This is not to suggest that the vast majority of English-Canadians steadfastly opposed bilingualism as a national policy or resisted the entry of French into air traffic control towers in Quebec. In fact, many people publicly disavowed the ethnic nationalism on which much of the anti-bilingualism sentiment rested, calling for progressive

192 Martel, French Canada, 24-26. 193 On the Quebec Board of the English Language, see Gaston Cholette, L’Office de la langue française de 1961 à 1974: regard et témoignage (Québec: Institut québécois de recherché sur la culture, 1993). 194 “French in air communications is Quebeckers’ cause of the ‘70s,” Toronto Star, 27 September 1976, C3. 195 “The Plains of Abraham: Part Two” Maclean’s, 18 October 1976, 14.

179 sociocultural change instead. Writing to Maclean’s, Bruce Gates of Toronto declared that bilingualism represented the locus of a new national imaginary and narrative of belonging that reconfirmed Confederation’s place as a contract between English-speaking and French-speaking peoples. “Bilingualism in Canada is a reality,” he wrote. “It won’t go away and hide. Whatever the inequities of Ottawa’s present policy on the subject, the fact still remains that Canada is a two-language country, and for this country to remain a country…Canadians from all regions must accept bilingualism as a fact of Canadian life.”196 Canadian Aviation, which had been strongly against bilingual air traffic communications in Quebec before and during the strike, later changed its tune, recognizing that deep-seated and divisive national issues had quickly sidelined much of the early public debate about language use in control towers that had been framed around air safety: The Battle of Bilcom [colloquial reference to bilingualism in air traffic control] is no longer a matter of aviation safety, or even aviation. It has become another confrontation between English- and French-speaking Canadians that threatens to rip this country apart. It is ironic that such a threat…should come from the aviation sector, for it was aviation that played such a major role in knitting the country together.197

Maclean’s writer John Condit agreed, contending that any setbacks to simply bring French into air traffic control towers in Quebec represented a far more serious public reluctance to recognize French and Francophones as central to Canadian identity and the country’s bilingual and bicultural founding narrative. Condit believed that evidence of Anglophone resistance to the measure itself represented a regressive development in the nation’s evolution that laid bare “our lagging maturity as a nation”. Moreover, he echoed Francophone critiques of anti-bilingualism sentiment by suggesting that Anglophone aversion to bilingualism used the internationalized terrain of aviation to espouse a national vision that relegated Quebec, and its particular cultural and linguistic character, to marginal status: The slogan [English is the international language of aviation] has been proclaimed on bumper stickers and bannered from airplanes. It belongs to the syndrome that treats Quebec as a foreign land. There are other languages of aviation, including

196 “Letter: We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Maclean’s, 13 December 1976, 16c-17c. 197 “Editorial: A time for co-operation,” Canadian Aviation, August 1976, 2.

180 some that are international. The battle for English as an indispensable alternative for flights crossing language zones has long since been won. What we’re looking at here is a bit of the old Canadian venom.198

In 1970s Canada, then, public conflicts over official bilingualism in air traffic communications were shaped by regional and national discourse as well as by global developments in aviation. There were many dimensions to this narrative that operated at multiple scales as various constituencies drew from different reference points to interrogate the merits of official bilingualism and fold it into ongoing conversations about labour alienation in the airport workplace. In 1977, after many consultations and simulations that tested the efficacy of a two-language air traffic control system, the Bilcom Commission of Inquiry concluded that bilingual air traffic control in Quebec did not endanger public safety. It concluded that only one accident of the 17,635 that had occurred worldwide since 1960 was caused by the use of two languages, but even in that case it was not the immediate cause. Echoing one of the more popular arguments made by bilingual advocates, the report noted that many countries, including Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, France, Spain, and Italy, used more than one language in air traffic communications, leaving only a minority, like Great Britain, West Germany, and the Netherlands, that were committed to English only.199 In Canada, controllers greeted the report with a mixture of cautious optimism and ambivalence. L’Association des Gens de l’Air partially supported Bilcom’s conclusions, but said the commission could have gone further in specifically affirming the safety of full bilingual air traffic communications in Quebec.200 Meanwhile, the CATCA refrained from taking a strong position, declaring the report had not provided absolute proof that bilingualism was equally safe to English in the air. After more delays, federal officials announced they were satisfied that Bilcom had resolved the question of safety, and the Progressive Conservative federal government began full integration of French into air

198 “Beneath all the pious talk of ‘keeping the airways safe’ is a simple case of racism,” Maclean’s, 12 July 1976, 12b. 199 Commission of Inquiry into Bilingual Air Traffic Services in Quebec: Final Report (Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1979); Globe and Mail, 9 July 1977, 1. 200 “Bilingual air traffic safe, inquiry concludes,” Globe and Mail, 9 July 1977, 1.

181 traffic control towers across Quebec in 1980.201 The resolution of the issue shifted public frictions over official bilingualism and its place in the Canadian sociocultural fabric from control towers in Quebec to the rise of Quebecois separatism.202 But even while concerns about French in the air generally faded, labour restiveness in air traffic control towers nationwide, which had amplified the stakes of the bilingualism debate and the CALPA strike, failed to improve in the coming years. In 1979, following the recommendation of a number of studies, including one published by Toronto’s Clark Institute of Psychiatry, the federal Ministry of Transport and Ministry of Health and Welfare together initiated the Air Traffic Controllers’ Occupational Health Program. The program required an on-site physician to be posted at every major Canadian airport, and also contained a greater emphasis on fitness and health education. Collectively these measures sought to induce controllers to reinvest in their labour as well as “re-examine their lifestyles and behaviour patterns, recognize and cope with problems inherent in the job, and improve their physical, mental and emotional well-being.”203 The federal initiative was part of a larger push worldwide, led by the International Federation of Air Traffic Control Associations, to mitigate the psychological costs of air traffic control work.204 Some observers, like Dr. Sam Birenbaum, full-time medical officer at Toronto, felt it was well past due: “of all industries I think ATC [air traffic control] needs medical services more than any other.”205 With the Occupational Health Program, the federal government tried to embark on a newly sensitive and comprehensive approach to address the challenges controllers faced in a workplace environment that was rarely static. During the 1980s, however, controllers across Canada continued to highlight health hazards in their workplace. In the early 1980s, asbestos had to be removed from one of the control towers at Toronto, a project that took seventeen weeks and cost over

201 For more on this shift, see Borins, The Language of the Skies, 190-219. 202 On the early years of the Quebec sovereignty movement and the 1980 referendum, see Graham Fraser, René Lévesque and the Parti Quebecois in Power (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). 203 “‘Explosive decompression’ fought by ATC fitness program,” Canadian Aviation, April 1979, 30. 204 In 1988, the International Federation of Air Traffic Control Associations funded a study to examine evidence of sleep paralysis in control towers across the world. “Controllers’ ‘sleep paralysis’ subject of IFATCA research,” Canadian Aviation, February 1988, 15. 205 “‘Explosive decompression’ fought by ATC fitness program,” Canadian Aviation, April 1979, 30.

182 $400,000.206 Glaring staff shortages and steady increases in air and passenger traffic also continued to adversely impact the labouring experience. Between 1982 and 1987, air traffic across Canada rose 20% to over 2.5 million IFR (instrumental flight rules) movements per year.207 But the number of controllers responsible for handling the increased volume actually decreased 8% over the same period because of government austerity measures that had been introduced in the early 1980s.208 Predictably, rising traffic volumes and growing technological sophistication in jet age air travel, and the concurrent pressures these twin developments imposed on control towers, meant many controllers continued to self-identify as exploited and emotionally burdened workers. Persistent staff shortages again weighed heavily on some individuals, with one controller in Toronto allegedly working nine days in a row.209 Not surprisingly, perpetual overtime severely affected workplace morale and labour performance. One controller observed: “a guy that works nine days in a row is a zombie. I don’t want to work next to a guy on his eighth day…the tension and stress makes guys very short- fused…they have a hard time concentrating and then take it out on the controller beside them.” Another struggled to see the value of performing air traffic labour after assessing the multiple tolls it could inflict on individual controllers: “You say, ‘Why am I doing this? I’m working myself to an early grave.’”210 In the 1980s, then, the decoupling of labour grievances and language politics in the control towers did not eliminate the frictions present there. Rather, even if the resolution of the bilingualism conflict de- politicized air traffic control workplaces, labour conditions and widespread worker frustration in these environments continued to be defined and shaped by the jet age as well as federal reluctance to completely upgrade or reform the system to satisfactorily address controller grievances.

206 “Asbestos removal started on tower at Malton airport,” Globe and Mail, 16 August 1983, 3. Earlier that year high levels of asbestos were also removed from Toronto’s Terminal I after workers there threatened to strike. “Airport workers may strike over asbestos hazard,” Toronto Star, 13 May 1983, A6. 207 This figure did not include the flights – mainly by smaller, private aircraft – that operated according to Visual Flight Rules. 208 CATCA Archives, “Reflections from a summer of strain,” CATCA News, December 1987, 2. The 1981- 82 recession led the Trudeau government to increase government spending, which failed to stimulate the economy or lower the jobless rate, but did increase annual deficits significantly. In response, the Mulroney government, upon coming to power in 1984, rolled back spending and hired fewer public servants. 209 CATCA Archives, “Reflections from a summer of strain,” CATCA News, December 1987, 2. 210 CATCA Archives, “Reflections from a summer of strain,” CATCA News, December 1987, 2.

183 Conclusion Between the 1960s and 1980s, jet age growth radically reshaped workplaces at major Canadian airports and complicated how these workers experienced and performed their labour. Tasked with helping to oversee air safety, air traffic controllers nationwide had to negotiate an especially unstable workplace that had been irremovably transformed as air traffic steadily rose and aircraft became more technologically sophisticated. Working in an environment that over time became defined by its very fluidity, many controllers grew alienated from their labour and came to feel cheated by the technical system in which they operated, experiencing acute physical and emotional costs that, in some cases, seriously interfered with their work performance and general mental health. Official bilingualism and the introduction of French to air traffic communications in Quebec soon intersected with and compounded labour alienation and made the unfolding situation at control towers a national issue beginning in the early 1970s. The ensuing public debate over bilingualism in the air dissected the relationship between language and labour to historical and contemporary questions of national identity and community according to a range of regional, national, and global discourses. Consequently, workplace tensions in air traffic control towers nationwide during the 1960s and 1970s helped to stimulate and inform broader conversations about the place of Francophones within the national community as well as underline the presence of competing and incompatible national imaginaries that were circulating in the late twentieth century.

184 Chapter 4

In But Not Of Canada: Airports, Citizenship, and Border Security in the 1970s and 1980s

In September 1965, 20 year-old British national Elspeth Ann Whitley arrived at Toronto International Airport after a flight from London.1 She was met at the airport by a throng of photographers, a Mountie escort, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration John Nicholson, and unexpectedly, Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, who happened to be travelling out of the city that day and spent a few minutes with her before his own flight.2 Afterwards, Nicholson escorted Whitley through customs and presented her with a gold pin engraved with her name, which nicely complimented the orchid corsage that she had received en route to Canada and proudly wore at the airport. Whitley received all this attention because she was Canada’s 100,000th immigrant that year, having been selected by officials after applying at the Canadian embassy in London.3 Two decades later, on January 1, 1989, Chhinder Paul, a 22 year-old Indian national, disembarked at Montreal’s Mirabel International Airport after an overseas flight. He was met at the airport not by an excited crowd of VIPs, but by an immigration officer who took him aside for more questioning. During this exchange, Paul asked for asylum in Canada, informing the officer that he was a refugee whose life was in danger in India. The officer duly filed the claim, detaining Paul and referring his case to a two- person adjudication panel, which met a few days later and ruled that Paul was not a genuine refugee. The panel ordered Paul to be deported within 72 hours, making him one of the first individuals believed to have been removed from the country under Canada’s more stringent, streamlined refugee system that was introduced at the beginning of that year to speed up assessment and processing.4 Officials had anticipated Whitley’s arrival because she had applied for landed immigrant status at the Canadian embassy in England. Her action followed legal practice

1 Portions of this chapter were originally published as a journal article. See Bret Edwards, “Governing Global Aeromobility: Canada and Airport Refugee Claimants in the 1980s,” Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies 6, 3 (Winter 2016), 22-40. 2 Celia Franca, the Artistic Director of the National Ballet of Canada, was also among the delegation of greeters, ready to give Whitley a try-out with the company after she had been contacted by her weeks earlier about a possible dancing opportunity. 3 “PM Greets 100,000th Immigrant,” Globe and Mail, 30 September 1965, 5. 4 “Deportation order is first to be issued under new process,” Globe and Mail, 7 January 1989, A1.

185 at the time, which prohibited “landed applications” at a Canadian border. In other words, by the time she arrived in Toronto Whitley’s path to Canadian citizenship had been secured and finalized through a process that began overseas. Conversely, Paul’s arrival occurred under different circumstances. Unlike Whitley, Paul was not a pre-screened traveller who had applied abroad for legal entry, but a self-declared refugee who had fled India, his country of origin, for Canada. Rather than sailing through the airport’s immigration and customs area, Paul languished there, enduring in succession an interrogation, detention, legal rejection, and, finally, deportation. Paul’s story was not exceptional, as his decision to board a plane and request admittance at one of Canada’s international airports mirrored the actions of hundreds of thousands of other migrants during the 1970s and 1980s. In so doing, Paul and others confronted the Canadian state, which claimed the power to admit them based on a normative idea of national citizenship. This chapter uses these contrasting experiences to explore how the infrastructure of Canada’s jet age airports, particularly in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, became key sites where the federal state and individual claimants engaged in a struggle over citizenship in the late twentieth century. It charts the rise of international air traffic and the surge in the number of foreign nationals making on-site claims as either landed immigrants, or increasingly, refugees during the 1970s and 1980s. These changes helped reconfigure jet age airports as inland national borders where government officials screened and sometimes disciplined travellers with greater frequency and sophistication. It also illustrates that the Canadian government’s screening of non-nationals at airports was fundamentally informed by a racialized discourse of citizenship that often discriminated against people from the global south, the source of most airport citizenship claimants came in this period. Moreover, this chapter argues that to reinforce control over its borders and protect national priorities, the Canadian government adopted various strategies to circumscribe and suspend individual movement at airports and through the air, building on border practices dating back to the early twentieth century. Through these actions it worked to reassert national prerogatives at a time when rapid developments in aviation had begun to unsettle immigration policies. Individual migrants, in turn, contested federal authority over citizenship by seeking ways to subvert restrictions on their aerial movement. The

186 surge in international air traffic beginning in the 1960s and the simultaneous governmental restrictions helped transform key jet age airports into critically strategic national borders. The encounters between the federal government and individual travellers at these airports underlined the extent to which mass aeromobility clashed with normative discourses of citizenship and border security in late twentieth century Canada.

Mass Aeromobility and Borders By the time Whitley arrived in Canada, the border was a well-established regulatory line. The border and the emergence of the nation-state can effectively be traced to the late eighteenth century. As early as the 18th century, borders had helped consolidate national sovereign authority over a delineated territory.5 This process defined free mobility as a contingent privilege rather than right. Peter Andreas has noted that the border conveyed to the wider public that individual mobility was not an absolute right: “border policing is not simply a policy instrument for deterring illegal crossings, but a symbolic representation of state authority; it communicates a state’s commitment to marking and maintaining the borderline.”6 Through this process, the national state reserves the right to classify some people as unfit for entry, differentiating them from acceptable travellers through a complex and fluid process that constantly shifted during individual inspections.7 The border, and the state’s surveillance practices there, thus represents a means of governing populations through the ritual of people submitting to being questioned and interrogated about their national identity by border guards who act as sovereign representatives.8 On the other hand, the modern border also linked the management of mobile populations to citizenship. Central to this development was not only the birth of the

5 Borders did exist in the pre-modern era, but were generally understood more as contact zones than territorial delineations. See Steven G. Ellis and Raingard Esser, “Introduction: Early Modern Frontiers in Comparative Context,” in Ellis and Esser, eds., Frontiers and the Writing of History, 1500-1850 (Hannover-Laatzen: Wehrhahn, 2006), 9-20. 6 Cited in Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large : Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 138. 7 Gareth Hoskins and Jo Frances Maddern, “Immigration Stations: The Regulation and Commemoration of Mobility at Angel Island, San Francisco and Ellis Island, New York,” in Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman, eds., Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 152-56. 8 Mark Salter, “When the exception becomes the rule: borders, sovereignty and citizenship,” Citizenship Studies 12, 4 (August 2008), 365-380.

187 nation-state, but also the invention of the modern passport, which recast the governance of mobile populations along more centralized, organized lines.9 In essence, passports conveyed and recognized citizenship, functioning as signifiers of a person’s secure place in the national community and legal right to remain within its boundaries.10 At the same time, as John Torpey has shown, national governments constructed an extensive bureaucracy to administer the passport, giving them “a monopoly of the legitimate means of movement” within and through national space that had previously been the responsibility of provincial or local authorities in the pre-modern era.11 Passports also constituted critical tools of governance that helped construct ideas of normative citizenship as well as legally exclude undesirable persons. Since passports conveyed the nationality of the holder, they also possessed a “disqualifying, rights- limiting” character by differentiating national from non-national subjects, which automatically rendered certain people more visible to authorities at entry points.12 Along these lines, passports have come to serve as what Anthony Richmond calls “instruments of exclusion” above all else, curtailing more than facilitating cross-border mobility on the basis of nationality and citizenship.13 The passport, then, helped to dramatically reshape how states governed territories and populations, foregrounding nationality as a visible marker of identity and difference. The development of the Canadian passport represented one particular version of this story. After Confederation, colonial logics of race, gender, and class dominated official and popular understandings of citizenship, structuring an emergent national imaginary rooted in whiteness and “Britishness”.14 As Radhika Viyas Mongia has shown, the federal government saw the passport as a way to restrict unwanted immigration from other parts of the Commonwealth and disguise racist motivations for restricting the

9 The modern passport was introduced in the late eighteenth century, although earlier incarnations existed. See Martin Lloyd, The Passport: The History of Man’s Most Travelled Document (Stroud: Sutton, 2003), chapter 1. 10 On the passport in the national and international areas, see Mark Salter, Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations (Boulder, Co.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003). 11 John C. Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2. 12 Torpey, The Invention of the Passport, 155-56. 13 Anthony Richmond, “Globalization: implications for immigrants and refugees,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 25, 5 (2002), 716. 14 On Britishness, see Kurt Korneski, “Britishness, Canadianness, Class, and Race: Winnipeg and the British World, 1880s-1910s,” Journal of Canadian Studies 41, 2 (2007), 161-184.

188 mobility of non-white persons, making it a “technology that nationalizes bodies along racial lines”.15 Colonial logics of racial difference tied to white hegemony also became codified in legal frameworks and Canadian immigration policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.16 Alongside the passport, Canada and the United States instituted other strategies to thicken its lengthy shared border in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century not only to regulate mobility but also preserve white racial and cultural hegemony.17 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, then, the Canadian state utilized the border to consolidate its monopoly over the means of movement and specifically exclude racially and socially undesirable persons. Beginning in the 1960s, mass aeromobility transformed Canada’s international airports into conduits of international leisure travel as well as primary immigration processing points. In the process, these airports were remade as de-localized, or virtual, national borders where the federal government wielded its monopoly over the means of

15 Radhika Viyas Mongia, “Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport,” Public Culture 11, 3 (1999), 529. 16 Anti-Chinese and anti-Indian sentiment was particularly strong during this period. To assuage public concerns about the Chinese threat to white hegemony, in 1885 the federal government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, imposing a $200 head tax on immigrants from China, a figure that it subsequently raised several times through the 1920s. In 1923, the government then passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which remained law until 1947 and banned all Chinese immigration to Canada. See Yukari Takai, “Asian Migrants, Exclusionary Laws, and Transborder Migration in North America, 1880-1940,” OAH Magazine of History 23, 4 (October 2009), 35-43. The situation was more complex with Indian migrants, who were analogously viewed in official and public circles as racially inferior and culturally backward, but were also fellow Commonwealth subjects. This tension is examined in Paula Hastings, “Fellow British Subjects or Colonial “Others”? Race, Empire, and Ambivalence in Canadian Representations of India in the Early Twentieth Century,” The American Review of Canadian Studies 38, 1 (Spring 2008), 3-26. For more on anti-Indian government policy and the 1914 Komagata Maru incident, see Hugh Johnston, The Voyage of the Komagata Maru: The Sikh Challenge to Canada’s Colour Bar (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1989). 17 In 1893, Canada and the United States signed the Canadian Agreement, which allowed American immigration officers and medical examiners to station themselves at Canadian seaports to inspect arriving travellers from Europe who intended to enter the United States. See Thomas A. Klug, “The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the Making of a Border-Crossing Culture on the U.S.-Canada Border, 1891-1941,” American Review of Canadian Studies 40, 3 (September 2010), 397-98. In spite of the Agreement, the flow southward continued into the twentieth century, prompting many Americans to increasingly perceive Canada as a sieve nation with a liberal immigration policy, where immigrants could enter with little difficulty and then proceed south to the United States across unguarded border points in pursuit of more favourable economic and professional opportunities. See Bruno Ramirez, Crossing the 49th Parallel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 39-51. In the Pacific Northwest, Canada and the United States introduced more sophisticated surveillance measures at entry points, including checkpoints, border patrol, shared intelligence, manpower exchange, and immigrant detention and deportation, following the arrival of thousands of Asian migrants seeking economic opportunities in the growing global markets of Vancouver and Seattle. More than 10,000 landed in Vancouver and Victoria alone in 1907. See Kornel S. Chang, Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 149-156.

189 movement.18 These changes particularly affected transoceanic immigration journeys. As air travel’s global popularity soared, older modes of transport that had carrying the bulk of immigrants to Canada precipitously declined. While steamships remained the dominant mode of transoceanic travel through the 1950s, air travel began to move more immigrants that same decade. In 1957, Canada introduced the “Air Bridge to Canada” program to help move Hungarian refugees and a growing number of British immigrants.19 During the first eight months of 1957, 207 flights departed mainly from London and landed in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, and Vancouver, bringing a total of 17,565 immigrants and refugees.20 The initiative was part of a pilot project initiated by the government because of interest overseas and later readjusted as a result of the deteriorating political circumstances in Hungary. But although the number of Hungarians moved by plane was impressive, more than half of the total number of 37,000 refugees still came by steamship, illustrating that the balance of power had not yet shifted from sea to sky.21 Approximately half of the Hungarian refugees were processed at Pier 21 in Halifax, which had constituted the principal entry point for steamship arrivals from Europe since it opened in 1928. Pier 21 remained a busy transit hub well into the 1950s. During that decade, Halifax received an average of 45,000 immigrants a year, which represented one-third of Canada’s annual average number over the 1950s, making heavy passenger traffic commonplace. Individual ocean liners could carry up to 1,500 people and the arrival of multiple ships at once could strain the Pier’s processing capabilities, evidenced by one five-day period in 1952 that saw 4,500 arrivals.22 By the late 1960s, however, Pier 21’s share of transcontinental traffic had slipped. In 1968, 12,000 travellers came through Pier 21, which was less than the 13,832 arrivals that Halifax International

18 David Lyon, “Filtering Flows, Friends and Foes,” in Mark Salter, ed., Politics at the Airport (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 42; Gallya Lahav, “Mobility and Border Security,” in Salter, ed., Politics at the Airport, 80-92. 19 On Canada’s response to Hungarian refugees, see Peter Hidas, “Arrival and Reception: Hungarian Refugees, 1956-57,” in Christopher Adam, et al., eds., The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: Hungarian and Canadian Perspectives (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010), 223-255. 20 Gerald E. Dirks, Canada’s Refugee Policy: Indifference or Opportunism? (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977), 201. 21 Ninette Kelley and Michael Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 346. 22 Trudy Duivenvoorden Mitic, Pier 21: The Gateway That Changed Canada (Halifax, N.S.: Nimbus Pub., 2011), 93, 107.

190 Airport processed that same year.23 In 1971, the Pier finally shut its doors, having processed a total of 1.5 million people over its lifetime.24 Ultimately, its closure was linked to the emergence of a new transportation geography through which international airports replaced piers as the key national centres for receiving and processing immigrants.25 Air travel’s global expansion coincided with more postwar immigration. As such, immigrants comprised a large percentage of the growing population of air travellers.26 During this period, immigration rates steadily rose, with 2.25 million people admitted between 1963 and 1976 for an average of 160,000 annually.27 Some years had higher totals than others; for example, 222,000 immigrants arrived in 1967, an annual figure that was not surpassed until 1991.28 Initially, the federal government was unprepared to handle the increasing number of immigrant arrivals by air. The primary reason was that airport immigration and customs areas remained tiny and understaffed prior to the 1970s, leaving them ill suited to function as primary national entry points. Unsurprisingly, immigration offices struggled to manage daily line-ups and process caseloads, particularly during peak periods. One officer at Toronto described the situation there in June 1969 as verging on total chaos. “If we get through the next two months…without a major crisis or two, it will be a miracle,” he said. “The inspection series are going to have to improvise for emergency situations and there will be times when inspection formalities may have to be waived completely.”29 As airports evolved into bona fide international transit hubs, the Canadian government installed tighter surveillance. In 1970, the federal departments of Transport and Citizenship and Immigration jointly introduced a two-tiered screening system at

23 Mitic, Pier 21, 120. 24 Mitic, Pier 21, 124. 25 John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 149-155. 26 For example, in 1968 12,000 immigrants arrived at Pier 21, while 13,832 came by air to Halifax alone. Mitic, Pier 21, 120. By the early 1970s, more than 75% of immigrants to Canada arrived by air annually. 27 Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 353. 28 Employment and Immigration Canada, Immigration Statistics (Ottawa: Minister of Supply Services, 1992), 3. 29 Library and Archives Canada (LAC), RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 2, File No. 50003-1-238, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, letter from R.J. Curry to Chief, Procedures Section, Immigration, 3 July 1969.

191 Toronto, Montreal-Dorval, and Vancouver, with plans to later expand to other airports.30 Prior to that, four different government agencies – Citizenship and Immigration, Customs, Health, and Agriculture – had screened every incoming passenger, a time- consuming process now rendered inefficient by higher volumes. Under the new system, Customs would now exclusively manage the Primary Inspection by conducting an “initial fact-finding interrogation of a person seeking to come into Canada, to determine the identity, status and admissibility of such person”, and would send anyone it had flagged to Secondary Inspection for additional questioning by one of the four agencies.31 The quest for greater efficiency meant that while some passengers would now move through inspection faster, others would be subjected to more rigorous and sophisticated security screening. However, the new system did not always eliminate processing delays, especially as sustained growth in international air traffic made immigration and customs areas busier. In 1974, immigration officials at Vancouver International Airport noted longer delays in processing people, which they attributed to a 78.2% increase in the number of arrivals over the previous year.32 Staff blamed the additional time they needed to process non-nationals for the slowdown, pointing out that they chose to refer most travellers that had arrived on flights from East Asia for secondary examination, regardless of their nationality. To reduce delays, they proposed selective in-flight examinations of residents and tourists on some international routes, including Hong Kong to Vancouver, leaving

30 These were the three busiest national airports. Officials planned to include Halifax, Gander, Calgary, Edmonton, and Winnipeg international airports in the first phase of expansion. See LAC, RG76, Series B- 1-C, Volume 1034, Part 1, File No. 5003-1-374, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Vancouver International Airport (1967-1975)”, letter from J.C. Best, Assistant Deputy Minister, Operations, to Deputy Minister, Transport, 29 May 1973. 31 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 1034, Part 1, File No. 5003-1-374, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Vancouver International Airport (1967-1975)”, letter from J.C. Best to Deputy Minister, Transport, 29 May 1973. 32 4,317 immigrants had arrived in the first four months of 1973, a number that climbed to 7,691 over the same period the next year. LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 1034, Part 1, File Number 5003-1-374, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Vancouver International Airport (1967-1975)”, letter from R.J. Curry, Associate Director, Operations, to T.B. Sheehan, Associate Director General, Home Branch, 23 May 1974.

192 only immigrants to be screened upon arrival.33 While never actually adopted, this proposal suggested that government actors imagined immigrants as riskier travellers. Immigration and customs screening also faced challenges if international flights arrived at times when airport operational resources were reduced. This mainly occurred late at night. In 1975, for example, Toronto had flights arrive at Terminal I between midnight and 7:00am on 155 nights that year, as well as at Terminal II on 133 nights, in spite of the fact that the time window was normally quiet for arrivals. Accordingly, shift supervisors complained that adapting to these conditions was impossible because delays were often impossible to predict, leading to a situation where “these post-curfew arrivals necessitated many hours of costly overtime.”34 Daytime staff shortages, however, could also sometimes occur. One traveller observed this problem at Montreal-Mirabel in 1976: We encountered conditions worse than any we had experienced on our trip. We stood in line for one hour by the clock before we were cleared. The problem appeared to be one of insufficient customs/immigration officers. There are numerous ‘positions’ but, in spite of the fact that international flights were arriving at frequent intervals, very few of them were manned and the available officers were quite unable to deal expeditiously with the large number of people. There was no crowd control so that some lines had three and four abreast with others barging in.35

The simultaneous arrival of multiple international flights compounded delays. This happened with greater regularity in the 1970s once airlines began using the wide- bodied jumbo jets, with most basic configurations at the time capable of carrying over 400 passengers.36 Their impact led one officer to remark in 1973 that “[now] the airport can only be a sieve at best…The volume of traffic is just too great…The days when you can have tighter border controls went out when jumbo jets came in.”37 As the busiest

33 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 1034, Part 1, File Number 5003-1-374, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Vancouver International Airport (1967-1975)”, letter from R.J. Curry, Associate Director, Operations, to T.B. Sheehan, Associate Director General, Home Branch, 23 May 1974. 34 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 4, File Number 50003-1-238, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, memo from F.E.A. Ewald, Director, Immigration, Ontario Region, to Senior Assistant Deputy Minister, Immigration, 30 March 1976. 35 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 1036, File Number 5003-1-484, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Montreal International Airport, Mirabel, Ste. Scholastique Que (19/10/72 – 06/08/76)”, letter from Launder Brunton to Otto Lang, Minister of Transport, 22 March 1976. 36 For example, the Boeing 747-100, introduced into commercial service in 1970, could carry upwards of 400 passengers depending on the seating configuration. 37 “Tougher immigration laws are having an effect,” Globe and Mail, 28 December 1973, 3.

193 national airport by the 1970s, Toronto especially felt the jumbo jet’s arrival, frequently experiencing significant backlog in its immigration and customs areas. D.P. Hall, the Ministry of Transport’s District Manager, noted that at Toronto “our biggest problem at the present rests with the bunching of flights in Terminal One, which occasionally drives the passenger load 50% beyond current handling capacity at P.I.L. [Primary Inspection Line] with consequential effects in the immigration secondary areas…it mystifies me why any airline would want to unload its passengers into a mob.”38 Staff on these shifts made the same assessment. In July 1976, after immigration officials at Toronto had worked overtime through the night to process late arrivals from international flights, A.H.E. Fiebig, staff superintendent at Toronto, called immigration and customs at the airport a “madhouse”, declaring that “if I could duplicate myself I gladly would” to eliminate the long lines.39 Unsurprisingly, immigration and customs staff soon questioned whether the federal government had appointed enough workers. In 1975, they became particularly agitated after learning that the Trudeau government was considering reducing by half the number of immigration officers at Toronto as part of its austerity program.40 Contending that staff levels were already dangerously low, Richard Griffith, president of the union local representing immigration officers at the airport, called the proposed cuts “insane” and predicated longer delays and weaker passenger screening: “If the government persists in this [proposed cutbacks], we will have to resort to work-to-rule – flights will be held up for many hours for immigration clearance – schedules will be a mess.”41 Griffith also suggested that the number of illegal immigrants in Toronto would rise exponentially if cuts went forward, a claim that sought to arouse national public opinion and stoke fears about the economic and social repercussions of more undocumented migrants living in

38 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 4, File Number 50003-1-238, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, letter from D.P. Hall, Director Administrator, Mississauga, to Director, Facilitation, Enforcement, and Control, 14 May 1976. 39 “Airport ‘madhouse’, staff stays late,” Toronto Star, 26 July 1976, C1. 40 The government’s austerity measures belied the fact that Canada’s rates of growth in the 1970s were strong, averaging 4.2 percent a year between 1973 and 1979. Jonathan Swarts, Constructing Neoliberalism: Economic Transformation in Anglo-American Democracies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 72. 41 “‘Cut back plan for immigration watchdog force’,” Toronto Sun, 12 November 1975, 4.

194 the Greater Toronto Area.42 While Griffith was most obviously preoccupied with protecting union jobs, others within government circles echoed some of his concerns. One memo circulating internally in the Department of Transport suggested multiple consequences from airport staff cuts, including “substantially reduced enforcement activity”, “substantial delays for the travelling public”, a drop in the number of secondary referrals, and rise in union militancy.43 This was borne out by officials’ private assertions that the inspection system worked much less effectively at especially busy times since “there is a tendency for officers to examine less thoroughly at peak workload periods so as not to inconvenience passengers.”44 Although the federal Treasury Board decided against cutting jobs, many of the imagined worse case scenarios from job losses were realized over time anyway. One night in May 1976 at Toronto’s Terminal I, which primarily handled international flights, illustrated the complex challenges that congestion posed for the federal screening program. Eight international flights, at least five of which were Boeing 747s at capacity, landed at the airport and disembarked at terminal gates between 4:30pm and 8:30pm. On hand to process them was one supervisor, eight immigration officers, one escort officer, and one person solely responsible for primary inspection, but they quickly succumbed to the high volume in the immigration and customs area and by the end “had almost lost control of the situation.”45 Processing delays soon emerged after the first three flights landed around 4:30pm and many international travellers were referred for secondary inspection. These included 40 Portuguese nationals from Lisbon, whose additional screenings were delayed because they required an interpreter, as well as 60 others across

42 “Watchdog cuts ‘insane’: 200,000 illegal residents in Metro?” Toronto Sun, 13 November 1975, 12. See also Daiva K. Stasilius, “Minority resistance in the local state: Toronto in the 1970s and 1980s,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 12 (1), 63-83. 43 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 4, File Number 50003-1-238, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, memo from D.P. Hall to Director, Immigration, 23 October 1975. 44 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 4, File Number 50003-1-238, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, memo from F.E.A. Ewald, Director, Immigration, Ontario Region, to Senior Assistant Deputy Minister, Immigration, 30 March 1976. 45 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 4, File Number 50003-1-238, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, memo from Director, Facilitation and Control, to Director General, Facilitation, Enforcement, and Control, 25 May 1976.

195 the three flights.46 Matters worsened after the next five flights arrived in the early evening. A federal report of that night described the traveller line-ups at the primary inspection point as “like a flash flood of people…pouring over into our limited immigration facilities, nowhere to stand, nowhere to sit, and hardly anywhere to be examined in anything like a proper fashion.” As a solution, three officers who had been handling secondary examination were dispatched to wave arrivals through without question “just to get rid of the people in any order if only to breathe again and regain a measure of control and sanity.” Meanwhile, in the secondary inspection zone, nine of the 40 Portuguese had to wait more than four hours and appeared “on the verge of rioting” before their cases were deferred until the next morning, while a drunken, loud-mouthed Scotsman also proved to be a handful for staff. In a sign of the general disorganization that now prevailed, the staff supervisor even assigned the interpreters to manage the crowds before sending them home for the night after they were unsuccessful.47 As this account suggested, immigration and customs staff were conscious of the impact of these lengthy wait times on the public. R.E. Mulgrue, Officer-in-Charge at Toronto and author of the report about Terminal I’s nightmare evening, observed that “for the genuine visitor it is a very poor first glimpse of Canada and one not calculated to give much confidence in our ability to organize.”48 Mulgrue also concluded that airport screening areas simply were not built to withstand massive crowds: Envision if you can hundreds and hundreds of people packed wall to wall in a hot confined area; the noise, the smell, children crying, expectant mothers, old people, sick people, drunks, and loud mouths all tired, anxious and impatient after long flights …The waiting appears to be interminable just to reach the hot sweating PIL [Primary Inspection Line] officer vainly trying to conduct an adequate examination, then after all that to be referred by him along with another couple of

46 An immigration officer examined some of the Portuguese relatively quickly, but a dozen or so ultimately endured long waits because of the sheer number of referrals and the demand for interpreters, who were forced to scramble from one case to another. The staff superintendent, who spoke halting German, was even pressed into service as a substitute interpreter to process one referral from a Lufthansa flight. See LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 4, File Number 50003-1-238, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, letter from R.E. Mulgrue, Officer-in-Charge, to D.P. Hall, District Administrator, Mississauga District, 11 May 1976. 47 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 4, File Number 50003-1-238, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, letter from R.E. Mulgrue, Officer-in-Charge, to D.P. Hall, District Administrator, Mississauga District, 11 May 1976. 48 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 4, File Number 50003-1-238, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, letter from R.E. Mulgrue, Officer-in-Charge, to D.P. Hall, District Administrator, Mississauga District, 11 May 1976.

196 hundred other unfortunate people to the limited examination area of immigration, to stand packed shoulder to shoulder for yet another examination. It is no wonder there was anger, frustration and dismay.49

At the same time, he characterized staff as the victims of a working environment where conditions had become so poor that “employees of any commercial enterprise faced with the same insane situation would have walked off the job long ago.”50 Like their brethren in air traffic control, immigration and customs workers had begun to show signs of alienation from a changing workplace now being modernized for mass aeromobility. Mulgrue’s final observation, however, was perhaps his most significant in acknowledging that international airports like Toronto – particularly their immigration and customs areas – were now border zones that had to be staffed adequately to keep up with swelling immigrant streams. If evenings like the one in Terminal I became commonplace, he argued, unwanted travellers would be admitted en masse and the nation’s border security would be undermined: “fortunate indeed is the terrorist, smuggler, crook, or undesirable who chooses to come at times such as this because he or she is almost guaranteed to gain entry to Canada with little or no problem other than simple delay due to the monstrous crowds.”51 This statement implied that while worsening airport congestion from rising traffic volume was certainly not ideal, it had now become a matter of national interest as international travellers, particularly immigrants and other non-nationals from far-flung and non-traditional places, began to make up a greater percentage of arrivals. In other words, the rise of mass global air travel significantly raised the stakes around the federal government’s screening program at the nation’s busiest airports, a process that gradually linked the examination of immigrants and other non-nationals in airports to larger questions of nation, race, and mobility in the late twentieth century.

49 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 4, File Number 50003-1-238, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, letter from R.E. Mulgrue, Officer-in-Charge, to D.P. Hall, District Administrator, Mississauga District, 11 May 1976. 50 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 4, File Number 50003-1-238, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, letter from R.E. Mulgrue, Officer-in-Charge, to D.P. Hall, District Administrator, Mississauga District, 11 May 1976. 51 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 4, File Number 50003-1-238, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, letter from R.E. Mulgrue, Officer-in-Charge, to D.P. Hall, District Administrator, Mississauga District, 11 May 1976.

197 Mass Aeromobility and Postwar Immigration Major Canadian airports became national ports of entry and active border security zones not only because of air travel’s global expansion, but also because of postwar national immigration reform. By the end of the 1960s, the federal government had radically revised national immigration policy, removing older racist language in the Immigration Act and broadening selection criteria. Until that time, federal policies had actively discriminated against non-white, non-European persons, reflecting a preference for immigrants who were more aligned with the dominant social fabric of Canada.52 Moves towards liberalizing Canadian immigration standards had first been made in the early 1960s, ultimately resulting in the release of the Sedgwick Report in 1964, the creation of an internal immigration memo in 1966, and the appointment of a Royal Commission on Security in 1966 that completed its hearings three years later.53 In 1967, the Pearson government dramatically revamped immigration policy, introducing a point system that assessed the merit of individual claimants based on a series of categories and omitted any mention of race or racial discrimination in the selection process.54 The point system and official elimination of racist policies effectively expanded the pool of eligible immigrants beyond Europe to Asia, Africa, South America, and the Middle East.55 Immigration to Canada from these regions sharply increased following the 1967 reforms; for example, the proportion of Asian and Caribbean immigrants annually climbed from 10% in 1965-66 to 23% in 1969-70.56 At the same time, these changes precipitously reduced the proportion of immigration from Europe. In 1962, 78% of immigrants admitted that year were of European origin, a number that dropped to 38% in 1976 and 24% in 1984. During that same period, immigrants from Britain, traditionally one of the largest source countries, declined from 28% to 16% annually. 57 While the federal government removed explicit references to racial discrimination from the

52 See Reginald Whitaker, Double Standard: The Secret History of Canadian Immigration Policy (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1987); Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic; Franca Iacovetta, Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2006). 53 Whitaker, Double Standard, 219-221. 54 Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 360-63. 55 These areas formed much of the global south, defined as parts of the world that have been plagued by overpopulation, underdevelopment, and large-scale poverty from colonial rule. See Manfred Steger, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1-32. 56 Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 354. 57 Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 354.

198 Immigration Act, the greater emphasis placed on skills and education and the scant number of visa offices overseas ultimately dissuaded or disqualified many migrants in the global south from even applying.58 Although the reforms still severely limited the eligibility of many people from the global south, they nonetheless recast Canadian citizenship in a more inclusive direction and made it more obtainable for a larger pool of people from non-traditional source countries. By itself, postwar immigration reform did little to reshape how government officials regulated airports because federal policy had traditionally focused on selecting and screening immigrants abroad. However, the Pearson government introduced a separate set of changes to immigration policy that infused the screening of arrivals with the racialized politics of citizenship and helped to transform Canada’s international airports into contested ports of entry. As part of its broader set of immigration reforms, the Pearson government enacted two new rules: one that allowed people to apply for landed immigrant status within Canada; and then that allowed appeals to the Immigration Appeal Board without removal prior to a hearing.59 This change transferred immigration matters to airports and exacerbated international traffic volumes, placing additional stress on the government’s already overburdened border security infrastructure. On a broader level, it also illustrated how mass aeromobility, by reconfiguring the practice of transoceanic and transatlantic migration, could influence immigration law and policy. The new rules remade Canada’s international airports into national ports of entry and into bordered environments where citizenship politics shaped exchanges between officials and travellers. It also dramatically worsened congestion by offering people a means of circumventing traditional immigration procedures, bringing planeloads of travellers who were eager to avoid filing a claim at a Canadian embassy abroad. Delays quickly grew because airport and immigration officials could not process the claims, and the appeals, quickly enough.60 Consequently, by the end of June 1972, the Immigration Appeal Board faced a backlog of 13,000 cases, which officials expected would take years

58 Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 357. 59 This was known as a landed claim, a term that I will employ where applicable to describe the process. See Howard Adelman, “Canadian Refugee Policy in the Postwar Period,” in Howard Adelman, ed., Refugee Policy: Canada and the United States (Staten Island, N.Y.: Center for Migration Studies of New York, 1991), 199. 60 Landed claimants whose claims were rejected had the right to stay in Canada and file an appeal under the new law. See Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 372-73.

199 to process.61 Applicant numbers continued to increase through the rest of the year, with thousands more coming in October alone. In a fourteen-hour period spanning October 22 and 23, officials at Toronto conducted 662 secondary examinations of people who had filed landed immigration claims, which required tripling the number of examining officers from 10 to 30 and bringing in an extra 12 interpreters and six support staff. Believing the volume at the airport had reached crisis levels, J.C. Best, Assistant Deputy Minister of Operations in the Department of Transport, declared: “our inspection staff at Toronto International Airport have been subjected to great pressure in recent weeks culminating in an all-out effort to bring some measure of control over a situation that has been rapidly deteriorating.”62 Government officials and much of the public saw the issue in terms of failing border security and rising illegal immigration. Their concerns were driven by a discomfort – not always consciously expressed – that the landed immigration process had unsettled the nation’s traditional emphasis on controlling mobile populations at borders. These feelings led some to associate the actions of landed immigrant applicants with illegal practices that threatened national sovereignty and border security. Joseph Sedgwick, whom the federal government had appointed in the 1960s to assess Canada’s deportation procedures, blamed landed immigrant appeals for undercutting the integrity of the national immigration system.63 It was, in his opinion, “breaking down because of wholesale evasion. It is apparently becoming common knowledge that it is easy for almost anyone to enter Canada as a non-immigrant”. Sedgwick also accused many landed claimants of duplicity at the airport: “they say that they intend only a limited stay here in order to avoid being subject to examination as immigrants at their point of origin: they have no intention of leaving Canada unless they are compelled to go.”64

61 “Selected immigration amnesty designed to end backlog by ’74,” Globe and Mail, 23 June 1972, 1. 62 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 2, File No. 50003-1-238, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, memo from J.C. Best, Assistant Deputy Minister, Operations, 25 October 1972. 63 In June 1964, the Pearson government asked Sedgwick to investigate allegations “that certain aliens have been unlawfully detained and deprived of access to counsel”. His subsequent findings were released the following year. See Joseph Sedgwick, The Sedgwick Report, two parts (Ottawa: Department of Citizenship and Immigration, 1965-66). 64 “Editorial: Not corn but common sense,” Globe and Mail, 6 May 1972, 6.

200 National media also began to suggest that landed immigration claims emboldened unscreened non-nationals to move on their own terms and invited widespread abuse that ultimately weakened border security. The Toronto Star portrayed the situation as a national crisis: “Canada’s borders are like a collapsed seawall over which flows flotsam and jetsam from all over the world…Visitors are pouring through Toronto International Airport at an unprecedented rate.” It also explicitly criticized the fact that these applicants had not been screened abroad and singled out mass aeromobility for principal blame: “why should those immigrants who can afford to fly here on a gamble get special appeals when their compatriots who apply at the Canadian embassy get no recourse from rejection except to apply again later?...Canada is the only country that lets visitors jump the immigration queue.”65 In 1972, the Trudeau government ended the landed immigration option, offering amnesty to people still in the lengthy application queue.66 Public fears about illegal immigration and failing border security fuelled this decision, particularly as more accusations were levelled against “visitors”, who were mainly applicants from the global south, for submitting false claims at airports in order to stay in Canada while their cases were being reviewed.67 Beginning in the early 1970s, staff at several Canadian airports had begun targeting ‘tourist’ flights – particularly from the Caribbean and South America – for extra screening because they allegedly contained scores of people planning to apply for landed immigrant status.68 In September 1971, officials referred every single person arriving on a ‘tourist’ flight from Kingston, Jamaica for secondary examination. Although the shift supervisors cautioned against repeating this practice, they did admit that “there are certain problem countries from an immigration stand-point, and that a higher proportion of the visitors from those countries should be directed for Secondary

65 “Federal immigration fiasco: Canada’s integrity is being violated,” Toronto Star, 24 October 1972, 6. 66 The government passed an order-in-council suspending the right to apply for landed immigration status and later amended the Immigration Appeal Board Act to prevent rejected landed immigrant applicants from appealing a deportation order. The amnesty gave people still in the queue awaiting appeal hearings a chance to reapply for landed immigrant status under more relaxed standards within sixty days. See Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 373; Adelman, “Canadian Refugee Policy in the Postwar Period,” 199. 67 This led Immigration and Manpower Minister Robert Andras to claim in 1973 that some airport arrivals questioned by immigration officials were most interested in finding out where they could appeal to stay in Canada. “‘Crisis’ caused arbitrary cutoff of immigration flow, Andras concedes,” Globe and Mail, 6 April 1973, 8. 68 “Crackdown ordered at airport,” Globe and Mail, 21 October 1972, 1.

201 Immigration examination. Generally, the countries concerned are the developing nations of the world.”69 A high-level official in the immigration bureaucracy agreed that individual travellers should be defined to some extent by the actions of others with the same national origin: “One must bear in mind that all officers are aware of the nationalities that are causing the problem in this country because of their past history of misrepresentation and it is only reasonable to expect that this failing will be borne in mind when they are being examined as to their right to be admitted.”70 These admissions underlined the fact that jet age airports were often spaces of whiteness. How federal officials screened non-national travellers, especially from areas of the global south, reflected longstanding racialized logics of cultural difference. At the same time, however, liberal immigration reform in 1967 as well as the institution of official multiculturalism nationwide in 1969 had formally discredited and de- institutionalized the practice of racial discrimination, placing the actions of front-line border staff in tension with the rhetoric of inclusivity that was especially prevalent in the Trudeau era.71 In 1973, Canadian publication Currents criticized the vestiges of racism in the immigration bureaucracy and suggested that the elimination of overt references to race in national immigration policy was simply window dressing: We wonder why it is that the rules of the immigration game is going to be changed only after the growing influx of Black peoples from the Caribbean, African and Asian countries has started…the setting up of policy is one thing but the carrying out of the policy is quite another. For instance, it is no use talking about relaxing immigration laws…while allowing immigration officers to act arbitrarily against some unfortunate people…despite changes in immigration regulations, the high handed, overbearing, bigoted attitude of some immigration officers is making life difficult for many people.72

Accusations of race-based border screening continued to dog immigration officials through the 1970s and 1980s, even after in-land applications became illegal.

69 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 2, File No. 50003-1-238, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, letter from Officer-in-Charge, Canada Immigration Centre, to Gordon Watts, Coordinator of Inspectional Services, 1 October 1971. 70 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 2, File No. 50003-1-238, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, letter from P.M. Murray, Associate Director of Immigration Operations, Ottawa Region, to Director of Operations, Immigration, 30 March 1972. 71 On Trudeau and multiculturalism, see Richard J.F. Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). 72 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 2, File No. 50003-1-238, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, clipping from Currents, 21 September 1973.

202 Complaints about border inspection were far from new, but they became more publicly linked to race in this period.73 In 1979, the Canadian Human Rights Commission received 120 complaints alleging racial discrimination by immigration officers at Toronto, Montreal-Dorval, and Vancouver airports. The Commission claimed the number might have been higher if people were aware that a formal complaint mechanism existed and believed it would be effective. These numbers prompted the federal government to commence a study of staff behaviour at airports, which recommended a new complaint procedure that would see complaint officers stationed at airports to report any incidents of possible harassment, a practice that was never formally introduced.74 Nevertheless, federal officials did make an effort to end racist practices, recognizing that they ran counter to official doctrine. In 1973, the Ministry of Transport dispatched training staff to Toronto and Montreal-Dorval airports to “guide the staff in the practical application of the ideas being emphasized to them”, which involved addressing and eliminating “obviously unacceptable present practices such as, automatically designating nationals from certain countries as requiring secondary examination.”75 At the same time, however, ministry bureaucrats claimed that racialized attitudes were anomalous rather than entrenched, pointing to the fact that immigration officers, on the whole, were young and well-educated and part of a “new breed” that had been raised on greater respect and tolerance for socio-cultural difference.76 Toronto reflected these changes to some extent. Of the 83 staff employed at Toronto’s two terminals as of 1973, the average age was 29, with 68 between 20 and 30 years old. 72.3% were university graduates, 35% were bilingual, and almost 20% were able to speak three or more languages.77 The notion that younger and better educated people held progressive views, however, was flawed, especially since the ministry failed to present any evidence that older officers without a university degree were more racist.

73 Klug, “The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the Making of a Border-Crossing Culture on the U.S.-Canada Border, 1891-1941,” 404-411. 74 “Plan for on-site officers welcomed,” Globe and Mail, 21 September 1979, 1-2. 75 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 2, File No. 50003-1-238, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, memo from A.E. Gotlieb, Deputy Minister of Immigration, 7 November 1973. 76 “Deciding who’s ‘right’ for Canada,” Globe and Mail, 13 August 1975, 4. 77 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 2, File No. 50003-1-238, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, memo from J.E. McKenna, Director General, Home Services Branch, 21 November 1973.

203 Officers themselves also tried to downplay public impressions that racialized screening of air travellers was endemic. Some disavowed any evidence of it at airports, failing to grasp that racial thinking was an institutionalized but sometimes invisible practice that could unconsciously inform decision-making processes.78 One particularly defensive person asked, “what are we supposed to do, dye our skin to prove we’re not racists?”79 Others followed the official line by suggesting that racism at airports was not absent but far from widespread. “You’d have to be naïve to say there are no racists in the Immigration Department”, claimed one, “but you’d have to be doubly naïve to believe there are many. There’s too much of a weeding-out process.”80 In some cases, the ministry’s statistics reinforced this argument. In 1974, 109,677 foreign nationals arrived at Toronto; of that total, officers referred 4,864, or less than 4%, for secondary exams, from which 1,879 voluntarily left and another 1,650 deported following an inquiry.81 That same year, officers also claimed that they rejected only 2% of the total number of secondary referrals at national airports.82 These numbers appeared acceptably low, but they failed to account for the travellers who might have been subjected to racial harassment but still been admitted after all. Some airport staff, however, defended racialized screening as a by-product of a stressful and highly charged workplace. They argued that profiling was something one learned to do on the job as an effective measure for processing long lines in the immigration and customs area. Moreover, they denied that profiling was racist, claiming that it enabled them to distinguish truth from fiction and rapidly sort bodies in an environment where they were overworked, understaffed, and continually under pressure.83 One immigration officer declared: Sure, prejudice could influence our decision, but we’re told to be impartial and objective…There are certain attitudes you have towards certain types of people, though. You ask a West Indian girl…Does she have children? You wouldn’t

78 This phenomenon has often manifested in legal cases. See Constance Backhouse, Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 79 “Immigration criticism,” Globe and Mail, 23 June 1979, 2. 80 “Deciding who’s ‘right’ for Canada,” Globe and Mail, 13 August 1975, 4. 81 “Some call it ‘doing my job,’ some call it discrimination,” Globe and Mail, 31 July 1975, 4. 82 “Deciding who’s ‘right’ for Canada,” Globe and Mail, 13 August 1975, 4. 83 Border officers had long relied on profiling and individual judgements to process people quickly. See Klug, “The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the Making of a Border-Crossing Culture on the U.S.-Canada Border, 1891-1941,” 403.

204 automatically ask an unmarried English girl if she has children. I suppose that’s a type of racism.84

Another concurred: “you do become suspicious of certain kinds of people because you keep hearing the same ones over and over again. You can’t help working by stereotypes a bit, because the stereotypes are there, every night.”85 Other officers, meanwhile, rationalized racial profiling as a natural instrument of sovereign power and a defense of national citizenship against non-nationals who represented risky travellers because they might be entering the country illegally. One officer at Toronto declared: “your basic job here is to detect people who are lying to you about their reasons for coming to Canada. You are looking mainly for people you think are not genuine tourists or visitors but who want to settle in Canada.”86 However, images of the risky and illegal traveller were themselves racialized since people from non- traditional places, especially in the global south, were disproportionately singled out as unfit for entry.87 One officer confirmed this practice: “most of them [travellers] will be non-white; so most of the people you ‘knock off’ (stop at the point of entry) are going to be non-whites from poor countries. It can’t be any other way under the Immigration Act.”88 Public comments about illegal immigration, too, connected illegality to race and unsanctioned mobility. In 1974, M. Mulcahy from Hamilton evoked the spectre of rampant abuse from Asia as a palpable threat to national citizenship and borders:

Who has the audacity to suggest that Canadian immigration officers need a course in human relations in dealing with visitors from Asiatic countries when it is an established fact that these visitors continue to make deliberate efforts to enter the country illegally and under every false premise possible?...Legal immigrants perhaps should be given free counsel if their motives are found to be questionable – but no other.89

At the same time, airports were also spaces of class privilege. Racialized screening could benefit other non-national travellers whom officers did not cast as illegal

84 “Some call it ‘doing my job,’ some call it discrimination,” Globe and Mail, 31 July 1975, 4. 85 “Deciding who’s ‘right’ for Canada,” Globe and Mail, 13 August 1975, 4. 86 “Deciding who’s ‘right’ for Canada,” Globe and Mail, 13 August 1975, 4. 87 Simone Browne, “Getting Carded: Border Control and the Politics of Canada’s Permanent Resident Card,” Citizenship Studies 9, 4 (September 2005), 423-438. 88 “Deciding who’s ‘right’ for Canada,” Globe and Mail, 13 August 1975, 4. 89 “Letter to the editor: Immigration,” Globe and Mail, 3 April 1974, 7.

205 migrants or risky entrants, rendering some people more mobile than others at international airports. This was particularly true for the global business class, known as the “kinetic elite”, who possessed enormous political and economic power worldwide in the late twentieth century and because of it received the privilege of smooth movement across borders as well as de facto recognition as global citizens.90 These global kinetic elite regularly moved easily through Canadian airport immigration and customs checks, but a particularly instructive example is a time when one did not. In 1973, CP Air lodged a complaint against immigration officials in Vancouver for questioning “legitimate” businessmen arriving from Latin America.91 The airline raised concerns about a lengthy immigration and customs examination of Peter Dowding, who worked in and represented a company based out of Argentina, following a flight from Buenos Aires. According to the Department of Immigration’s report of the incident, Dowding mistakenly tried to enter the country without a proper employment visa and then verbally abused officers for delaying his secondary examination by 15 minutes because they had other cases that day.92 The report said that Dowding had a “condescending and hostile attitude” during the exam and was reluctant to answer questions. Dowding was admitted following the exam, but was left with border rage because officers had questioned his global privilege and failed to admit him immediately in spite of his own foul-up: “I would much rather have applied for a visa before going to Canada, and been admitted immediately, then suffer the humiliation that I did at Vancouver Airport.”93 Some Canadians shared Dowding’s implicit belief that border screening should favour global privilege and separate low-risk travellers from risky immigrants and other

90 On the kinetic elite, see Jana Costas, “Problematizing Mobility: A Metaphor of Stickiness, Non-Places and the Kinetic Elite,” Organization Studies 34, 10 (October 2013), 1467-1485. On the impact that global mobility has on citizenship practices, see also Kim Rygiel, Globalizing Citizenship (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 1-12. 91 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 1034, Part 1, File Number 5003-1-374, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Vancouver International Airport (1967-1975)”, letter from E.W. Galbraith, Facilitation Manager, CP Air, to H.J. Johnson, Operations Officer, Manpower and Immigration, 2 April 1973. 92 Visa rules stipulated that it was the traveller’s responsibility to verify procedures with the nearest Canadian embassy before departing for Canada. 93 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 1034, Part 1, File Number 5003-1-374, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Vancouver International Airport (1967-1975)”, letter from R.J. Curry, International Airport Specialist, to E.W. Galbraith, Facilitation Manager, CP Air, 22 May 1973.

206 non-nationals. Arthur Earle of Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario made a clear case for such a distinction in a letter to the Globe: Perhaps the most absurd aspect of the Toronto [immigration and customs] system is to throw all passengers…into the same clearance halls. The result of this is that the poor businessman returning from a visit of a few hours to Detroit or Chicago finds himself standing behind lines of returning holiday makers and immigrants who present much more complex immigration and customs problems than he does. Surely they could separate the US traffic, which 90 percent of the time is made up of a quite different traveller.94

Others, meanwhile, linked mobility to citizenship by suggesting that Canadians should be exempt from immigration and customs screening altogether because they had a legal right to re-enter the country and posed no risk at the border. “I am frequently asked what was the purpose of my trip”, decried J.H. Govan of Pickering, Ontario. “It is none of the government’s business for what reason I leave the country and return if I am a Canadian citizen. If I were a foreigner coming into the country the question would be valid. But for a Canadian coming home it is senseless.”95 On the one hand, comments like these highlighted a sense of entitlement and an expectation that the border crossing should be smooth. At the same time, they endorsed a border security policy that policed risk according to specific notions of citizenship, which only served to reinforce the dominant value system that had come to govern the state-sponsored screening of non-nationals at international airports. As a result, in these environments connections between race, mobility, and nation became more evident at national entry points that had simultaneously become thicker and thinner because of mass aeromobility and postwar immigration reform.

Mass Aeromobility and Global Refugees During the 1970s and 1980s, Canada became a major destination for the global refugee population, receiving thousands of asylum claims annually from people who were primarily escaping wars of decolonization in the global south. Some of these claims occurred abroad, but arriving air travellers initiated many more in the immigration and customs areas at the nation’s international airports. The appearance of asylum seekers at

94 “Fliers’ protests pile up over customs practices,” Globe and Mail, 13 November 1982, T7. 95 “Customs, immigration rankle frequent fliers,” Globe and Mail, 6 November 1982, T6.

207 airports amplified national preoccupations with border security and illegal migration. Matters of citizenship returned to airports on a much larger, more politicized, and racialized scale than during the landed immigration experiment of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the process, it also illustrated the developing tensions between mass aeromobility and national sovereignty as refugee claimants from around the world travelled on their own terms into Canada and challenged the state’s monopoly over the means of movement in the process. Alongside progressive immigration reform in the 1960s, the rise in asylum claims in the 1970s and 1980s constituted the second radical postwar historical development that brought the global south and worldwide mobility into sustained conversation with themes of citizenship, national sovereignty, and border security at Canada’s international airports. Following the Second World War, which saw millions of people in Europe displaced from their homes during the conflict, the United Nations led an international campaign to recognize and protect the human rights of refugees.96 In 1951, it passed the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, known as the Geneva Convention, obligating signees to assume responsibility for admitting refugees as legal citizens under international law. The Convention explicitly defined a refugee as someone who could establish a reasonable fear of persecution in their homeland, and also outlined the legal protections that they would be accorded as legitimate claimants, rights that could not be surmounted by the laws of a particular state.97 According to the law, refugees could claim asylum at a national embassy or national port of entry. By the 1960s, refuges mainly originated in the global south, particularly Asia and Africa, where political and ethnic violence of decolonization helped produce a refugee crisis of global proportions. Millions were forced to go into hiding to avoid persecution after being labelled dissidents by native elites that had ascended to power, oftentimes through civil war. By 1970, the global refugee population numbered 2.5 million.98 Subsequent decades brought more displacement as political crises and civil unrest intensified across the global south; there

96 Alexander Betts, Gil Loescher and James Milner, UNHCR: The Politics and Practice of Refugee Protection (New York: Routledge, 2012). 97 For an overview, see James C. Simeon, ed., The UNHCR and the Supervision of International Refugee Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 98 Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 381.

208 were 135 coups and thirty-five different wars across the world in the 1970s alone, and a further twenty-three wars and 140 coups in the 1980s.99 But in the midst of a global refugee epidemic in the postwar era, Canadian officials were conflicted for some time about committing Canada to the UN international effort. On the one hand, Canada did admit a quarter of a million refugees between 1946 and 1962, albeit mostly from Europe, through a combination of labour programs, government selection, and private sponsorship.100 At the same time, however, Canada maintained a highly selective refugee policy well into the 1960s.101 It refrained from signing the Geneva Convention until 1969, favouring an ad-hoc strategy until then because the RCMP and immigration bureaucracy feared that the international obligations outlined in the Convention would hamstring the country’s ability to deport refugees on security grounds.102 Moreover, even after officially becoming a signatory, Canada sometimes still weighed its Convention obligations in relation to other political, ideological, and economic considerations. For example, it was far more generous towards refugees fleeing Communist states, admitting thousands of people from Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s and China and Vietnam in the 1970s.103 Canada did, however, select some refugees escaping political persecution in countries with right-leaning, totalitarian governments, notably several thousand Ugandan Asians expelled by the Idi Amin regime in the early 1970s and an equal number of Chileans fleeing the Pinochet regime.104 In 1976, the Trudeau government committed more substantively to integrate refugees in policy by making them a “designated class” under the Immigration Act, which enabled officials to select refugees on humanitarian grounds within assigned quotas. Looking forward, however, it envisioned a future where Canada would continue to select the vast majority of refugees abroad as it had traditionally done with other

99 Niall Ferguson, “Introduction: Crisis, What Crisis? The 1970s and the Shock of the Global,” in Niall Ferguson, et al., eds., The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 5-6. 100 Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 342. 101 Gerald Dirks has argued that even as Canadian officials were increasingly aware that the majority of global refugees had shifted to non-European countries by the early 1960s, they remained reluctant to actively help resettle them. Dirks, Canada’s Refugee Policy, 225. 102 Whitaker, Double Standard, 53. 103 Whitaker makes this argument the centre of his survey of postwar immigration policy. See Whitaker, Double Standard, introduction, and also Dirks, Canada’s Refugee Policy, 252-58; Adelman, “Canadian Refugee Policy in the Postwar Period,” 193; Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 366-67. 104 Adelman, “Canadian Refugee Policy in the Postwar Period,” 193.

209 immigrant classes. Officials were loath to enshrine the right of refugees to make a claim at entry points because they feared it would become as popular as the short-lived landed immigrant experiment, transforming Canada into a “dumping group” for refugees.105 Like landed immigrant applicants, asylum seekers filing a claim in Canada had the right to appeal a rejected decision at the point of arrival. This multi-step appeals process allowed a hearing first before the Refugee Status Advisory Committee and, as a final step before removal, the Immigration Appeal Board and the Federal Court.106 Once again, federal officials betrayed a real discomfort with the possibility that their historical preference for selecting and screening immigrants abroad would be eroded by international law and mass aeromobility. Through most of the 1970s, however, annual refugee figures remained low and generally comprised of pre-screened individuals overseas. Between 1963 and 1976, refugees made up between 0.5% and 11% of yearly immigration totals, while the number of refugee claims at national ports of entry averaged between just 200 and 400 per year during the 1970s.107 The situation changed considerably, however, by the early 1980s. Part of the reason came from new procedural rules the Trudeau government introduced in 1981 that removed the need for refugee claimants to prove they had been individually persecuted, improving their chances of being approved for permanent residency once in Canada. The government also introduced oral hearings as a pilot project in 1983 and made them mandatory in 1985 following a Supreme Court ruling, delighting advocates who had decried the absence of hearings for refugees as a denial of individual legal rights.108 At the same time, the global refugee population continued to steadily rise, climbing from 2.5 million in 1970 to more than 18 million by the early 1990s.109 As geopolitical pressures intensified in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Central America, and South America, and

105 Adelman, “Canadian Refugee Policy in the Postwar Period,” 200-01. See also Dirks, Canada’s Refugee Policy, 225-258. 106 Adelman, “Canadian Refugee Policy in the Postwar Era,” 202-03. Individuals appealing rejected cases were, however, denied a work permit while their case moved its way through the courts. 107 Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 353, 401. 108 Adelman, “Canadian Refugee Policy in the Postwar Era,” 204-07. In Singh vs. Minister of Employment and Immigration, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the refugee claimants were protected by the Charter and thus entitled to an oral hearing. On non-citizens and the Charter, see Catherine Dauvergne, “How the Charter Has Failed Non-Citizens in Canada: Reviewing Thirty Years of Supreme Court of Canada Jurisprudence,” McGill Law Journal 58, 3 (September 2013), 663-728. 109 Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 381.

210 mass air travel reshaped global transport and international migration patterns b y connecting Canada’s major cities directly to the global south, more refugees began to see transoceanic relocation as a viable option. Consequently, by the early 1980s Canada experienced a huge spike in refugee claims at national entry points, receiving between 3,400 and 5,200 claims annually from 1982 through 1984.110 As the major sites of international air traffic, Toronto, Montreal-Dorval, Montreal- Mirabel, and Vancouver International Airport disproportionately received new refugee claimants.111 At Montreal-Mirabel, 286 people claimed asylum in June 1983 alone, including 75 Sri Lankans, 76 Bangladeshis, and 72 Iranians.112 Montreal-Mirabel continued to handle a large number of refugee claims through the summer, largely from Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, leading one government observer to categorize it as a “trend which threatens the success of the refugee program if it continues.”113 Between May and August 1983, more than 1,250 people claimed refugee status at Mirabel, with more than one-third arriving in August alone. Sri Lankan claims made up more than half the total, comprising over 700 claims altogether and more than 300 during a single eight-day period in August.114 People in the Department of Immigration expected more of the same for the foreseeable future because Air Canada flights from London were fully booked over the next several weeks with “large numbers of Sri Lankan nationals” abroad, many of whom were “presumed to be students in the United Kingdom who wish to take advantage of the situation to gain admission to Canada in the hope of remaining here permanently.”115

110 Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 401. 111 In April 1983, for example, Toronto received applications from 70 Guyanese nationals alone. See LAC, RG76, Series D-7, Volume 1415, File Number 209-1-2, Part 1, file “Mirabel International Airport, Toronto International Airport”, memo from Gaetan Lussier to Lloyd Axworthy, Minister of Employment and Immigration, 11 May 1983. 112 LAC, RG76, Series D-7, Volume 1415, File Number 209-1-2, Part 1, file “Mirabel International Airport, Toronto International Airport”, letter from Gaetan Lussier to Lloyd Axworthy, Minister of Employment and Immigration, 14 July 1983. 113 LAC, RG76, Series D-7, Volume 1415, File Number 209-1-2, Part 1, file “Mirabel International Airport, Toronto International Airport”, memo from Gaetan Lussier to Lloyd Axworthy, Minister of Employment and Immigration, 11 May 1983. 114 LAC, RG76, Series D-7, Volume 1415, File Number 209-1-2, Part 1, file “Mirabel International Airport, Toronto International Airport”, memo from Gaetan Lussier to John Roberts, Minister of Employment and Immigration, 24 August 1983. 115 LAC, RG76, Series D-7, Volume 1415, File Number 209-1-2, part 2, file “Mirabel International Airport, Toronto International Airport”, memo from Gaetan Lussier to John Roberts, Minister of Employment and Immigration, 26 August 1983.

211 Annual refugee claims steadily climbed through the end of the decade, creating a lengthening queue since the immigration bureaucracy and courts could not process case appeals fast enough. 1984 and 1985 saw 7,100 and 8,400 claims respectively, leading one lawyer who handled refugee cases to observe: “I remember the time, not so long ago, when a person claiming refugee status at Pearson International Airport could have an inquiry within one week. Now, refugees have to wait six to seven months.”116 There was also evidence that more people were filing false claims as the queue lengthened. The most notable example of abuse occurred in 1986 when thousands of Portuguese nationals landed at Toronto and requested asylum as persecuted Jehovah’s Witnesses.117 That same year, Canada received 18,280 claims, including 13,000 between July and December, and by the end of 1986 the total case backlog nationally exceeded 23,000 claims, which officials estimated would take more than $50 million and approximately ten years to clear.118 Additionally, more than 10,000 people, mainly from El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Iran, Lebanon, and Turkey, claimed refugee status in the first three months of 1987.119 By June 1987, the annual total had increased to 14,212; of that total, almost four thousand claimants were from El Salvador, and over 1,000 each from Sri Lanka, Brazil, Chile, Iran, and Guatemala, all countries currently experiencing political instability.120 The federal government initially responded to these developments by dispatching operatives to the nation’s international airports to witness and assess the events first- hand. In late August 1983, the Ministry of Transport sent Harry Mueller, an immigration analyst, to Montreal-Mirabel to “personally observe and report on arrivals of refugee claimants”.121 Mueller spent three days there and witnessed more than one hundred asylum claims, all of which came from people arriving from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, and Afghanistan. Generally speaking, Mueller was highly critical of these applicants,

116 Michael Schelew, “A Lawyer’s Perspective on Canadian Refugee Policy”, Refuge 3, 4, (June 1984), 11. 117 “Visa requirement called solution to bogus claims,” Globe and Mail, 9 July 1986, A3. See also Victor Malarek, Haven’s Gate: Canada’s Immigration Fiasco (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1987), 150-62. 118 Malarek, Haven’s Gate, 104. 119 Malarek, Haven’s Gate, 104. 120 Adelman, “Canadian Refugee Policy in the Postwar Period,” 209. 121 LAC, RG76, Series D-7, Volume 1415, File Number 209-1-2, part 2, file “Mirabel International Airport, Toronto International Airport”, letter from R. Hudon, Director, Intelligence Division, to D.P. Hall, Associate Director General, Enforcement Branch, 9 September 1983.

212 characterizing them as illegal travellers who had landed with false or no documents after having been refused asylum elsewhere. He claimed that many had bought fabricated passports abroad without the knowledge of transporting airlines and also received detailed instructions from friends in Canada about how to file a successful asylum claim. As evidence, he offered letters that immigration officials had confiscated from two travellers that recommended applying at Mirabel because immigration and customs was more lenient than elsewhere. In light of these revelations, Mueller expressed sympathy for immigration officers whose caseloads had dramatically increased, suggesting that they had become “numbed” to refugee claims because “they had been exposed to so much of it and have so little time to properly pursue it while examining those individuals…working seven days a week just to try and keep up with case preparation, refugee claims and inquiries.”122 Mueller thus raised the spectre of illegal migration and weakened border controls as manifestations of the global refugee crisis and mass aeromobility. Around the same time, the federal government commissioned Ed Ratushny, Director of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa Law School, to examine Canada’s approach to refugee selection. Ratushny’s report argued that the refugee crisis was a manifestation of globalization’s fundamental challenge to sovereign power over mobility and undermined governmental strategies to differentiate risky from safe travellers. Ratushny spoke out against any policy that encouraged refugees to make claims at international airports and other national ports of entry, arguing that it would only continue to induce large-scale illegal immigration and undercut the nation’s historical preference for off shore selection. “Any argument in favour of a broad and open policy of access to Canada by all those in need of asylum must face the reality that not only those in need of protection from persecution will be attracted,” he wrote. “With ten million refugees in transitional situations throughout the world, any system that confers rights must be insulated from flows of refugees seeking

122 LAC, RG76, Series D-7, Volume 1415, File Number 209-1-2, part 2, file “Mirabel International Airport, Toronto International Airport”, Harry Mueller, “Report on Mirabel, August 27-29, 1983”.

213 only to better their conditions of asylum.”123 Ratushny concluded that more bodies on the move globally required a national counter-response focused on mobility regulation at the border as well as abroad: Canada’s basic objective, then, is to limit direct access to Canada as a place of refuge in order to ensure that asylum is made available to the greatest possible number of those most in need of protection…Our international obligation to refugees must, of course, be fulfilled in tandem with immigration enforcement. Every sovereign state also has an obligation…to maintain the integrity of its borders.124

Border security concerns from the rise in refugee claims also prompted Quebec to directly raise the issue of immigration reform with the federal government. On the one hand, this was an ironic request. Quebec had more power over immigration than any other province as a result of a series of federal-provincial agreements in the 1970s that were designed to recognize its status as a culturally and linguistically distinct province with unique immigration needs. These agreements culminated in Quebec introducing new immigration legislation and a points system that heavily weighted skills and knowledge tied to French language and culture.125 On the other hand, the province was impacted by national immigration policy insofar as it related to refugees because the city’s two international airports were handling a large percentage of the growing number of annual asylum claims nationwide. In 1986, for example, the province admitted as many refugees as it had the previous three years combined.126 Witnessing these developments, Quebec argued that the federal government was obliged to assist its refugees since they did not reflect the province’s own immigration priorities. Said Immigration Minister Louise Robic: “this has nothing to do with Quebec immigration. We’re paying for a federal jurisdiction here. We’re talking about Canadian borders.”127

123 City of Toronto Archives (CTA), General job files of the City of Toronto Planning Department, Series 618, File 630, file “New Refugee Determination Process”, Ed Rathushny, “A New Refugee Determination Process for Canada”, May 1984, 25. 124 CTA, General job files of the City of Toronto Planning Department, Series 618, File 630, file “New Refugee Determination Process”, Ed Rathushny, “A New Refugee Determination Process for Canada”, May 1984, 25, 60. 125 Chris Kostov, “Canada-Quebec Immigration Agreements (1971-1991) and Their Impact on Federalism,” American Review of Canadian Studies 38, 1 (March 2008), 91-103. 126 Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 387. 127 Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 387-88.

214 Robic’s comments were significant not only from the standpoint of Canada- Quebec relations, but also for illustrating how public discourse had begun to differentiate refugees from other immigrant classes. Their legal right to make a claim at international airports and other national ports of entry threatened the usual process of offshore selection. They helped to foster a growing national impression that asylum seekers were engaged in uncontrolled and spontaneous movement through the air that was antithetical to the prevailing immigration selection paradigm. As the 1980s progressed, public concerns about illegal immigration thus focused on aeromobile refugees whose sudden presence at international airports not only symbolized large-scale, global movement outside normative state-sponsored channels, but also fundamentally challenged sovereign power over mobility, borders, and citizenship.

(Non-)Normative Aeromobility: Visas and the Global South During the 1980s, state and public attitudes towards refugees gradually hardened as the number of asylum claims climbed, case delays grew longer, and fears about illegal migration became more alarmist. In response, the Trudeau and Mulroney governments pivoted towards a more conservative and draconian refugee policy that institutionalized differential mobility rights for refugee claimants from much of the global south and made citizenship harder to attain. These measures collectively represented not only a re- expression of sovereign power over the means of movement, but also a pushback against refugee claims at airports and other ports of entry from racialized non-national travellers. In other words, the programs and policies pursued by the federal state during the 1980s reflected a push to transfer the refugee selection process from international airports to traditional off-shore points and re-establish sovereign control of the border. In the first place, the federal government turned more heavily to visas to shrink refugee flows at airports. Visas are state-issued documents that authorize individual travel to a particular country along with a legal passport.128 Canadian officials saw visas as a way to thwart greater numbers of air travellers who they alleged were landing without identity documents after destroying or eating them en route to conceal their nationality

128 Mark Salter, “The global visa regime and the political technologies of the international self: borders, bodies, and biopolitics,” Alternatives 31, 2 (April-June 2006), 167-189.

215 and delay their removal from the country.129 Moreover, the state linked normative aeromobility to visas since people from non-exempt countries had to obtain them before travel. By forcing many legitimate refugee claimants to request visas outside the country to secure legal entry, federal authorities betrayed their discomfort with new global movement patterns that had brought more undesirable people to their national doorstep seeking citizenship and embraced visas as a governance tool to induce a more controlled refugee flow to Canadian airports. During the 1980s the Canadian government progressively stripped different countries of free movement rights that they had previously enjoyed. This was in spite of the fact that Canada had taken steps to open its land border with the United States during the previous decade by waiving the passport requirement for American nationals and by instituting preclearance of US-bound travellers at specific Canadian airports.130 A sudden rise in asylum claims from some countries in the global south usually spurred federal authorities to impose visa restrictions. For example, the Mulroney government stripped Panama of visa-exemption status in 1988 after more than 1,000 Panamanians landed at the nation’s international airports, mainly Montreal-Dorval, in the first nine months of the year.131 Tellingly, by the late 1980s, more than 100 countries – including India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Jamaica, Peru, and Guyana – had lost visa-exempt status, many within the previous fifteen years, while the United States and most of Europe had not.132 These developments illustrated that national authorities had taken steps to smooth the movement of designated safe travellers while increasing surveillance of the mobility of undesirable non-nationals. Panicked by what it perceived as rampant abuse of the refugee system, the Mulroney government went further, introducing more restrictive measures in 1987 that required people travelling from all countries where visas were in effect to also have “transit visas”. The new rules applied to those who stopped for less than 48 hours in

129 LAC, RG76, Series D-7, Volume 1415, File No. 209-1-2, part 2, file “Mirabel International Airport, Toronto International Airport”, memo from Gaetan Lussier to John Roberts, 24 August 1983. 130 Harry Hiller, “Airports as borderlands: American preclearance and transitional spaces in Canada,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 25, 3 (March 2010), 19-36. 131 700 Panamanian refugee claimants landed in August alone. “Panamanians require visas for Canada, Ottawa says,” Globe and Mail, 8 September 1988, A1. 132 Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 403; Adelman, “Canadian Refugee Policy in the Postwar Period,” 208; “Monitoring the ‘illegals’,” Maclean’s, 26 March 1984, 44.

216 Canada or even just landed at a Canadian airport for a fuel stop without getting off the plane. Brian McQuillan, the Ministry of Immigration’s director of case review, justified transit visas as a necessary corrective against the abuse of the nation’s immigration system, declaring that “it will inconvenience people, but if they have nothing to hide they will get a visa.”133 Echoing McQuillan’s words, proponents claimed that visas tightened border security by pre-emptively banning undesirable travellers before they reached the border. In 1987, the Globe and Mail recommended extending visa requirements to almost all countries to curb false refugee claims in Canada: Canada already has visas on 98 countries, but waits for each new turn of the refugee roulette to extend the list. Why not move to a universal visa – with exemptions for the United States, Japan, Australia and most of Western Europe?...Rather than waste manpower resources in belated efforts to send counterfeit claimants home, Ottawa should adopt a timely measure that would keep them from reaching our shores in the first place.134

That same year, a federal government press release about transit visas also endorsed a strong border to police global mobility: “population increases, global strife and reduced immigration opportunities turn more and more people toward Canada…we need a positive immigration program and it cannot be effective if…[it is] subject to unmanaged flows of migrants.”135 Another government official concurred: “refusal overseas makes it possible to delay a decision pending the completion of criminal and other background checks. This allows for better control of persons.” He continued, “it must be stressed that visa requirements simply move the examination process abroad, they are not an attempt to prevent the admission of the many thousands of bona fide visitors and businessman who seek to enter Canada each year.”136 This view explicitly drew connections between mobility and capital and cast largely unregulated movement as a privilege reserved for low-risk travellers concentrated in the global north who were connected to international corridors of wealth and power.

133 “Seeking a sanctuary,” Maclean’s, 19 August 1985, 50. 134 “Editorial: Bye bye Brazil,” Globe and Mail, 18 June 1987, A6. 135 “Ottawa acts to stop torrent of refugees,” Globe and Mail, 20 February 1987, A1-2. 136 LAC, RG76, Series D-7, Volume 1415, File Number 209-1-2, part 2, file “Mirabel International Airport, Toronto International Airport”, memo from Gaetan Lussier to John Roberts, Minister of Employment and Immigration, 16 August 1983.

217 On the other hand, critics, including academics, lawyers, media, and social agencies, saw visas as an expression of deep hostility towards genuine refugees who moved on their own terms. “The government is trying to choose its refugees before they arrive in Canada”, observed Maclean’s.137 The editors of Refuge, a York University-based periodical focused on exploring immigration and refugee issues, were more unequivocal: “Canada distances itself while people fleeing persecution wait in uncertain if not unprotected circumstances. Canada has opted to protect its borders rather than refugees. We urge the government to turn back to compassion.”138 Regarding transit visas, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops foresaw further politico-cultural retrenchment and predicated they would “serve to reinforce a fortress mentality in this country”.139 Immigration lawyer David Matas also expressed concern that Canada had failed to uphold its international legal obligations under the UN Convention: If a visa exemption means that it is the refugee who chooses Canada, rather than Canada’s choosing the refugees, that is the consequence of the UN Convention”, he argued. “Signatories are not free to choose whether or not to protect refugees…It is not the Signatories countries that make a person a refugee by choosing him. It is the person with a well-founded fear of persecution who makes himself a refugee, by choosing to flee his country.140

Opponents also attacked the logic of imposing visas on asylum seekers to deter systemic abuse, pointing out that the government had constructed a false binary between genuine and bogus refugees based on the belief that unsanctioned aeromobility automatically signified criminality. These critics attacked the notion that national identity documents such as passports and visas, which the federal state alone claimed the power to verify as authentic, overwhelmingly shaped one’s access to citizenship. Immigration lawyer Barbara Jackson contended that many refugees travelled with false or no documents because they had no time to obtain real ones: “They can’t get passports and have to leave the country clandestinely. The only way they can travel is on forged passports.”141 The Toronto-based Urban Alliance on Race Relations took a similar line:

137 “Proposals for dealing with ‘illegals’,” Maclean’s, 11 July 1983, 40. 138 C. Michael Lanphier and Howard Adelman, “Editorial: The Trust of the People of Canada,” Refuge 6, 3, (June 1987), 2. 139 Malarek, Haven’s Gate, 120. 140 David Matas, “Canada as a Country of First Asylum,” Refuge 4, 2, (June 1984), 23. 141 “2,600 foreigners landed in 7 months minus right papers,” Globe and Mail, 5 September 1986, A1.

218 “refugees need to come to Canada more quickly than ordinary immigrants.”142 NDP MP Jim Fulton, too, stressed this point: “when they [refugees] arrive at the borders of Canada, at an airport…they have used the last of their resources. Very few refugees have an opportunity to sell their home or their car and casually board a Boeing 747 to fly to Canada.”143 These comments stressed the difficulties many asylum claimants faced in satisfying regulatory requirements and endorsed spontaneous travel as a subversive but practical expression of resistance to state-defined norms. Critical arguments against visas gestured to the racialized boundaries of citizenship and the various challenges people from the global south encountered when trying to obtain safe, legal passage to Canada. This was particularly true in Africa, where the odds of receiving refugee status in Canada were barely better than zero in the 1980s. In 1981, Canada selected only 200 refugees overseas, and no more than 1,000 in any year throughout the 1980s. Additionally, there were only three immigration officers stationed on the entire continent to process claims as of 1989.144 The parameters of citizenship were very much defined by race and place. Opponents thus framed individual decisions to travel without visas or with falsified documents not as evidence of criminality and illegality, but as a subversive response to the governmental monopoly over the means of movement. Others, meanwhile, attacked the Trudeau and Mulroney governments specifically for not exempting refugee claimants from visa policies. Rabbi Gunther Plaut, who was commissioned by the Mulroney government to study the refugee selection process, noted that visas violated the legal right of refugees to freely seek asylum outside their country of origin.145 “Queues exist for immigrants, not for refugees”, he later wrote. “The latter are by definition incapable of standing in line at our consulates and embassies, for they are fleeing for their lives….By definition, refugees do not fit our orderly requirements abroad, for they are victims of disorderly conditions. Immigrants can wait their turn,

142 CTA, Urban Alliance on Race Relations (UARR) fonds, Series 39, File 228, file “Refugee and Immigration Committee, 1989”, UARR Talking Points. 143 Canada, House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 33rd Parliament, 2nd Session, Vol. 5, 12 May 1987, 6035. 144 Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 401. 145 Plaut’s released his report in 1985. See W. Gunther Plaut, Refugee Determination in Canada: a report to the Honourable Flora MacDonald, Minister of Employment and Immigration (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1985).

219 refugees cannot.”146 Plaut sought to clearly distinguish between immigrants and refugees, arguing that the latter constituted displaced persons under international law and deserved a more humane national screening response because they possessed a unique migratory narrative. Equally significant, Plaut also contended that it was a mistake to see visas as a panacea for eliminating abuse and backlog in the system. Rather, he felt the answer lay in reforming the appeals system itself: “We cannot build a Berlin Wall around Canada, and even such a wall would be breached. At best we can make the process speedy enough so that a stay of only six months in Canada will not appear a worthwhile risk to the potential abuser.”147 There were instances where the government contradicted its own logic of using visas. In 1984, immigration officials at Toronto detained Carol Anderson of Jamaica for five days after he landed in Toronto even though he had a three-week visitor visa to stay with his cousin. They alleged that he lacked credibility and refused to admit him, claiming that Anderson could not provide some basic personal details about his cousin. The action incensed Anderson’s lawyer, who questioned the state’s right to violate a policy it held up as sacrosanct: “What’s the sense of issuing visas if people are going to be hassled by immigration when they come here.”148 In this case, visas operated in tension with another federal border enforcement strategy of detaining and deporting suspected illegal travellers that had become more ubiquitous at the nation’s international airports as the refugee case backlog intensified in the 1980s.

Airport Hotels, Detention, and Deportation In the 1980s the Canadian government began to detain and deport more refugee claimants – many from the global south – and other non-nationals from airports. But unlike earlier periods in Canada that saw people, particularly political radicals and surplus labour, targeted mainly for ideological and socio-economic reasons, officials cast many asylum seekers as national risks because they were criminals who had illegally come to Canada

146 Rabbi Gunther Plaut, “Principles and Questions,” Refuge 6, 1 (June 1986), 4. 147 Rabbi Gunther Plaut, “Principles and Questions,” Refuge 6, 1 (June 1986), 4. 148 “Jamaican visitor is locked up despite having a visa,” Toronto Star, 31 March 1984, A3.

220 as bogus refugees.149 Federal authorities used this reasoning to expand enforcement strategies and apply sometimes legally ambiguous methods to suspend the mobility of suspected fake refugee claimants. In the process, they stretched the airport border to off- site locations as a way of imposing sovereign power over undesirable, largely non-white people and withholding from them certain basic rights and freedoms. Detainees and deportees, then, differed from the kinetic elite in experiencing airports not as global non- places of anonymity, transiency, and homogeneity, but as distinct national places of control where the mechanisms of sovereign power could curtail or altogether disavow their identity and rights as part of a broader campaign to regulate racialized mobile populations.150 In many respects, the off-site locations where officials took detainees resembled other spaces, notably detention camps and other holding centres, of absolute state power. These were places where sovereign authorities not only physically isolated individuals from society, but also stripped them of their status as rights-bearing individuals.151 Initially, detention camps and other holding centres represented what Giorgio Agamben has called a state of exception, or a temporary departure from institutionalized policy in response to a perceived threat, but over time they could become permanent and normalized if conditions warranted.152 This left these places, and the people who languished there both part of, and outside of, the national politico-juridical order.153 While not functioning in exactly the same way as detention camps, off-site locations near airports, specifically designated sections of hotels, operated as another type of holding

149 Barbara Roberts, Whence They Came: Deportation from Canada, 1900-1935 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1988); Donald Avery, “Dangerous foreigners”: European immigrant workers and labour radicalism in Canada, 1896-1932 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979). 150 This is not to say that airports cannot be non-places, but that some travellers can form concrete meanings from their experiences there, particularly if the state restricts their freedom of movement. On non-places, see Marc Augé, Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995), 77-103. For other theoretical interpretations of airports, see Mark Salter, “Introduction,” in Salter, ed., Politics at the Airport (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), ix-xiv. 151 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 8-11; Rygiel, Globalizing Citizenship, 84-85, 105-08; Anna Pratt, Securing Borders: Detention and Deportation in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), 25-27, 51. 152 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 153 Elena Bellina and Paola Bonifazio, eds., State of Exception: Cultural Responses to the Rhetoric of Fear (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), ix; Leonard Feldman, “Terminal Exceptions: Law and Sovereignty at the Airport Threshold,” Law, Culture, and the Humanities 3, 2 (June 2007), 320-344.

221 centre where the Canadian government denied and disavowed basic rights and freedoms to asylum claimants and other undesirable non-nationals. The federal government began to detain and deport more arrivals at major national airports, particularly in Toronto and Montreal, as the volume of international traffic climbed in the 1970s. Between 1967 and 1971, the annual number of people deported nationally averaged 11,766, a significant jump from an annual average of around 3,500 over the previous fifteen years, and deportations remained high through the rest of the decade.154 The number of annual detentions, too, also steadily climbed during these years, leading the Trudeau government to gradually revise its detention policy. Until the early 1970s, federal authorities had mainly detained people with outstanding deportation orders and pending appeals hearings who they considered flight risks because they were unlikely to willingly attend their hearing. To hold detainees the government rented out rooms at different hotels near airports on a short-term basis; for example, in the early 1970s people detained at Toronto stayed first at the Cloverleaf Hotel and later the Avion Hotel, and at Montreal-Dorval officials brought detainees to the Airport Hotel.155 At the time, immigration officials stressed that detention was temporary and should not be a commonly used measure since “detention in this context should not be understood as incarceration in jail.”156 In August 1973, however, the immigration bureaucracy began to favour large-scale detentions after 42 of 160 landed immigration claimants skipped their appeals hearing after being released the day before.157

154 Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 354; Pratt, Securing Borders: Detention and Deportation in Canada, 85. Many of the deportations between 1967 and 1971 arguably came from rejected landed immigrant applications since that policy was in effect at the time. Even after it ended, however, annual deportations continued to rise. For example, there were nearly 23,000 deportations in 1974 and 1975 combined. “The people who don’t belong here,” Maclean’s, 29 November 1976, 44c. 155 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 2, File Number 50003-1-238, Volume 2, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, bulletin by G.G. Vogan, Assistant Airport Passenger Office Manager, Toronto, 15 June 1970; LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 2, File Number 50003-1-238, Volume 2, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, letter from W.K. Bell, Director, Programs and Procedures Branch, to J. Edmonds, Assistant Deputy Minister, Immigration, 21 November 1973. 156 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 2, File Number 50003-1-238, Volume 2, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, letter from W.K. Bell, Director, Programs and Procedures Branch, to J. Edmonds, Assistant Deputy Minister, Immigration, 21 November 1973. 157 LAC, RG76, Series B-1-C, Volume 2, File Number 50003-1-238, Volume 2, file “Immigration Administration – Ports and Posts – Toronto International Airport”, letter from W.K. Bell, Director, Programs and Procedures Branch, to J. Edmonds, Assistant Deputy Minister, Immigration, 21 November 1973.

222 By the mid-1970s, the federal government began to use airport hotels for lengthier detentions, ending a practice that had previously sent longer-term stays to city jails.158 In Toronto, federal officials leased space at the Avion Hotel, which consisted of about twenty rooms on two floors of a wing, at an annual cost of around $800,000.159 Airlines were responsible for picking up the costs of their detained passengers and also fined $1,000 for carrying any travellers without acceptable documentation. This continued older practices of penalizing transportation companies for transporting illegal migrants, a policy dating back to the early twentieth century.160 In 1975, costs for a single detainee amounted to around $60 a day, including room, food and the hiring of private security.161 As the number of detainees and deportations increased, so did airline expenses. In 1975, Air Canada incurred over $200,000 in costs to handle more than 3,000 deportees at Toronto and Montreal’s two international airports, figures that climbed above $300,000 for more than 3,500 people the next year. CP Air, too, saw its detainee expenses soar over time, rising from approximately $29,000 in 1973 to more than $130,000 in 1975.162 When the government formalized airport hotel leases, it also began to hold people there longer. Revisions to the Immigration Act in 1976 sanctioned lengthier detentions and granted officials the power to hold someone – usually characterized as a public safety or flight risk – as long as their case was reviewed by an adjudicator within the first 48 hours and then again every seven days.163 At the same time, officials denied these practices were draconian or that detainees were being treated as convicted offenders. As Terry Sheehan, acting director-general for the Department of Immigration, said of these passengers, “they’ll still be in detention. But it’s not a jail. That’s what we’re trying to avoid…we’re not dealing with criminals, we have people here who for one reason or

158 Officials hoped to address public concerns about putting detained persons with convicted criminals and find a dedicated space for the rising number of airport detainees. In Toronto, an average of thirty air arrivals a day were detained at the Don Jail in March 1974. “Don’t detain people on suspicion, Ottawa tells immigration offices,” Globe and Mail, 10 April 1974, 9. 159 “Centre to hold illegal immigrants moves out of Avion Hotel in June,” Toronto Star, 3 May 1985, A6. 160 For an older example, see Government of Canada, An Act Respecting Chinese Immigration (Ottawa: F.A. Accland, 1923). 161 “The treatment facing unwanted travellers,” Globe and Mail, 12 August 1975, 4. 162 “The people who don’t belong here,” Maclean’s, 29 November 1976, 44c. 163 Arthur C. Helton, “The Detention of Asylum Seekers in the United States and Canada,” in Adelman, ed., Refugee Policy: Canada and the United States, 260-61.

223 another have to be detained to be available for an inquiry or in some cases deportation.”164 However, the leased spaces of airport hotels, and particularly the Avion, functioned as an environment where the federal government wielded enormous disciplinary power over detainees. In the process, the state gradually extended the structures of power that had transformed airports into de-localized borders to the detention corridors of nearby airport hotels. At the Avion, the detention wing for airport detainees was cordoned off from the rest of the hotel and the windows of these rooms were barred from the outside with wire mesh. The back parking lot at the hotel was bounded by 14-foot high fences and topped with barbed wire, projecting a carceral atmosphere to detainees and observers alike.165 Security guards hired by the airlines to police the wing were stationed at its entrance, and eligible visitors, which included only the detainee’s lawyers and family, had to sign in.166 While the hotel was not officially a jail, refugee claimants and other detainees held there were thus subjected to conditions that suggested incarceration in many traditional respects.167 By the time the government’s lease at the Avion expired in 1985, a large number of detainees had stayed there for varying periods of time at considerable cost. Determining the exact number of detainees held here is difficult, but some figures help shed light on its vital role within the regulatory structure that the federal government had erected to police the airport border, particularly during the early 1980s. In 1982, for instance, officials sent approximately 2,400 people to the Avion, each for an average length of stay of eleven days.168 However, detention lengths could vary widely; at the end of January 1985, four people had been detained for more than six months, nine from three to six months, 17 between one and three months, and 18 less than a month.169 Air carriers, consequently, incurred large expenses in detainee costs in the 1980s. In 1983 alone, Air Canada, the largest Canadian airline, spent about $850,000 to accommodate 1,200 detained passengers, mainly in Toronto, while CP Air, the second largest national carrier,

164 “Illegal immigrants to be kept in hotels instead of jails,” Toronto Star, 25 April 1974, A6. 165 “When Canada is a hotel room,” Globe and Mail, 10 May 1984, L5. 166 “Guard shot as woman escapes from immigration,” Toronto Star, 14 February 1982, A1. 167 Pratt, Securing Borders, 38-40. 168 “Visitors with something to hide find immigration a tough hurdle,” Toronto Star, 9 August 1982, A15. 169 “Refugee centre breaks UN rules: report,” Globe and Mail, 15 February 1985, 1-2.

224 spent about the same in total detention costs.170 Expenses from detainees at Montreal- Mirabel were not insignificant either with both carriers estimating annual costs of $475,000 in the mid-1980s.171 During the 1980s, critics alleged there were abuses of power and inhumane conditions for detainees at the Avion. One of the more notable cases occurred in August 1981, when almost 100 Sikh refugee claimants being held there for more than two weeks began a hunger strike to protest living conditions, including significant overcrowding in men’s single rooms and regular verbal and physical abuse from the security guards.172 The strike lasted more than a week, attracting media attention and inspiring a public protest that was attended by more than 500 people, but failed to produce substantive changes.173 Nonetheless, it not only revealed that citizenship struggles between the Canadian state and individual asylum claimants had spilled over from airports to nearby sites. It also showed that detainees who actively contested the terms of their detention at airport hotels were questioning the normative discourse that sanctioned their stay at these places. In some cases, detainees practiced subtle forms of resistance. For example, in 1983 Avion detainee Lenoris Richards of Jamaica, whom authorities suspected of being an illegal visitor, refused to identify herself to an unknown woman who had entered her room at the Avion and asked for her name. Shortly thereafter, she was moved to the West Toronto Jail because of what an immigration spokesman described as a “confrontation” with security guards. However, the United African Improvement Association, a local advocate group, claimed the move was simply because Richards had not given her name to a stranger. The Association demanded an end to what it called the “brutal” and “inhumane treatment” of detainees.174 Detainees also sometimes resisted violently. In 1982, an 18-year old security guard was shot in the face during an escape attempt that

170 “When Canada is a hotel room,” Globe and Mail, 10 May 1984, L5. 171 “Airlines seek relief from cost of detaining immigrants,” Toronto Star, 14 October 1983, E4. 172 “Detained Sikhs cry persecution,” Toronto Star, 13 August 1981, A18. More attention should be paid to the gender of detainees and deportees, particularly since refugee advocate groups did not explicitly raise the issue of women detainees in overcrowded single rooms during the 1980s. 173 Air Canada, the airline responsible for covering the costs of the Sikh detainees and hiring security for their stay, did concede the rooms were overcrowded, but claimed it was unprepared for the influx of people. “500 demand release of Sikhs held in hotel,” Toronto Star, 17 August 1981, A3. 174 “West Indian visitors to Canada treated ‘brutally’, black group says,” Toronto Star, 12 April 1983, C8.

225 saw a woman detainee from Jamaica leave the hotel with five people who were visiting her at the time.175 In the wake of the shooting, Mississauga Councillor Frank McKechnie called for the abolition of airport detention centres and the immediate return of rejected border entrants to their country of origin.176 Unsurprisingly, others, including Indian Immigrant Aid Services in Toronto, lambasted his proposal for disproportionately targeting vulnerable racialized populations and overlooking structural problems inside airport hotel detention areas.177 Complaints continued during the 1980s. In a 1985 report, the Toronto Refugee Affairs Council sharply criticized conditions in detention areas at Toronto and in the Avion itself.178 According to the report, which primarily focused on 15 Iranian refugee claimants, Avion detainees were denied the daily hour of fresh air mandated under UN standards, instead only allowed a half hour walk in the fenced-in back parking lot. They also were held several to a room, again in contravention of UN rules requiring single detention in a cell or room at night. The report also highlighted the “hostile” and “aggressive” behaviour of security guards, who allegedly threatened detainees with transfers to city jails if they broke the rules, and revealed that the firm employing them primarily had experience guarding factories and warehouses, not people.179 The TRAC concluded that its findings were “more than sufficient to warrant a serious independent review into the conditions of detention in order to establish standards appropriate to Canada’s best traditions.”180 The TRAC’s report prompted the House of Commons to establish a committee to examine conditions at airport hotel detention centres in Toronto and Montreal, where

175 “Guard shot as woman escapes from immigration,” Toronto Star, 14 February 1982, A1. 176 McKechnie’s proposal envisioned people either being flown back for appeal hearings or held overseas at the nearest Canadian embassy. “Immigration centres not working, Mississauga says,” Toronto Star, 18 February 1982, F13. 177 “Immigration centres not working, Mississauga says,” Toronto Star, 18 February 1982, F13. 178 Along with describing abuse at the Avion, the TRAC alleged that the Iranian refugees had been mistreated by immigration officers at Toronto-Pearson, who allegedly did not inform them about legal aid clinics in or any church and humanitarian organizations that could assist them, details that they were legally entitled to receive even as detainees under international law. 179 “Refugee centre breaks UN rules: report,” Globe and Mail, 15 February 1985, 2. 180 “Refugee centre breaks UN rules: report,” Globe and Mail, 15 February 1985, 1. NDP MP Dan Heap had called for an inquiry into conditions at the Avion in early February 1985, alluding to findings in the TRAC’s then-unreleased report. Canada, House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 33rd Parliament, 1st Session, Vol. 2, 5 February 1985, 2009.

226 detainee stays averaged 11 and 3.5 days respectively.181 In both cities refugees complained about the lack of an exercise yard at hotels and the housing of multiple detainees in single rooms.182 The Commons committee later flagged these problems as evidence for systemic reform, recommending the introduction of an exercise program, the allowance of phone calls and visitors, and an end to multiple occupants in a room. It also reserved especially harsh criticism for the security guards who the airlines employed to work at the hotels. MP Lucie Pepin, a member of the Commons committee, described them as “little green men at $4 an hour who are neither trained nor competent to do the job.”183 Evidence of carceral-like conditions at the Avion also intersected with growing concerns that the state was violating the individual rights of detainees in other ways. In March 1985, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) allegedly spoke to detainees in the absence of lawyers and without informing them of their right to counsel. Immigration officials contended that they informed detainees of this right at the airport either orally or via a letter, an action that essentially sanctioned subsequent private interrogations.184 A similar issue had occurred one month earlier after CSIS and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) allegedly questioned more than a dozen Iranian refugee claimants at the Avion without telling them they could hire lawyers and without asking other immigration officials to sit in.185 The RCMP defended its actions by claiming the Iranians were non-citizens and therefore not subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. RCMP Inspector T.J. Wylie, argued that “it’s an individual judgment [of an officer] based on what the interview is about...[and they are] not Canadian citizens, so I don’t think it [the Charter] applies here.”186

181 “NDP immigration critic seeks inquiry into refugee centres,” Globe and Mail, 16 February 1985, M1, M3. Montreal had a slightly better reputation as a refugee-receiving city, although conditions there still left much to be desired. Some refugees and observers alleged that people received more social and legal assistance from the Quebec government upon arriving at Montreal’s two international airports, including information about non-governmental organizations offering assistance and a government pamphlet about the refugee determination process. 182 “NDP immigration critic seeks inquiry into refugee centres,” Globe and Mail, 16 February 1985, M1. 183 “Liberate refugees, committee of MPs urges minister,” Globe and Mail, 28 June 1985, 8. 184 “CSIS confirms questioning of detainees,” Globe and Mail, 6 March 1985, M1 185 The Iranians claimed that they were “grilled” about their political affiliations and activities and also photographed and fingerprinted. 186 “RCMP’s questioning of detainees draws ire,” Globe and Mail, 20 February 1985, M2. According to NDP MP Dan Heap, CSIS and RCMP saw the Iranians as potential terrorists and said that they had

227 The RCMP’s use of normative citizenship discourse to defend certain detention methods underlined how state rhetoric could normalize exceptional legal circumstances for suspected risky refugee claimants. But the RCMP’s conduct conveniently ignored the basic human rights to which these asylum seekers were entitled under international and Canadian law, framing their in-limbo status as reason to not fully recognize their humanity, or their right to have rights.187 The fact that the RCMP could arbitrarily suspend basic protections to refugees underlined the opaque power that the state wielded in airport hotels. One lawyer who had clients at the Avion seemed to recognize these elements at play, characterizing it as “a Kafka-esque place like a little, lost part of the world,” a description that suggested a disorienting existence where detainees were unsure of the charges against them.188 The RCMP’s association of mobility with nationality underlined how airport hotels, like the Avion, could function as zones of exclusion where detainees were cast outside normative citizenship and subjected to extra-legal and quasi- judicial sovereign power. The actions of Canadian security agencies against detainees also shed light on how mass aeromobility had reshaped borders and machinations of border enforcement.189 More specifically, the rise of detention sites near airports suggested that the border was growing thicker and more elastic as the federal state targeted international air travellers, particularly racialized mobile populations, at a distance from the physical edge of the nation. As a result, asylum-seekers in airport hotels occupied a place and status that was in but not of Canada. Despite having entered Canada, they were marginalized outside the national community and denied full recognition as rights-bearing persons because many had moved in unsanctioned ways. In other words, government officials viewed detainees not as a distinct class of travellers with varied migratory narratives who were fully entitled to the protection of the state, but as undesirable non-national bodies with a tenuous claim to universal legal rights and protections. Collectively speaking, then,

detained them to protect the Queen and Pope, who were visiting Canada. However, they had left the country “several weeks before the interrogations took place”. See Canada, House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 33rd Parliament, 1st Session, Vol. 4, 20 June 1985, 6063. 187 On this idea, see Alison Kesby, The Right to Have Rights: Citizenship, Humanity, and International Law (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012). 188 “When Canada is a hotel room,” Globe and Mail, 10 May 1984, L5. 189 David Lyon, “Filtering Flows, Friends, and Foes,” in Salter, ed., Politics at the Airport, 34-42.

228 government authorities detained and later deported many aerial asylum seekers as part of a national project of managing aeromobile populations.

Competing Citizenships: Canadians and Airport Refugees in the late 1980s By the late 1980s, Canada’s backlog of airport refugee cases had sparked a national discussion about border security and citizenship politics in the modern global era. In mid- 1987, there were more than 35,000 outstanding refugee claims after 14,000 applicants had arrived in the first six months of that year alone, mainly from global south countries including El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Sri Lanka, Ghana, and Iran.190 Witnessing these events, some national commenters sought more progressive solutions for governing more mobile and displaced populations worldwide. “[Traditionally] Canada has been afforded the luxury of being able to sit back and play its international and humanitarian commitment to refugees from behind a desk, selecting who it wants and how many it wants,” wrote The Globe and Mail’s Victor Malarek. “However, in the past five years, those once seemingly insurmountable barriers are being easily circumvented by the sheer doggedness and increasing sophistication of refugees.”191 Refuge’s editors agreed, accusing refugee critics of nationalist and retrograde thinking: “We are no longer absolutely sovereign in controlling entry, and once entry is obtained it is clear that anyone on Canadian soil has the right to protection of Canada’s laws.”192 Other critics noted that the sheer presence of so many aeromobile refugee claimants had brought the international dimensions of national immigration policy into sharper focus. The Urban Alliance on Race Relations observed that Canadian authorities had to adapt to a more intensive and extensive wave of globalization in the late twentieth century: “Canada can no longer afford to be comfortably cocooned in the backwaters of world affairs, disinclined to recognize or grapple with its responsibilities towards the global refugee crisis.”193 Moreover, a James Hathaway, a Canadian law professor in

190 Adelman, “Canadian Refugee Policy in the Postwar Period,” 209. 191 “Refugees’ maze: arrivals face 3-year struggle through choked system,” Globe and Mail, 19 December 1984, M1. 192 Howard Adelman, et. al., “Betrayal,” Refuge 5, 3 (January 1986), 2. 193 CTA, UARR fonds, Series 231, Item 13, file “Currents: Readings in Race Relations, 1987”. Currents 4, 1 (Winter 1986-87), 1.

229 favour of a more humane national refugee policy, argued that mass aeromobility had reframed national discussions of sovereignty and citizenship in a global context: We’re dealing with something much bigger than Canada. This is something common to virtually every industrialized state. I’ve heard someone make the comment that more refugee determination is done by airline officials than by formal determination authorities. That is clearly true. The issue is whether or not Western states are prepared to see territorial claims being made, or do they wish to see all persons stopped abroad?194

Nevertheless, intensifying national fears and anxieties about more undocumented refugees offset calls for sober reassessment and reform. “I think it comes down to, who’s in charge?” stated one immigration officer. “Is Canada going to be in charge of its borders? Or is any Tom, Dick, and Harry that can buy the plane fare or the bus fare going to be in charge of the borders? And I happen to think we should be in charge.”195 Segments of the Canadian public similarly wondered why asylum seekers had the right to make landed claims and be treated differently than other immigrant classes, pointing to the existing backlog that was expected to take years to process. Anne Davidson, a researcher for a Vancouver television show with a call-in segment, indicated she had heard from a number of angry viewers about refugees: “The feeling here is quite staunch – let these people wait their turn like everybody else who immigrated to this country. Everybody gets his back up over this issue.”196 Other commenters sought tougher measures against asylum seekers by arguing that the state’s monopoly over mobility superseded the right of people to make spontaneous refugee claims. Their logic positioned borders and citizenship as key mechanisms protecting a specific vision of national community threatened by mass global aeromobility. Conservative MP Reginald Stackhouse made this point: “If you can just show up on a beach or at an airport and somehow, without qualifications or credentials, find yourself in the country…they [people] wonder whether the Government really is in control.”197 But this was also a racialized vision since the imagined nation evoked by many refugee sceptics was of a rapidly vanishing white, British Canada that

194 “CRS Discussion of Bill C-86”, Refuge 12, 2 (June 1992), 9. 195 Who Gets In?, dir. Barry Greenwald, 1989. National Film Board of Canada. 196 Malarek, Haven’s Gate, 74. 197 Canada, House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 33rd Parliament, 2nd Session, Vol. 7, 18 August 1987, 8174-75.

230 stood in stark contrast to the racial change and official multiculturalism that had come to define the country since the 1970s.198 Maclean’s writer Barbara Amiel lamented its passing in a mid-1980s column that argued for controlled refugee entry. “Canada ought never to close its doors to those of different cultures, but should bring them in with some regard for the concepts of gradualness and assimilation, which should not be dirty words,” she wrote. “The more distant a culture is from our own Canadian culture, the more gradual the number of people from it you let in at one time.”199 Amiel’s remarks betrayed deep concern over extending citizenship to refugees who were not visibly aligned with declining white cultural hegemony. In the process, she located global south migrants outside an idea of national belonging tied to the logic of cultural difference. The public shared these views to some extent. A 1987 Gallup Poll found that of 1,048 people questioned, 77.6% agreed “the size and content of immigration should not be permitted to change Canada’s ‘ethnic and cultural balance” and 52.7% said they wanted immigrant selection to be based on one’s ability to culturally assimilate.200 Another pollster acknowledged similar concerns: “[some people] just don’t like the idea that when you get on the subway at working time, drive time, morning or night, it looks like the UN. They don’t like it, they really don’t. They thought they lived in a white middle-class society and they want to recapture it.”201 And in 1986, Benoit Bouchard, federal Minister of Employment and Immigration, remarked that many Canadians were anxious about refugees because they were “from places like Asia, whereas in the old days the came from Europe…we are not closing the door. People are worried, however, about the level of refugee claimants. I can’t deny it, it’s there.”202 Refugee claimants from the global south who moved on their own terms were thus also racialized because they threatened a white national imaginary that was resistant to racial change. In 1987 federal authorities introduced more punitive measures as airport refugee claims continued to rise and after discovering several boatloads of asylum seekers off the

198 José Eduardo Igartua, The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities in English Canada, 1945-71 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006). 199 “Canada and the issue of racism,” Maclean’s, 14 May 1984, 17. 200 The Immigration Association of Canada sponsored the poll. “Unease over immigration policy may give support to extremists,” Globe and Mail, 10 January 1989, A4. 201 Malarek, Haven’s Gate, 74. 202 “Refugee points to immigration racket,” Globe and Mail, 31 December 1986, A3.

231 country’s western and eastern coasts that summer.203 The Mulroney government swiftly proposed amending the Immigration Act through Bills C-55 and C-84, the latter known as the Detention and Deterrents Act.204 These bills toughened measures against asylum seekers without identity documents, which the government claimed had come to number in the hundreds each month, and further jeopardized the rights and protections to which asylum seekers were legally entitled under international law. Bill C-55 significantly restructured the refugee determination process to prevent future backlog by limiting case appeals and carrying out deportations within 72 hours of arrival.205 Bill C-84 gave the state new powers to punish refugee claimants, including indefinitely detaining non- documented persons, extending detention periods without a judicial review, and using new security certificates that stripped the legal rights of non-Canadians cast as national security threats.206 The Mulroney government justified the bills by claiming more than 500 people per month were landing at Canadian airports with no documents after destroying them beforehand, and that greater detention powers would give immigration officers “appropriate time to gather information before proceeding with further immigration and refugee processing.”207 Moreover, officials briefly explored the idea of building a giant detention centre between Montreal and Toronto to enforce the new laws

203 Although the federal government proposed new legislation soon after the arrival of refugees from Sri Lanka and India abroad two freight vessels several months apart in 1987, there were nevertheless strong pre-existing concerns about systemic abuse and false refugees, the vast majority of whom were arriving by air. See Pratt, Securing Borders, 97-102. 204 The legislative committee minutes provide more insight on the evolution of the two bills before they became law. See House of Commons, Minutes of proceedings and evidence of the Legislative Committee on Bill C-55, an Act to amend the Immigration Act, 1976 and to amend other acts in consequence thereof (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1987); House of Commons, Minutes of proceedings and evidence of the Legislative Committee on Bill C-84, an Act to amend the Immigration Act, 1976 and the Criminal Code in consequence thereof (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1987). 205 Refugee claims would now go to a two-person panel of representatives from the newly created Immigration Board and any people whose claims were rejected would be deported within 72 hours. See Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 404. 206 CTA, UARR fonds, Series 39, File 228, file “Refugee and Immigration Committee, 1989”, Detention and Deterrents Act, Backgrounders C and D, Government of Canada; Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 411-13. Under the security certificates rules, federal authorities could detain people categorized as security threats for up to 28 days with no review to allow time for officials to obtain a certification issued by the Minister of Immigration and Citizenship and the Solicitor General. If legally accepted, this certificate would allow the government to deport individuals with no opportunity for appeal. For a contemporary analysis of security certificates, see Rob Aitken, “Notes on the Canadian exception: security certificates in critical context,” Citizenship Studies 12, 4 (August 2008), 381-396. 207 CTA, UARR fonds, Series 39, File 228, file “Refugee and Immigration Committee, 1989”, Detention and Deterrents Act, Backgrounder D, Government of Canada.

232 and contain airport refugee claimants; the centre was to be made up of prefabricated housing units capable of holding as many as 2,500 people at one time.208 Federal officials also sought to extend surveillance to the air itself. The twin bills made airlines and their employees more active partners in ensuring that travellers did not move outside regulatory channels. They also illustrated that the airport border and the state’s monopoly over movement could stretch to ambiguous places, like mobile aircraft, that were well above and at some distance from recognized national spaces. Bill C-84 required airlines to hold passenger passports during the flight and hand them over to immigration officials upon landing, illustrating a renewed push to expand national practices of expulsion outside borders and relocate citizenship screening to off-shore points.209 To entice compliance of this order, Bill C-84 also increased fines on airlines carrying undocumented passengers from $2,000 to $5,000 per person.210 Airlines ultimately balked at the passport seizure requirement, contending that their employees were not border guards and documents would inevitably get lost or mixed-up in mid- flight.211 Critics decried the twin bills as an unequivocal national rejection of displaced persons. “For the first time in many years”, declared Lorne Waldman, a national immigration lawyer, “we will turn genuine refugees away from our shores.”212 Susan Davis of the Refugee Status Advisory Committee agreed: “people, some with children tagging along, go from airport to airport for years. How human is it to put people in this floating orbit situation?”213 Others suggested the proposed legislation underlined how dominant national discourse on refugees linked race, mobility, and citizenship. Dan Heap, an NDP federal politician, attacked the government for choosing “a sneaky, administrative means to shut out refugees from most of the countries of the world where refugees are being created such as Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and the

208 “Ottawa may construct giant refugee centre,” Globe and Mail, 17 August 1987, A1-A2. 209 William Walters, “Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of Aliens,” Citizenship Studies 6, 3 (September 2002), 265-292. 210 CTA, UAAR fonds, Series 39, File 228, file “Refugee and Immigration Committee, 1989”, Detention and Deterrents Act, Backgrounder C, Government of Canada. 211 “Airlines balk at controls on passports,” Globe and Mail, 19 August 1987, A8. 212 “Genuine refugees to be penalized under new system, lawyer says,” Globe and Mail, 12 December 1988, A9. 213 “Right of refugees to seek asylum is being eroded, conference told,” Globe and Mail, 26 October 1987, A14.

233 islands of the Pacific. The Government does not want these non-white refugees in Canada.”214 Initiating court action against the legislation, the Canadian Council of Churches alleged at least 50 Charter violations and reserved special criticism for the expanded detention powers, saying they led to a process that “allows the detention of people who have not done anything wrong but ‘might’.”215 The Council also pointed to witness reports at Parliamentary Committee legislative reviews that alleged questionable detention decisions, notably officials categorizing people as flight risks because at the airport they had expressed a fear of being sent back to their country of origin.216 Taken together, these critiques formed an alternative idea of citizenship in 1980s Canada based on a more humane, open door refugee policy. The architects of this counter-discourse operated with different signposts than the dominant version by aligning the national imaginary with a more cosmopolitan idea of citizenship based on transculturalism and inclusivity.217 They advocated new strategies for administering borders at a time of greater global mobility that had helped bring Canada and more of the millions of displaced persons worldwide within the same geographical orbit. To put it another way, this nascent citizenship vision offered a national logic of belonging that recognized and endorsed – rather than contested – mass global aeromobility and the right of refugee claimants to subvert sovereign border controls and claim asylum at national airports. Although the Mulroney government tinkered with the proposed measures in Bill C-55 and Bill C-84, notably dropping the order on airlines to confiscate documents mid- flight, it still went on to enact them on January 1, 1989. These twin bills left Canada with a streamlined refugee appeals system and arbitrary detention policy that seriously disadvantaged air asylum seekers, like Chhinder Paul, who were already marginalized or excluded from the national imaginary. Generally speaking, these institutional changes

214 Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 406. 215 The Charter violations raised by the Council included limitations on refugees’ right to counsel; arbitrary detention powers; removal without fair hearing; the possibility of ministerial intervention on an independent review body; and no meaningful appeal or review process. 216 CTA, UARR fonds, Series 39, File 228, file “Refugee and Immigration Committee, 1989”, UARR Refugee Update, Issue 2, March 1989, 5. 217 David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

234 were the culmination of a national pushback against mass global aeromobility and racialized populations from the global south moving more on their own terms.

Conclusion Beginning in the 1960s, mass air travel, the worldwide refugee crisis, and national immigration reform challenged federal power over mobility and embedded Canadian international airports in a rapidly shifting global arena. These various historical developments saw airport immigration and customs areas not only become ports of entry for hundreds of thousands of immigrants annually, but also inland national borders where the federal state sought to police and exclude unwanted air travellers. In the process, historical racist practices of exclusion migrated to the nation’s international airports in the late twentieth century. Authorities were motivated by a racialized idea of national belonging that characterized many air travellers from the global south as illegal entrants, particularly during the mass panic over refugees during the 1980s. Over the course of that decade, moreover, the Trudeau and Mulroney governments thickened and extended the airport border as they recast the logic guiding how and where federal authorities determined which bodies could become Canadian. In other words, they embraced more draconian enforcement at jet age airports to reassert sovereign monopoly over the means of movement and narrow access to citizenship for racialized global populations.

235 Chapter 5

“There are areas that have to be covered that have not been covered”: Airport Security and Surveillance, Air Terrorism, and Risk Prevention in the 1970s and 1980s

During the fifth annual Canadian Airline Pilots Association (CALPA) technical and safety forum, held in Montreal in late September 1972, Charlie Simpson, president of the CALPA, was interviewed by the CFCF network’s Pulse radio program. The subject was heightened security at the nation’s major airports following a global surge in airplane hijackings. Simpson cast workers as the pivotal cog of airport security in the late twentieth century, arguing that air hijackings would decrease only if authorities focused as much on skills training for guards as on upgrading deterrence technologies. “There are areas that have to be covered that have not been covered”, he declared. “People have to be trained properly. You can have the best detection equipment but if it’s not used properly, it’s of no value…trained people have to know how to find [dangerous devices].1 Simpson also insisted that airport security was only as effective as the federal regulatory structure that oversaw it. Asked if security searches at airports should remain voluntary and at the discretion of individual airlines or become mandatory, he recommended strict federal oversight of airport security: “we feel the government has the responsibility for safety. The airlines should not have to bear the cost of making the airlines secure. The travelling public pay their taxes, the airlines pay a user tax to the airports and for this reason the government has a responsibility to provide this security.”2 Simpson’s call for a comprehensive federal security plan at airports nationwide became a reality in the ensuing years, as the federal government erected a new surveillance program based on technological and human deterrents, fundamentally transforming airports into heavily securitized environments that were sterilized against emerging risks in mass aeromobility. Nevertheless, historical developments in the late 1970s and 1980s soon confirmed Simpson’s worst fears, eroding the government’s interest in maintaining

1 Library and Archives Canada (LAC), RG12, Volume 4492, File Number 5172-7-1, Part 1, File “Airports – Security and Policing – Screening/Detection Devices – General”, interview with Charlie Simpson, 20 September 1972. 2 LAC, RG12, Volume 4492, File Number 5172-7-1, Part 1, File “Airports – Security and Policing – Screening/Detection Devices – General”, interview with Charlie Simpson, 20 September 1972.

236 its surveillance program and leading authorities to neglect the training of airport staff, particularly guards at passenger checkpoints. This chapter examines how these tensions played out at Canada’s jet age airports against the backdrop of terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s. It first surveys how emerging threats to passenger and plane safety worldwide transformed key national airports from relatively free and unrestricted public spaces into tightly regulated infrastructures of mass surveillance and led authorities to naturalize security as a core element of jet age airports. Beginning in 1973, the federal government erected a comprehensive surveillance regime at major airports across Canada to aggressively combat air terrorism. Airport surveillance was both a national and a global containment project that aimed to isolate but was not done in isolation. On the one hand, it symbolized the extension of the national security state into new public environments as part of an ongoing and evolving concern with containing and excluding risks to the wider population. On the other hand, it represented a specific national contribution to an international response against air terrorism and other aeromobile risks. In both respects, the sweeping federal security program fundamentally remade jet age airports into laboratories for state surveillance in the late twentieth century. However, this chapter also shows that the federal approach to airport security shifted as the 1970s and 1980s progressed, severely weakening the efficacy, if not the power, of the surveillance regime in the process. The use of sophisticated technology and human vigilance to scrutinize departing air travellers soon clashed with an ascendant neoliberal economic vision that defined the future health of aviation more in terms of speed and cost than regulation and safety, especially as the number of hijackings worldwide declined in the early 1980s. This ideological shift not only underlined the limitations of federal airport surveillance to adapt to shifting air terrorism strategies in the 1980s, specifically aircraft sabotage and bombings. It also revealed the precarious position of many airport security workers who lacked the necessary tools of security enforcement because of waning federal oversight. The Air India 182 bombing in 1985, it seemed, displayed all of these dynamics. In the end, duelling federal imperatives of security and economy shaped the course of airport surveillance over the 1970s and 1980s and paradoxically left an undertrained workforce with a disproportionate amount of

237 responsibility to fortify airports and achieve national security objectives against emerging risks in mass air travel.

The National Security State and Air Violence and Terrorism In Canada, the modern national security state was largely a twentieth century creation.3 Although largely administered by the federal government and its security agencies, the RCMP and CSIS, it came to encompass many aspects of Canadian civil society. As various scholars have shown, the national security state derived power and legitimacy from constructing politically, socially, and morally undesirable people as enemies to the nation and therefore threats to the wider population.4 The national security state first emerged during the First World War. At that time, the fluid wartime environment provoked new concerns about myriad domestic threats, particularly immigrants from enemy countries, and saw rising tensions between supporters and opponents of war and conscription. Consequently, during the war federal authorities were compelled to step into the void and introduce greater secrecy and control through censorship to mitigate the power and influence of constituencies that they believed were out of step or outright hostile to the war effort.5 They mobilized the full weight of the state’s bureaucratic apparatus to restrict individual freedoms as part of a larger impetus to root out wartime security threats. This security regime soon moved towards explicitly targeting ideological enemies in the ensuing decades, particularly in the early Cold War era. During this period, the Canadian state, along with much of the public, embraced policies of domestic containment to purge the nation of unwanted Communist influences. Authorities explicitly connected domestic containment to risk prevention and public safety, justifying surveillance against specific individuals and groups because they posed a serious moral health risk as suspected Communist sympathizers or for exhibiting behaviours antithetical

3 There were instances in the late nineteenth century when the federal government took an interest in national security, notably during the Northwest Rebellion. See Gregory Kealey, “The surveillance state: The origins of domestic intelligence and counter-subversion in Canada, 1914-21,” Intelligence and National Security 7, 3 (1992), 179. 4 Gary Kinsman, Dieter K. Buse, and Mercedes Steedman, eds., Whose National Security? Canadian State Surveillance and the Creation of Enemies (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2000). 5 Kealey, “The surveillance state: The origins of domestic intelligence and counter-subversion in Canada, 1914-21,” 180.

238 to social and cultural norms.6 Across the country, the RCMP began regularly spying on university students with suspected communist ties because of concerns they would infiltrate and subvert campus groups and movements and influence impressionable classmates.7 Security agencies also kept tabs on alleged homosexuals for the same reasons, characterizing them as morally degenerate and likely Communists.8 Moreover, other “gatekeepers” like the news media, psychologists, psychiatrists, and social agencies embraced domestic containment in other respects, promoting a form of citizenship that celebrated capitalist mass consumption, individualism, and social welfare while stigmatizing other behaviours, like mental illness in men who had emigrated from Eastern Bloc countries, that violated traditional gender norms and notions of Canadian democratic decency.9 Their actions reflected the politics of the Cold War and specifically the anti-Communism that underlined the dominant political and moral order in early postwar Canada. Governmental surveillance of such individuals and groups was meant to assuage national anxieties about emerging threats to the nation from suspected radicals or others who threatened hetero-normative ideals.10 A growing sense of insecurity largely driven by ideological differences thus precipitated the emergence of the modern Canadian security state, with students, labour, homosexuals, sovereigntists, and other subversive figures targeted by the widening surveillance net. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a global surge in both failed and successful hijackings of commercial aircraft (or ‘skyjackings’ as they were colloquially known), along with a rise in other forms of air terrorism (such as bomb threats), helped produce a new discourse of security.11 The proliferation of skyjacking was particularly significant.12 While air hijackings dated back to the early 1930s, the number of annual incidents

6 Reginald Whitaker, Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State, 1945-1957 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 7 Steve Hewitt, Spying 101: The RCMP’s Secret Activities at Canadian Universities, 1917-1997 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 3, 11. 8 Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile, The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010). 9 Franca Iacovetta, Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2006). 10 On hetero-normativity in postwar Canada, see Mary Louise Adams, The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 11 The term “skyjacked” first appeared in The Times on 10 August 1961. Cited in Gordon Hawkins, “Skyjacking,” Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences 7, 4 (1975), 157. 12 I use “air hijacking” and “skyjacking” interchangeably to describe the same action, the unlawful seizure of a aircraft.

239 increased sharply in the late 1960s.13 Air hijackings peaked between 1968 and 1972, when there were 400 international skyjackings involving over 75,000 passengers, including 85 attempted air hijackings in 1969.14 The majority of skyjackings originated in the United States, with many hijackers demanding to be taken to Cuba so that they could claim asylum there.15 The number of explosions abroad aircraft also climbed worldwide beginning in the late 1960s.16 What complicated enforcement efforts was that it was difficult to know where air hijackers and bombers would emerge next because there were so many flights worldwide at any given time. As a result, the skyjacker and other air saboteurs came to embody a new type of risk to the national security state that often defied easy or logical categorization and explanation. Although Canada experienced significantly fewer incidents than other countries, it still felt key effects over time. On the one hand, there were many anonymous – and false – bomb threats that originated in the country against both Canadian and foreign airlines.17 In 1972 and 1973, Air Canada received 103 and 45 bomb threats respectively, all of which turned out to be negative, as well as 10 extortion threats in 1972.18 False bomb threats also plagued CP Air, including one in July 1972 against a flight that had just left Vancouver for Toronto. In that case, a Vancouver airport reservations clerk received the threat from an anonymous caller, forcing the plane to return to the airport to be searched

13 The first recorded hijacking occurred in Peru in 1931 when a group of Peruvian revolutionaries seized control of a Pan American Airways Fokker F7. Between 1930 and 1967, there were only 12 attempted air hijackings in the United States. See David Gero, Flights of Terror: Aerial hijack and sabotage since 1930 (Somerset: Patrick Stephens Ltd., 1997), 10-17; Kenneth Moore, Airport, Aircraft and Airline Security (Los Angeles: Security World Publishing Co., 1976), 4. 14 Alastair Gordon, Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), 231; Jin-Tai Choi, Aviation Terrorism: Historical Survey, Perspectives and Responses (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 13. 15 On American air hijackings that were rerouted to Cuba, see Peter St. John, Air Piracy, Airport Security, and International Terrorism: Winning the War against Hijackers (New York: Quorum Books, 1991), 11- 21. For a list of these skyjackings, see David Gero, Flights of Terror, 22-48. Canada, United States, and Cuba signed an agreement in February 1973 that saw Cuba agree to return hijackers who had gone there. St. John, Air Piracy, Airport Security, and International Terrorism, 29. 16 St. John, Air Piracy, Airport Security, and International Terrorism, 213. It is reasonable to assume that false bomb threats also rose as more explosions occurred, although specific numbers are unavailable. 17 Canada also experienced two aircraft bombings before 1970. The first – also the first in the world – occurred in September 1949 on a Quebec Airways flight, killing 23 people, and the second was in August 1965 on a Canadian Pacific Airways aircraft, killing 52 people. T.M. McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 2nd edition (Toronto: Lugas, 1992), 53. 18 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 3, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, memo from J. Barclay, Chief of Security, 3 January 1973.

240 and later cleared for re-departure.19 Nationally, there were 1,206 threats made against Canadian aircraft between 1969 and 1979, a figure that encompassed bomb threats, skyjackings, extortion threats, and other, non-specified threats.20 Although almost all of these never seriously endangered air travellers, they underlined the fact that rising air violence worldwide, and its widespread publicity, had inspired scores of imitators in Canada who were keen to participate in an international cultural phenomenon. Generally speaking, air hijackings garnered far more public attention in Canada than other forms of air violence, even though they comprised a fraction of the threats received annually. Between 1968 and 1979, there were nine attempted hijackings of Canadian aircraft, two of which were successful, which meant the plane was rerouted and landed at the destination the hijackers had requested.21 During the same period, seven American aircraft that had been hijacked in the United States landed at Canadian airports. Hijackings peaked in 1972-73, during which there were ten incidents, six involving Canadian airlines and four with American aircraft.22 One incident in the United States also involved Canadians; in 1969, two members of the Front de Liberation du Quebec hijacked a flight between New York and Miami.23 Skyjacking and other forms of air violence emerged at a time when authorities and the public had begun to associate the modern era not only with techno-scientific optimism, but also with systemic risk. Put simply, people began to perceive more sources of instability and uncertainty even as they embraced the rhetoric of progress. The new “risk society” was a key pillar of modernity, where insecurity and uncertainty existed alongside stability and objectivity.24 Moreover, aero-modernity seemed particularly unstable, since it accelerated the flow of people, goods, and technologies in transnational, non-linear, and unpredictable patterns.25 This restructuring of modern life, in turn, widened the scope of possible risks to populations and forced authorities to rethink

19 “Twin bomb threats freeze CP, JAL flights,” Richmond Review, 21 July 1972, 1. 20 McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 53. 21 The two successful hijackings occurred on 26 December 1971 and on 14 December 1972. See David Gero, Flights of Terror, 37, 131. I describe both in more detail later in the chapter. 22 McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 53. 23 McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 53. 24 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage Publications, 2002). 25 Sven Kesselring, “The Mobile Risk Society,” in Weert Canzler, Vincent Kaufman, Sven Kesselring, eds., Tracing Mobilities: Towards a Cosmopolitan Perspective (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 77.

241 containment efforts more globally to counter movement that had become more fluid or “liquid”, to use Zygmunt Bauman’s term.26 Growing concerns about air safety became symptomatic of this broader shift, particularly once jumbo jets entered service in the early 1970s. Jumbo jets were attractive targets for prospective saboteurs because each one could hold hundreds of people, numbers that could not be ignored by authorities if a hijacking occurred. Air travel’s rapid global expansion also introduced greater risk by offering more entry points for skyjackers and saboteurs to penetrate a stretched network.27 Moreover, steady international media coverage of skyjackings throughout the 1960s and 1970s gave skyjackers enormous public exposure, emboldening some to view it as a means to a political or personal end.28 Mass aeromobility thus paradoxically posed new dangers to the public as skyjackings and other forms of air violence proliferated. In Canada, ideology and politics were motivating forces in some of the skyjackings. On September 11, 1968, Charles Lavern Beasley, a 22 year old from Texas with self-declared links to the black power movement in the United States, hijacked an Air Canada flight from Saint John, New Brunswick to Toronto. The plane eventually landed in Montreal to refuel and Beasley allowed everyone off except the flight crew. There then ensued a two-hour standoff during which the RCMP communicated with Beasley while he pointed a gun at the plane’s pilot and first officer. After initially demanding to be taken to Cuba, Beasley stood down after authorities guaranteed him political asylum in Canada.29 Analogous motives lay behind the first successful hijacking of a Canadian aircraft three years later. In late December 1971, New York City resident Patrick Critton hijacked an Air Canada flight from Thunder Bay to Toronto. After allowing the passengers to disembark in Toronto, Critton kept the flight’s crew of six on board and forced the pilot to fly him to Havana, where he asked Cuban authorities for asylum.30 These incidents suggested that air travel’s global reach had begun to appeal to politicized individuals and groups looking to disseminate their message of protest in a

26 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). 27 St. John, Air Piracy, Airport Security, and International Terrorism, 19. 28 See the various case studies in David G. Hubbard, The Skyjacker: His Flights of Fantasy (New York: Macmillan Company, 1971). 29 “Air Canada plane hijacked,” Montreal Gazette, 12 September 1968, 1. 30 “Toronto-bound Air Canada jet pirated to Cuba,” Montreal Gazette, 27 December 1971, 1.

242 way that was both dramatic and likely to reach a large public audience. The fact that Critton and Beasley were American also illustrated that some hijackers defined their politics beyond the national arena. Flights in Canada were fair game to prospective hijackers outside the country as long as the desired outcome – publicizing a counter- politics of resistance – was achieved. There were instances, too, where Canadian citizens saw skyjacking as a means of extortion against the state. The hijacking of Air Canada 812 travelling from Vancouver to Toronto in November 1971 represented one such example. Paul Joseph Cini, a truck driver in his late 20s with self-declared links to the Irish Republican Army, boarded the flight during a stop in Calgary and quickly hijacked the plane after takeoff. Cici demanded $1.5 million and immediate safe passage to Ireland. Over six dramatic and tense hours, the plane criss-crossed the Midwest and Rocky Mountains as Cini wielded a gun and repeatedly threatened to blow up the plane with a bomb he had brought on board. At his order, the plane twice refuelled in Great Falls, Montana, where he also picked up a briefcase that contained a portion of the money he had requested. Once the plane had refuelled a second time, Cini changed his mind and decided to bail out at 3,000 feet, a move that the plane’s captain, Vernon Ehman, resisted because Cini wanted the plane to slow to a speed that would cause a stall. After Cini threatened to detonate his bomb, Ehman convinced him to use an escape hatch instead and then charged at Cici when he lowered his gun. This gave the flight’s assistant purser, Philippe Bonny, time to hit Cini on the head with the blunt end of a fire axe that was part of the plane’s inventory.31 At the same time, however, other skyjackings were less clearly political statements than cryptic acts of spontaneous violence, which made them more difficult to anticipate and deter. In response, authorities and the media began constructing a skyjacker psychological profile to narrow the pool of potential offenders.32 Subsequently, national discourse on skyjackers routinely evoked a longstanding link between mental illness and deviancy to highlight evidence that suggested skyjackers were emotionally unstable and morally corrupted and to rationalize air hijacking as a fundamentally

31 “Air Canada skyjacker said in fair condition,” Montreal Gazette, 15 November 1971, 1; “Hijacker held his lighter ¼ inch from dynamite fuse,” Toronto Star, 15 November 1971, 15. 32 For a brief discussion on skyjacker profiling outside Canada, see Peter St. John, Air Piracy, Airport Security, and International Terrorism, 43-56.

243 irrational action.33 National media reports of another hijacking in late 1972 form a case in point. On December 14, Saint John resident Larry Maxwell hijacked a flight from Wabush, Newfoundland to Montreal and held the plane hostage for ten hours before voluntarily surrendering at Montreal’s Dorval Airport after his father, with whom he had a strained relationship, showed up at the airport. Stanford offered no explicit reasons for hijacking the plane, leaving others to offer their own interpretations that the media widely circulated. Sanford’s mother claimed he had a history of “memory-fogged blackouts”, while one passenger on the plane observed that Stanford behaved erratically and “sat in the back and held the gun. He looked like he was high or drunk or something. His eyes were really glassy.”34 These testimonies cast doubt on Stanford’s mental health before and during the hijacking, portraying him as someone who lacked the capacity to exercise sound judgement. Ideas of masculinity also shaped public perceptions of skyjackers, particularly since the vast majority of air hijackers worldwide were men.35 Accordingly, national media positioned skyjackers against modern masculinity, casting them as shy and effete males with socio-pathological tendencies.36 The Montreal Gazette published research from an American psychiatrist, Donald Hubbard, who argued that skyjackers were prone to schizophrenia, often the younger sons in middle-sized families, and had “unimportant jobs, no friends and sometimes a shrew of a wife who deserts him for another man.”37 This characterization offered a gendered construction of the typical skyjacker to provide public reassurance that air hijacking was less a random and unexplainable danger than an expression of abnormal behaviour that disproportionately attracted psychologically unstable men. Nevertheless, contemporary discourse about skyjackers and other air saboteurs toed a fine line between stigmatizing their disposition and glorifying their actions. In the

33 Historical connections between mental illness and deviancy were particularly salient during the early Cold War era. See Iacovetta, Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada, 204. 34 “Quebecair hijacker gives up to father,” Montreal Gazette, 15 December 1972, 1, 3. 35 I was not able to find statistics that definitively confirm this, but primary and secondary sources on the subject often clearly state, or imply, that they were overwhelmingly men. For an example, see the descriptions of individual hijackings in Gero, Flights of Terror. 36 Christopher Dummitt, The Manly Modern: Masculinity in Postwar Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007). 37 “Skyjackers sexually inadequate,” Montreal Gazette, 2 March 1972, 7.

244 early 1970s, television networks in Canada sometimes aired Hollywood movies about skyjackings and other forms of air violence, which were being released in growing numbers as part of the burgeoning “disaster movie genre” that largely glossed over the real dangers and risks of skyjacking to present a sanitized version for mass consumption.38 In August 1971, Montreal-based CFCF-TV aired the US film Doomsday Flight about a fictional failed air hijacking. Nine days later, a British Overseas Airways Corporation flight from Montreal to London experienced a bomb scare after a person demanded $225,000 in return for providing information about a specially made bomb that was allegedly on the aircraft, developments that mirrored the Doomsday Flight’s plot about a bomb extortion scheme.39 Similarly, national print media coverage of skyjackings sometimes revealed a tension between condemning and promoting air violence. On the first anniversary of the hijacking of Air Canada 812, Canadian magazine, a weekly supplement in Saturday issues of some major national newspapers, published a sensationalized account of the incident. Titled “Welcome to a Doomsday flight”, the piece ran over two issues and recounted the events after Paul Cini hijacked the plane. It read like a formulaic mass- market thriller, pitting Cini, the violent-tempered and paranoid hijacker with a death wish, against the calm and mild-mannered crew and passengers who prevented a catastrophe by negotiating Cini’s violent mood swings, repeated outbursts, and continued threats to bomb the plane.40 While Canadian’s story surely captivated some readers seeking a real-life morality tale reinforced with fictional tropes, others who subscribed to the notion that skyjackers were dangerously abnormal and emotionally disturbed men were not as impressed. Teresa Kennedy, a Gazette reader, feared that the story did not satisfactorily highlight Cini’s moral failings, functioning more as tabloid fodder than a condemnation of skyjackers. An air hijacker like Cini, she wrote, “is deranged with a difference. He is unconcerned with, if not titillated by others’ opinions regarding his mental state. He doesn’t care what happens to him as long as he realizes however briefly his delusions of

38 On aviation and the disaster movie genre, see Michael Paris, From the Wright Brothers to Top Gun: Aviation and Popular Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 198. 39 “Bomb threat movies worry airlines,” Montreal Gazette, 4 August 1971, 3. 40 “Welcome to a Doomsday Flight…,” Montreal Gazette, 18 November 1972, S1-5 (part 1) and 25 November 1972, S1-5 (part 2).

245 grandeur.” Because of the very real pathologies that emboldened hijackers to act, she argued, publishing Canadian’s piece only added “to the notoriety and fame that such a person so desperately seeks”.41 In other words, she was concerned that sensationalizing skyjacking for public consumption created greater risk by emboldening future hijackers who were also keen to reach a mass audience. Other media accounts of skyjacking were even more ambivalent, with some appropriating older cinematic representations of daring, individualistic airmen to describe skyjackers and differentiate them from other air saboteurs, particularly people who made bomb threats.42 In 1972, the Richmond Review contended that air hijacking contained “elements of desperation and bravado which smack of old-style adventure, however misguided” unlike bomb prank calling, which was “a peculiarly modern kind of crime”. Moreover, it juxtaposed the high-stakes nature of skyjacking with the anonymity of bomb threats to condemn the latter: Beside the warped kind of courage displayed by a hi-jacker [sic], the timid alienation of a bomb-threat prankster is indeed shabby. How trivial is the satisfaction to be gained from reading of the disruption you have caused in the next day’s paper. What a feeble gloat is to be gained from evading the authorities when you have barely appeared on the scene, let alone played for any kind of reward.43

The Review thus implied that air hijackers deserved begrudging respect when their actions were properly contextualized, helping to perpetuate a nuanced public image of the skyjacker based on both shock and awe. Lack of pre-flight screening at airports enabled skyjacking to become a cultural phenomenon worldwide. In Canada, the federal government had no uniform airport security policy before the early 1970s. Instead, it left security to individual airlines, which were responsible for screening passengers before they boarded the plane, but not required to enforce it on all flights. As a result, travellers faced inconsistent or non-existent security at airports nationwide, enabling hijackers to board planes with little scrutiny and resistance. In the Quebecair incident, Larry Sanford entered Wabush, Newfoundland’s

41 “Letter to the editor: Canadian Magazine article on hijacking criticized,” Montreal Gazette, 28 November 1972, 6. For a similar take, see “‘Skyjacking has evolved into a glory game’,” Toronto Star, 13 July 1970, 6. 42 Paris, From the Wright Brothers to Top Gun, 108. 43 “The sickest of jokes,” Richmond Review, 21 July 1972, 1.

246 airport with a large parcel designed to look like a Christmas present. Once inside, he pulled a rifle from the box, ran through the terminal to the tarmac without being stopped, and after seizing a stewardess, entered the unguarded aircraft, a sequence that lasted only a few minutes.44 Although Wabash was not a national air hub by any means, the lack of security there generally prevailed at airports nationwide and became a glaring liability as skyjackings and other air violence peaked during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Therefore, while national public discourse alternately vilified and glorified skyjackers, federal authorities began to focus on tightening airport security to more effectively contain and exclude risky air travellers.

The Airport Security Regime and Surveillance Culture in the 1970s The proliferation of skyjackings in the late 1960s and early 1970s led federal authorities to dramatically increase security at major national airports.45 As a result, these airports became environments of mass surveillance where authorities deployed sophisticated technologies and engineered a new culture of hyper-vigilance to manage and police air terrorism risks. Changes began in earnest as the number of skyjackings worldwide escalated in the late 1960s, even as some national press, like the Montreal Gazette, were reluctant to endorse stricter security screening at airports over concerns that travel delays would ensue.46 By 1970, international public support for greater security solidified as skyjacking and air piracy became linked more to organized group terrorism, including pro-Palestine and other organizations based in Europe and the Middle East, and as worldwide media coverage of successive incidents intensified.47 Canada was not immune from this shift. In a March 1970 letter to the Gazette, George V. Deane recommended immediate mandatory searches of all male travellers at airports to offset what he felt was a collective passivity that had helped encourage more skyjackings: “we are gradually becoming a race of people that actually encourage certain

44 “Hijacker held rifle at stewardess’ head,” Montreal Gazette, 15 December 1972, 3. 45 For a brief overview of airport security in the pre-NASP years, see McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 53. 46 “Editorial: Piracy in the Air,” Montreal Gazette, 25 July 1968, 6. 47 St. John, Air Piracy, Airport Security and International Terrorism, 11-42; Choi, Aviation Terrorism, 13- 14, 42-64.

247 adults to abuse the law with our apathy and lethargic attitude.”48 Unlike Deane, George Bryant, writing to the Star, recommended that everyone be searched, although he also betrayed a presumption that air hijackers and saboteurs were more likely to be men. “Such inspections won’t end hijackings completely,” he wrote. “A man can always put his hands around a stewardess’ neck, there will always be human lapses in the inspection line, and there’s the possibility of a bluff. But they can cut them well down….future movements at airports may be even more curtailed…but considering the alternatives it should be worth the price.”49 Federal officials, too, gradually subscribed to the idea that only an aggressive national security response would deter future air violence and sufficiently protect public safety, but refrained from explicitly targeting men. In early 1970s, J. Cook, an official in the Ministry of Transport, acknowledged this shifting reality and the role the state should play in mobilizing against new risks: “the necessity of developing acceptable safety standards and implementing preventive measures against unlawful acts involving aircraft is obvious and will be appreciated in view of recent well publicized incidents”.50 Former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker went even further in advocating more punitive measures against air offenders, arguing that anyone convicted of hijacking or sabotaging a plane deserved the death penalty, a stunning reversal of his long-standing aversion to it.51 As government officials engaged in heated discussions about new preventive measures, individual airlines, with federal approval, moved to introduce stricter security measures using advanced technology systems at key airports. This process was helped by the federal government’s passage of the War Measures Act in Montreal during the FLQ Crisis, which immediately heightened security at the country’s international airports. In October and November 1970, Air Canada installed a weapons detector at Montreal-

48 “Letter to the editor: Urges pre-flight passenger search,” Montreal Gazette, 4 March 1970, 6. 49 “Why it’s so hard for the airlines to stop hijackings,” Toronto Star, 17 June 1972, 70. 50 LAC, RG12, Volume 4492, File Number 5172-7-1, Part 1, File “Airports – Security and Policing – Screening/Detection Devices – General”, letter from J. Cook, Chief of Airport Services and Properties, 15 April 1970. 51 Diefenbaker changed his position following the bombing of a Swissair jet by members of The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine on 21 February 1970, which killed 38 passengers and eight crew. “Diefenbaker seeks death penalty for air pirates,” Montreal Gazette, 24 February 1970, 1.

248 Dorval and Toronto to test screen randomly selected departure flights.52 Airlines could request this technology from the Ministry of Transport, which had purchased 21 detectors by the end of 1971.53 The detector consisted of two large vertical bars and a meter; passengers walked through the bars and the meter registered the amount of metal found on them, swinging forward whenever some was detected. In the beginning, two airline officials and an airport policeman supervised the meter and made the decision to hand- search any passengers who registered high readings. The detectors were mobile and portable, allowing authorities to move them around to different departure gates.54 Federal authorities also took cues from developing international conversations about policing air hijackings and terrorism worldwide. In April 1972, a Canadian delegation attended a major international seminar on airport security held in Washington.55 One month later, several officials from the Ministry of Transport travelled to Israel, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and England to examine recent upgrades to security at airports in those countries.56 These events underlined that government officials had begun to participate in an exchange of ideas about security and surveillance across borders, particularly in North America, Europe, and the Middle East, where skyjackings and attacks on aircraft occurred most frequently. In mid-1972, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the governing body responsible for regulating air travel globally, outlined a four-part plan to curb air hijacking and sabotage incidents after several years of fractious negotiations. The plan required all ICAO members to form national security committees comprised of airport, government, airline and police members; develop new intelligence strategies to prevent violence; introduce new legislation on hijacking and ratify analogous international conventions and treaties; and act with other members to push for sanctions against non-

52 McGrath, History of Canadian Airports, 53. 53 LAC, RG12, Volume 4492, File Number 5172-7-1, Part 1, File “Airports – Security and Policing – Screening/Detection Devices – General”, memo by A.B. McIntosh, 29 December 1971. 54 “Air Canada plans to use gun detectors at Toronto airport,” Toronto Star, 29 October 1970, 1; “Air Canada sets up weapons detector,” Toronto Star, 11 November 1970, 47. 55 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 3, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, AOCI security seminar information, April 1972. 56 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 3, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, letter from T.M. McGrath, Chief, Airport Services and Properties, to Emil Egli, Director, Civil Aviation Office, Switzerland, 29 May 1972.

249 complaint nations.57 The ICAO’s efforts laid the groundwork for an international aeromobile surveillance system that stretched across borders and linked international airports worldwide. Pressure for federal action came from many directions. The ICAO’s directive spurred member nations to formulate and introduce airport security programs and to respond to skyjackings and other incidents in the domestic arena. Specific constituencies in Canada pressured the federal government to act with the ICAO and other countries to avoid becoming a magnet for skyjackers and air saboteurs. In June 1972, the CALPA joined a one-day worldwide strike by pilots to demand tougher anti-hijacking laws, threatening further action if the government did not respond.58 Moreover, after the American government passed strict anti-hijacking security measures in late 1972, the CALPA declared that the Trudeau government had to follow suit to protect airlines flying in Canada, which “must not become the weak link in the anti-hijacking security chain.”59 Some segments of the travelling public also expressed a desire for more security to stem air incidents. Said Wendy Fuller of Richmond, British Columbia, in mid-1972: “I don’t think there is enough security at airports, not when people are getting on airplanes with guns and bombs. Those detectors [existing security measures] don’t seem to be working.”60 By this time, governments understood surveillance as a fundamental feature of jet age airports. As early as 1971, federal officials had begun to acknowledge that such a program was in the planning stages.61 The next year, a Ministry of Transport official noted that authorities would “examine even more modern methods of detection and surveillance and to coordinate the experience of other countries and airlines in aviation security.”62 Early in 1973, federal Transport Minister Jean Marchand also acknowledged

57 “ICAO’s target denial of service to ‘soft’ nations,” Montreal Gazette, 20 June 1972, 1. 58 “Pilots threaten new protests, UN seeks solution,” Toronto Star, 20 June 1972, 1, 4. 59 LAC, RG12, Volume 4492, File Number 5172-7-1, Part 1, File “Airports – Security and Policing – Screening/Detection Devices – General”, telegram from Canadian Airline Pilots Association, 3 February 1972. 60 “Comments: The People Say,” Richmond Review, 7 July 1972, 4. 61 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 3, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, letter from W.H. Huck, Administrator of Canadian Air Transportation Administration, September 1971. 62 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 3, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, Ministry of Transport status report, March 1972.

250 that national airport security could not be less comprehensive than other places, especially the United States, since mobility constituted the greatest asset of air terrorists able to move through an interconnected mass travel network. “What we’re afraid of is that if they’re [the new security policies] successful in the United States”, he said, “it may assist in hijackers moving to Canada because they can no longer do their job in the United States.”63 Marchand’s comment effectively characterized skyjackers as hyper- mobile risks, thus elevating the importance of imposing uniform policies across borders and signalling that officials saw stricter airport security as proof of national compliance with international regulations. In late January 1973, the Trudeau government announced significant security upgrades at airports and more stringent penalties for skyjacking and sabotaging aircraft. On July 27, 1973 it passed these measures through an amendment to the National Aeronautics Act.64 As part of a new no search, no fly rule, the government now subjected all departing passengers at major airports to mandatory security checks and searches of their personal baggage. Anyone who tried to board a plane without first being searched or refused to leave an aircraft if ordered would be fined $5,000 and possibly jailed for up to one year.65 Soon after, the Ministry of Transport announced plans to also use dogs to detect drugs and explosives at Montreal-Dorval, Toronto and Vancouver, claiming that dogs were not only very efficient and easy to train, but also helped to further expand the surveillance net. One official said that the dogs’ presence “will really leave very little chance for anyone carrying any type of dangerous object to get on board an aircraft. If the personality profile doesn’t get them, the metal detector or the dog will for sure.”66 Government planning re-made airports to facilitate surveillance, but the results were uneven. Federal officials established the National Airport Security Plan (NASP), which specifically targeted changes at the nation’s nine international airports, but also

63 “Hijack bill provides $5000 fine, jail term for refusing search,” Toronto Star, 23 January 1973, 1. 64 The 1919 National Aeronautics Act established federal control over aviation in Canada, giving the government the power to regulate the nascent industry. 65 Alastair Gordon, Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure, 231- 35. Transport Minister Jean Marchand declared that the changes were necessary until aeromobile risks could be brought under control and that mandatory searching would happen “for a while, at least, until we are satisfied we have complete control. I think that everybody’s going to be searched.” “Hijack bill provides $5000 fine, jail term for refusing search,” Toronto Star, 23 January 1973, 1. 66 “Airport security here will use trained dogs to check passengers,” Montreal Gazette, 3 February 1973, 3.

251 identified 23 other airports that handled enough domestic traffic to warrant extra security attention.67 The nine airports were Toronto, Montreal-Dorval, Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Halifax, Edmonton, and Gander, Newfoundland. Each would receive new master security plans complete with a specially created security committee, along with emergency coordination centres and mobile emergency search shelters.68 The NASP effectively enabled authorities to enact a technocratic vision of surveillance that imposed new conditions and restrictions on individual movement throughout airports. In most respects, they were guided by an inverted risk prevention strategy that was reminiscent of banopticon modes of governance. Didier Bigo has theorized the banopticon as a technology of control that is an inversion of the Foucauldian panopticon, which operates to contain risks within an ordered space, such as the prison.69 According to him, the banopticon instead signifies a set of governmental practices focused on capturing and excluding risky elements from a given place altogether.70 The NASP envisioned airports as banopticon environments in two ways. The program emphasized the “clear aircraft concept”, which instituted mandatory screening before departures to enable “the departure of an aircraft free of weapons, explosives, and incendiary devices.”71 It also created restricted spaces, or “sterilized” areas, in airports that were off limits to the general public and subjected to especially intensive surveillance. 72 Sterilization conveyed the image of a safe, contained area that had been scrubbed clean of risk and populated only by people and things that had passed comprehensive security checks and clearances.

67 The changes also applied to Montreal-Mirabel, slated to open in the mid-1970s. LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, Notes and Agenda for meeting with RCMP, 17 October 1974. 68 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, memo on National Airport Security Program, 1974, no specific date. 69 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, transl. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977). 70 Didier Bigo, “Detention of Foreigners, States of Exception, and the Social Practices of Control of the Banopticon,” in Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr, eds., Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2007), 3-34. 71 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, memo on National Airport Security Program, 1974, no specific date. 72 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, table as part of memo on National Airport Security Program, 1974, no specific date.

252 Banopticon surveillance and sterilization effectively created two airports in one that were differentiated by the level of exposure to risk. On the one hand, publicly accessible areas where travellers might mingle with family and other visitors before departure became specifically recognized as the “landside”, which included the terminal entrance, surface-level transit options, and ticket counters. As their flight times neared, travellers had to enter a restricted part of the airport, or the “secured airside”, which contained all of the passenger departure and arrival gates, as well as outside areas proximate to aircraft, such as the apron, tarmac, and runways.73 Only approved passengers, goods, and airport employees with proper clearance could access the airside so as to isolate them from physically interacting with non-cleared people, items, and things.74 Security checkpoints were installed away from individual departure gates to enable authorities to centralize the screening process and give them extra time and space to neutralize potential risks in the terminal before they reached the aircraft.75 Authorities largely relied on advanced screening technologies and human labour to separate the sterilized airside from the more open landside. In 1973, after instituting mandatory passenger and baggage inspections, the federal government purchased more equipment to fortify and expand the new security checkpoints. It prioritized hand-held and walk-through metal detectors, seeing them as the best means of exposing travellers carrying illegal weapons. By 1974, officials had distributed 375 hand-held metal detectors to Canadian airports with regular service from air carriers.76 The federal government also installed 38 stand-alone, walk-through detectors at the nine international airports specifically identified for enormous security upgrades. Finally, it relied on newer x-ray units to specifically inspect carry-on baggage at the at the country’s largest airports that handled international traffic; by March 1974, the same nine airports shared sixteen

73 Landside and airside are both discussed in John Zukowsky, Building for Air Travel: Architecture and Design for Commercial Aviation (Munich and New York: The Art Institute of Chicago and Prestel-Verlag, 1996). 74 Gillian Fuller, “>Store>forward>,” in Saulo Cwerner, Sven Kesselring and John Urry, eds., Aeromobilities (London: Routledge, 2009), 66. 75 For a brief outline of the secured airside in the American context, see Kenneth Moore, Airport, Aircraft and Airline Security, 31-34. 76 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, Policing and Security, Status Report: National Airport Security Program, October 1974, page 8.

253 units that cost $36,000 each.77 One internal government memo predicted expenses would dramatically rise as the security program expanded: “within the next few years it looks like we will be investing quite a few millions in x-ray equipment.”78 The NASP also reconfigured the policing structure at airports and markedly increased the number of officers at security checkpoints and on the airside more generally. Prior to the NASP, the Corps of Commissionaires (former Armed Forces personnel) had been responsible for airport policing, but as air violence surged in the late 1960s and early 1970s Ministry of Transport officials began to express concern about their declining numbers, increasing age, “limited physical capabilities”, and lack of training.79 As a result, the NASP replaced the Corps with RCMP Special Constables, who were tasked with “law enforcement; traffic control; security guarding and patrolling; [and] crowd control”.80 Special Constables had the power of a peace officer, wore the force’s uniform, and carried a firearm, but despite taking a nine-week course on airport security and policing, they were paid less than regular officers.81 By 1975, there were more than 700 Special Constables at airports at a projected cost of over $4.5 million

77 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 1, File “Airports – Security and Policing – Screening/Detection Devices – General”, letter from H. Courtemanche, TEDC Section, to M. Fergson/J.T. Lukaszewicz, IDISC Representatives, 21 March 1974. 78 LAC, RG12, Volume 4492, File Number 5172-7-1, Part 1, File “Airports – Security and Policing – Screening/Detection Devices – General”, letter from H. Courtemanche, TEDC Section, to M. Fergson/J.T. Lukaszewicz, IDISC Representatives, 21 March 1974. 79 LAC, RG73, Volume 1063, File Number 11-88, Part 1, File “RCMP – National Airport Security Program – General”, Ministry of Transport and Solicitor-General, Program Approval – National Airport Security Program, 31 July 1972, page 6. 80 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, Policing and Security, Status Report: National Airport Security Program, October 1974, page 13. 81 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, Policing and Security, Status Report: National Airport Security Program, October 1974, page 12; LAC, RG73, Volume 1063, File Number 11-88, Part 1, File “RCMP – National Airport Security Program – General”, Ministry of Transport and Solicitor-General, Program Approval – National Airport Security Program, 31 July 1972, page 7.

254 annually.82 Most were stationed at the nine international airports, including 132 at Toronto, 101 at Montreal-Dorval, 57 at Vancouver, 45 at Calgary, and 42 at Ottawa.83 The NASP’s surveillance measures extended outside the terminal to the apron, tarmac and surrounding grounds, following ICAO protocol that had been issued to all member states. Federal authorities tightened physical and structural security at the airport perimeter in order to “guard against ground-based attacks from outside the airport against aircraft and aviation installation and facilities.”84 They also approved over $2 million for the installation of fences, gates, posts, locks, and new alarm and surveillance systems at airports.85 Security measures fashioned guardhouses as an effective deterrent against risks, where trained officers would monitor activities around the terminal from observation posts using closed-circuit televisions and also regularly patrol the grounds on foot.86 The guards were expected to pay special attention to “areas providing easy cover for saboteurs, such as wooded areas, parking lots, etc., and to areas under the usual approach and takeoff paths of aircraft.”87 Through the NASP the federal government also constructed an airport surveillance culture based on collective risk prevention and heightened security awareness. On the one hand, officials introduced a security alert system to respond to both threatened and real acts of air terrorism. The system contained three threat levels,

82 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, Agenda for meeting re: RCMP Security Guard Service – National Airport Security Program, 17 October 1974, Appendix D; LAC, RG73, Volume 1063, File Number 11-88, Part 1, File “RCMP – National Airport Security Program – General”, Ministry of Transport and Solicitor-General, Program Approval – National Airport Security Program, 31 July 1972, Appendix A. 83 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, Policing and Security, Status Report: National Airport Security Program, October 1974, page 13. 84 LAC, RG73, Volume 1063, File Number 11-88, Part 1, File “RCMP – National Airport Security Program – General”, Ministry of Transport and Solicitor-General, Program Approval – National Airport Security Program, 31 July 1972, page 7 and Resolution and Appendices of the Civil Aviation Organization. 85 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 3, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, letter from Eric Winsor, DGAC, to D.H. Proudfoot, Special Assistant, Status Report – International Airport Security Plan, 10 March 1972. 86 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 3, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, telegram, no author, 8 January 1974; LAC, RG73, Volume 1063, File Number 11-88, Part 1, File “RCMP – National Airport Security Program – General”, Ministry of Transport and Solicitor-General, Program Approval – National Airport Security Program, 31 July 1972, Resolution and Appendices of the Civil Aviation Organization. 87 LAC, RG73, Volume 1063, File Number 11-88, Part 1, File “RCMP – National Airport Security Program – General”, Ministry of Transport and Solicitor-General, Program Approval – National Airport Security Program, 31 July 1972, Resolution and Appendices of the Civil Aviation Organization, Security Measures in the Vicinity of Airports.

255 each of which was intended to address the presence of possible or real risks within Canada or to Canadian aircraft outside the country. The lowest alert represented the basic security measures – those in place in the absence of an impending threat. This increased to a stand-by alert, or the medium security level, “when intelligence is assessed to indicate that a state of readiness is required”.88 Under this alert, normal security responsibilities were intensified, which meant more frequent security patrols and surveillance, greater police support at security checkpoints, and more rigorous inspection of passengers and carry-on baggage. Moreover, authorities could elevate to the highest alert level if they determined “the threat is assessed as being imminent and maximum security measures are necessary”. At this stage, the Department of Transport had to activate airport security contingency plans and lock down access to the airside and restricted areas in the airport. At the same time, air carriers overseeing passenger security had to ensure rigorous individual inspections, such as conducting a passenger count before departure, in order to “protect aircraft against unlawful access”.89 Justifying the system, S.T. Grant, Executive Officer of Civil Aviation Security, argued that a flexible security response was best suited for sudden developments in the national or global arena. “In Canada at this point in time we have not been exposed to terrorist activities against civil aviation of the nature that have erupted from time to time in the Middle East and Europe”, he wrote. “However, we cannot afford to sit back with complacency with the feeling that we are immune to threats of this nature.”90 The federal government expected airport staff to play a key role in the new surveillance environment once they had been re-trained. Authorities believed that the efficacy of the security regime depended on properly educating and motivating individual employees to be constantly vigilant and aware of possible risks in their workplace. Some of this education was compulsory. For example, officials mandated that all employees

88 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, letter from S.T. Grant, Executive Officer, Civil Aviation Security, to Airline Chiefs of Security, 9 September 1974. 89 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, letter from S.T. Grant, Executive Officer, Civil Aviation Security, to Airline Chiefs of Security, 9 September 1974. 90 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, letter from S.T. Grant, Executive Officer, Civil Aviation Security, to Airline Chiefs of Security, 9 September 1974.

256 had to carry new identification cards and wear badges to control access to restricted areas and make individuals more accountable.91 The NASP also contained the seeds of a new Security Education Program, which was intended to provide airport employees with a basic overview of security prevention in the workplace and “be universal in application; be short in duration; be direct; possess impact”.92 Armed with a more sophisticated understanding of security enforcement, workers could then apply their learning to a work environment that had become more geared towards risk management in recent years. The federal government also recognized that workers had to be properly motivated to carry out these tasks. Officials created both a Security Suggestion Award Program, which would “reward those who suggest improved methods to enhance security”, and a Security Hazard Reporting Program, which would “bring security hazards to the attention of authorities without delay”.93 By offering incentives for effective job performance, these programs reflected a state-sponsored push to transform airport employees into integral components of the airport security regime. Officials believed that workers would come to embrace this role if they could be sufficiently convinced they were “an important part of the security team and that by his detection and reporting of incidents he may prevent the loss of life and or valuable equipment or property.”94 Furthermore, they believed that the implications of conditioning airport employees to a new surveillance culture were massive. Properly motivated security personnel would “help prevent direct losses in life, money, valuable property, equipment and information; help prevent indirect losses in reputation, customer and public goodwill, employee morale, etc.; reduce risk potential which could result in lower insurance

91 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 3, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, NASP briefing, 5 February 1974. 92 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, letter from W.P. Stoker, Chief, Airport Planning and Security, re: Security Education and Motivation Program, 3 September 1974. 93 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, letter from W.P. Stoker, Chief, Airport Planning and Security, re: Security Education and Motivation Program, 3 September 1974. 94 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, letter from W.P. Stoker, Chief, Airport Planning and Security, re: Security Education and Motivation Program, 3 September 1974.

257 ratings…; [and] provide employee protection.”95 To federal authorities, then, apathetic and untrained airport workers represented possible risks in their own right at newly securitized airports. Nevertheless, officials presumed that air travellers posed the greatest risk and focused on conditioning them to accept the reality of increased security and regulation. As a result, federal efforts to create security-conscious travellers became linked to sterilizing material spaces inside airports. In early 1973, for example, the government banned issues of Skyjack magazine, an American publication, from airports nationwide following a thwarted skyjacking on a Pacific Western Airlines (PWA) aircraft in Vancouver several weeks earlier.96 Following that incident, the CALPA had expressed outrage that Skyjack was available at airports, saying it was disturbed by the “lurid sensationalism of this publication and the crass commercialization of the grievous menace of air piracy. Such a magazine, particularly when displayed at an airport stand, could be the catalyst which would give a person with a deranged mind the idea to hijack an aircraft.”97 The federal government then began to remove other items that could be used as potential weapons. It banned toy pistols after discovering that the thwarted PWA air hijacker had tried to take control of the plane using one purchased in the Vancouver airport’s gift shop.98 It also targeted items, like letter openers and pocket knifes, that might especially entice skyjackers. Authorities singled out Montreal-Dorval’s duty free shop for selling unusually elaborate Swiss-army knifes that contained a blade, a nail file, corkscrew, can opener, screwdriver, cap lifter, reamer double cut saw, tweezer, toothpick, and scissors, as well as golf balls, tennis rackets, pens and pencils.99 They ordered these

95 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, letter from W.P. Stoker, Chief, Airport Planning and Security, re: Security Education and Motivation Program, 3 September 1974. 96 For details of this incident, see Gero, Flights of Terror, 131. 97 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 3, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, letter from Charles Simpson, Canadian Air Line Pilots Association President, December 1972. 98 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 3, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, letter from W.H. Huck, Administrator of Canadian Air Transportation Administration, 15 January 1973. 99 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, letter from Eric Winsor, re: Hijacking and “Offensive” Items in Airport Gift Shops, 15 January 1973.

258 shops to immediately discontinue the sale of these items, although one official who was part of the discussion was unconvinced the measures would be effective: “no matter how many items we remove from airport shop stocks, a determined hijacker will not be deterred.”100 Sterilizing the airport also meant inserting architectural and material cues that would re-socialize the public on desirable airport etiquette by inducing specific affective responses. As Peter Adey has argued, airport technologies of control that were central to the surveillance culture not only regulated individual movements, but also manipulated their feelings and emotions.101 In other words, the security regime derived some of its power from constructing an environment of “complete control” in which people felt compelled to be self-vigilant and govern themselves in ways that authorities sanctioned as safe and desirable.102 This happened most prominently at the passenger checkpoints, which divided the landside and the secured airside. At this juncture, the process of sterilization most evidently reshaped the cultural codes that governed airport space, conditioning travellers to discipline themselves as they prepared to be screened. In late December 1974, airport security workers began installing new signs at passenger checkpoints that read “IT’S NO JOKING MATTER: Do not joke about guns, bombs, or hijacking an aircraft. We are required to take these remarks seriously. Anyone making such a statement may be arrested and prosecuted.”103 Measures like these indicated that authorities viewed self-governance as a critical element of an airport surveillance culture structured around control and vigilance.104 Travellers who became security-conscious helped to not only legitimize expanded governmental power at airports, but also isolate

100 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, letter from W.P. Stoker, Chief, Policing and Security Division, Airport Services and Security Branch, re: Weapons – Duty Free Shops, 28 February 1975; LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 3, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, letter from Eric Winsor, re: Hijacking and “Offensive” Items in Airport Gift Shops, 15 January 1973. 101 Peter Adey, “Airports, Mobility, and the Calculative Architecture of Affective Control,” Geoforum 39, 1 (2008), 440. 102 Peter Adey, “Surveillance at the airport: surveilling mobility/mobilizing surveillance,” Environment and Planning A 36, 8 (2004), 1366. See also Rygiel, Globalizing Citizenship, 68-69. 103 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, letter from D.A. Tresham, Airport Policing and Security Division, Airport Services and Security Branch, re: Security Signing, 3 December 1974. 104 On bomb jokes and airport security in the post-9/11 era, see Lauren L. Martin, “Bombs, bodies, and biopolitics: securitizing the subject at the airport security checkpoint,” Social & Cultural Geography 11, 1 (2010), 26-29.

259 specific people and codes of conduct that violated the dominant norms in these environments. In the ensuing years, the travelling public largely internalized these changes and adopted the affective responses that federal authorities desired. Some developed a security neurosis and grew concerned with how their behaviour and that of others conformed to airport surveillance and its cultural codes.105 In 1973, Hugh Whittington, the editor of Canadian Aviation, Canada’s largest aviation trade periodical, described being searched at security checkpoints in Vancouver and San Francisco airports after weapons detectors identified metal on his body. Whittington’s commentary offered insight into how the vigilance preached by the government was already affecting ordinary travellers by altering how they observed and interacted with others at airports. After twice setting off the detector in San Francisco, Whittington recounted feeling publicly stigmatized as “everyone in the lounge had dropped what he was doing and was glaring at me with a ‘Ha! They got one!’ expression on his face. I was worried.” Guards soon determined that one of Whittington’s credit cards had been the source of the alarm and allowed him through, but he could not help thinking that bystanders now viewed him differently because of the experience: “the other passengers went back about their business, but I was the subject of many cautious glances on the one-hour flight to Vegas.”106 Whittington’s account suggests that he became more self-conscious as the security search unfolded, largely driven by an irrational fear of capture at a “moment of crisis” from being examined by guards.107 In other words, he worried not only that he would be accused of wrongdoing, but that others had also concluded he was an unsafe traveller because he had been singled out. Reflecting on the experience, he expressed deep conflict and ambiguity about the means of surveillance to differentially categorize travellers by levels of risk. While he was “very concerned that I was being taken for something I am not”, and aware that “when you grow up in a free society, it sure feels

105 Engin Isin has argued that neurosis develops at borders and other security checkpoints from the fear of being excluded by sovereign representatives. See Engin Isin, “The neurotic citizen,” Citizenship Studies 8, 3 (2004), 217-235. 106 “Security,” Canadian Aviation, March 1973, 4. 107 Mark Salter argues that this “moment of crisis” is driven by a compulsion to explain one’s actions to border guards at borders and other security checkpoints, part of the individual submitting to sovereign authority. See Mark Salter, “When the exception becomes the rule: borders, sovereignty and citizenship,” Citizenship Studies, 12, 4 (2008), 365-380.

260 strange to all of a sudden be searched and heavily scrutinized because you want to go from A to B by airline”, he nevertheless concluded “the entire security exercise at airports is necessary.”108 Although Whittington struggled to reconcile differing emotions about new airport security measures, his public endorsement showed that he ultimately accepted heightened state surveillance and regulation at airports. Whether others who enjoyed less privilege and status than him – a white man – felt the same is less clear.109 Nevertheless, Whittington’s personal reflections on airport security in the early 1970s helped to show that an airport surveillance culture had begun to emerge in Canada and around the world in the late twentieth century.

Airport Security Breaches and Surveillance Failures The fact that federal authorities naturalized airport security for many air travellers in the early 1970s did not mean the people and technologies that comprised the state surveillance regime exercised absolute power or were immune from national scrutiny. Rather, as the decade progressed the airport surveillance culture actually grew weaker and more vulnerable, notably because of a series of successful security breaches that some elements of the national media and public orchestrated to evaluate the system. Collectively, these incidents exposed not only the lack of security awareness and readiness amongst airport workers, but also the incomplete, uneven success of the federal airport sterilization project to date. As a result, people whom the federal government had reconditioned to be effective screening agents at sterilized airports suddenly found their own workplace performance questioned amidst new revelations about the unfinished state of surveillance at national airports. Initially, airport surveillance appeared to work effectively as psychological deterrents against prospective skyjackers and air saboteurs. In the NASP’s early years, airport security checkpoints nationwide discovered and confiscated a significant cache of illegal items from departing passengers. In October 1973, at Montreal-Dorval the RCMP

108 “Security,” Canadian Aviation, March 1973, 4. 109 There is little historical research in Canada on the role of gender and race in shaping airport screening practices and individual affective responses. For a contemporary study, see Alica Baker, “Securing Bodies: Performances of Security by Transgender Travelers in Canadian Airports and Borders,” M.A. Thesis, Carleton University, 2013.

261 seized three pistols, 83 various knives, four swords, four switchblade knives, one Hachette, one 12 gauge shotgun, one .25 revolver, and one brass knuckle.110 The next year, the RCMP confiscated over 6,000 knives at airports across the country, claiming the figure was actually closer to 10,000 if records provided by individual airports had been more complete. That same year, in its searches the RCMP also found “spear guns and karate sticks, bullets and blasting caps, slingshots and mace, and even containers full of combustible butane fuel”.111 One the one hand, it attributed many of these seizures to “innocent possession” as people simply forgot to check their contents before boarding. But it also stressed that these and other seemingly harmless items had to be rigorously inspected because they could be converted into unsafe and potentially violent weapons. Said one official: “if a water pistol can shoot water, it can also shoot acid.”112 While the number of seizures suggested some regulatory success, they also illustrated the stark cultural transformation at airports during the 1970s as travellers were exposed to a new set of rules and rituals governing airports and commercial aviation more broadly. But reconditioning the public to experience and navigate airports differently mattered little if the government’s surveillance strategy was poorly executed. A series of subsequent security breaches made this clear. On the one hand, mishaps were sometimes accidental. In March 1978, while waiting to pass through a security checkpoint at Toronto, 12-year old David Gray spotted images of two guns on the x-ray scanner and notified officials who had not seen them. He had noticed their mistake after an x-ray scan of a woman’s hand luggage was mistakenly projected onto a nearby television screen. After officials searched the bag again, they discovered two toy pistols the woman had bought for family members, which the scanner should have detected.113 A similar error occurred two years later when two writers for Canadian Aviation inadvertently discovered another glitch in x-ray systems at Montreal-Dorval. Both had metal letter openers in their carry-on attaché cases, but the x-ray detected only one, even after they were re-screened. The issue turned out to be the angle of placement in their cases; while

110 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 3, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, progress report from M.A.S.S. Montreal to W. Stoker, Ottawa, November 1973. 111 “Airport check nets 10,000 knifes,” Montreal Gazette, 6 March 1975, 9. 112 “Airport check nets 10,000 knifes,” Montreal Gazette, 6 March 1975, 9. 113 “Alert boy finds ‘guns’,” Toronto Star, 28 March 1978, A3.

262 the x-ray caught the letter opener that was lying flat, it failed to see the other that was on its side and thus too thin to present a proper, recognizable shape.114 Pre-meditated airport security breaches also exposed vulnerabilities in the state’s screening regime. After federal authorities had announced mandatory screening and begun implementing the NASP, some in the national media decided to test the new surveillance and share their experience with their readers. In March 1973, reporter and columnist Robert Parker arranged with CBC’s Here and Now to review security at Gander International Airport and film a typical passenger checkpoint inspection.115 As part of this, Parker concocted a scheme to smuggle illegal weapons through the checkpoint and alerted staff of his stunt beforehand. Even after notifying them, Parker successfully smuggled his weapons through three separate security checks involving both walk-through and hand-held metal detectors. Parker attributed his success to the structural failings of Canadian airport security and called for further reform, ignoring the fact that the Trudeau government had announced security upgrades only two months earlier. He argued that his experience underlined glaring vulnerabilities in the airport surveillance net that skyjackers and saboteurs could easily exploit. Parker was particularly adamant that creative people could easily beat the system because security staff and technology were not adept at finding carefully concealed weapons. He suggested that workers were too dependent on flawed and rudimentary technology that was unlikely to differentiate multiple traces of metal: If the detector sets up a search near a man’s navel, it’s probably picked up his belt buckle. But it could also have picked up the switchblade he has taped to his gut under the buckle, and the searched won’t know which it was until he has the buckle moved out of the way and checks again. The security team at Gander didn’t do that.116

And because of these failings, Parker believed the possibilities for thwarting security were endless for people seeking to hijack or harm aircraft: A knife can be taped inside a camera; with guts removed, you could hide a full- sized .38 calibre revolver, in, say, a Polaroid. Your shirt cuff and jacket will neatly conceal a small knife held against the underside of your wrist by a watch

114 “Security screen loophole,” Canadian Aviation, June 1980, 52. 115 Gander was one of the nine airports that the NASP designated for major security upgrades. At the time, it was still used by some airlines as a refuelling stop on transatlantic flights. 116 “Coffee, Tea, or Cuba?” March 1973, Maclean’s, 91.

263 bracelet, and there are a number of small purse automatics that would fit inside a large package of cigarettes.117

Although Parker was shocked by his findings at Gander, there is a tension in his account upon learning of the result. On the one hand, he expressed horror that his well-intentioned plan had gone awry. “What started out to be a simple film demonstration of a working security system”, he wrote, “suddenly became a frightening object lesson on how simple it is to hijack a plane.” Soon, however, Parker’s tune became more self-congratulatory. “I beat the security system, hands down”, he crowed. “In fact I gave them a running start by telling them in advance that I was armed and they still couldn’t find anything.”118 Taken as a whole, Parker’s recounting of his Gander experience blurred the lines between edification and pleasure, revealing both a palpable fear and a morbid fascination with the skyjacking culture of mass air travel and the heightened surveillance reforms erected in response. By moving beyond the encounter with Gander security to vividly imagine other security breaches, Parker characterized airport screening as a game of trickery and deceit as much as a high-stakes national security project.119 Or, to quote Christopher Schaberg, it represented “an elaborate funhouse of seeing and being seen – and deriving pleasure whenever possible”.120 Newly mandatory airport security inspections, then, could represent a form of entertainment to people, like Parker, who could not help but imagine checkpoints as sites where individuals could invert and subvert state power. Parker’s exploits inspired others to test airport surveillance elsewhere in Canada. In January 1974, a team of Global TV reporters managed to enter the secured airside at Toronto without being seen by staff or challenged by RCMP officers, who called the incident “rather embarrassing”.121 Cameraman Thomas Sharina recounted his surprise at how quickly his group found themselves in a part of Toronto that had been sterilized to prevent breaches like theirs:

117 “Coffee, Tea, or Cuba?” March 1973, Maclean’s, 91. 118 “Coffee, Tea, or Cuba?” Maclean’s, March 1973, 91. 119 Lisa Parks, “Points of Departure: The Culture of US Airport Screening,” Journal of Visual Culture 6, 2 (2007), 189-90. 120 Christopher Schaberg, The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (London: Continuum, 2012), 78-79. 121 “Newsmen’s unimpeded tour of airport embarrasses RCMP,” Globe and Mail, 9 January 1974, 9.

264 When we got near the airport our sound man…suggested we go through the cargo entrance. So we just drove through. We drove on past a guardhouse with nobody in it, right on to the tarmac between two US planes and started shooting film. We could have driven right on to the runway if we had wanted to or even driven right into the 747. We stayed around for a while shooting film, then we left on our own to go inside and shoot some more film. Inside we met some RCMP people and told them we were taking film inside the airport and they said there was no problem.122

Even though he knew his actions were illegal, Sharina’s eagerness to describe the experience at length suggested he felt some degree of excitement from entering restricted areas without permission. His detailed account, moreover, helped to publicly reveal a gap between the official and real state of airport surveillance culture. In August 1975, Toronto experienced another serious security breach, instigated once again by some of the national media. Toronto Star reporter Jennifer Grass managed to access the airport’s tarmac after discovering unmarked doors in the departures-level cafeteria and main dining room that led directly to the runways via a service corridor. She walked through these doors three times without being questioned by several barmen, maintenance men and freight handlers who “smiled hello but didn’t bother asking what I was doing there.”123 Each time she proceeded to the runway and entered a different empty airplane on the tarmac, remaining inside for five minutes without being questioned. Three baggage handlers sat outside one plane and watched Grass enter it, and then greeted her after she exited. On her last trip Grass brought along a Star photographer, who snapped images of her alone on the tarmac, gazing at an empty jet. Grass’s account of the incident implied that she never believed she would not be caught even after initially breaching security: I boarded the nearest Air Canada 707 when I first got out on the tarmac. But, after a brief rest…I gave up waiting for somebody to order me off and left. No one paid any attention to me as I walked casually along the tarmac for about 15 minutes…Finally, I woke up a sleeping attendant to get directions back into the airport…A security guard at the arrivals entrance opened the door and smiled as I re-entered the building.124

122 “Newsmen’s unimpeded tour of airport embarrasses RCMP,” Globe and Mail, 9 January 1974, 9. 123 “Airport security tightened after reporter finds flaws,” Toronto Star, 8 August 1975, A3. 124 “Airport security tightened after reporter finds flaws,” Toronto Star, 8 August 1975, A3.

265 Like Parker and Sharina, Grass described her experience as surreal and disconcerting, an improbable tale that underscored serious security shortcomings at national airports. Toronto airport officials refrained from condemning Grass, arguing instead that her actions made airports safer and were based on civic engagement rather than hedonistic play. Hugh Devitt, the airport’s manager, essentially thanked Grass for discovering security flaws and writing an expose about it, declaring she had “rendered a public service by finding that chink in our security”.125 His remarks portrayed Grass’s actions not as dangerous and illegal, but as an affirmation of citizenship that helped to reinforce, rather than undermine, airport surveillance culture and its technologies of control.126 In other words, Grass had made the state’s airport security regime safer for everyone by adopting an appropriate security-conscious attitude and taking it to its logical end. Federal officials and airport authorities also began to confront the limits of federal surveillance through their own security tests. In the summer of 1974, RCMP officers at Toronto successfully smuggled weapons through an Air Canada security checkpoint on several occasions without notifying the guards on duty. Two officers, Corporal W.P. Heckendorn and Constable Ellis, hatched a plan to have Ellis walk through the checkpoint’s metal detector with Heckendorn’s unloaded service revolver. At the time, Ellis concealed his uniform and identity with a disguise and Heckendorn observed from a distance. According to Heckendorn’s account, Ellis initially walked through the metal detector while security personnel were busy with other passengers. He “was not challenged for a boarding pass or a ticket…Cst. Ellis was subsequently stopped by a guard. She questioned him about his ticket but appeared satisfied at the flimsiest excuse.” At that point, the guard personally searched Ellis, which “produced a lighter, some change, a belt buckle, but no gun. He was then allowed to proceed through. The gun was positioned on the left side of Cst. Ellis at waist level and midway between his side and back. The gun handle was visible only if his sports coat was pushed back.” Once through, another RCMP officer who had been observing convinced Constable Ellis to try again in

125 “Airport security tightened after reporter finds flaws,” Toronto Star, 8 August 1975, 3. 126 Rygiel, Globalizing Citizenship, 31-43.

266 a different line at the same checkpoint. Again, guards failed to detect the gun or verify if Ellis had a boarding pass or ticket.127 Suspicions about uneven security enforcement at passenger checkpoints motivated Heckendorn and Ellis to act. In recent months they had grown frustrated with Air Canada’s security performance at Toronto, concluding that the airline’s strategy and methods at checkpoints were “sorely lacking”.128 This followed several recent incidents in which airline officials at specific checkpoints in the terminal had personally intervened to accelerate or altogether waive the screening of some departing passengers. In April 1974, one manager on duty at a Terminal II passenger checkpoint with a lengthy queue panicked, opening three additional doors to the secured airside and waving through individuals who had not yet been screened, while declaring “I can’t take this any longer. These people have to meet their flight.”129 There were other instances of aborted screening the same year. In July, heavy passenger congestion at a Terminal II checkpoint prompted the Air Canada supervisor to open another line and allow “a number of people” through without searching or screening them. According to the RCMP’s report, the supervisor “made a statement to the effect of, we have aircraft sitting out there that are costing us a thousand dollars a minute”.130 Another Air Canada supervisor nearby refused to provide his name to the RCMP for the report and, within earshot of RCMP officials, allegedly told security personnel to “not check ladies handbags and the carry on luggage so closely as there was a long lineup.”131 These events led B.L. Campbell, Inspector of the RCMP’s Toronto security detachment and author of the report, to conclude that Air Canada staff who oversaw passenger screening at individual checkpoints were “not only indifferent but actually antagonistic

127 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, report by RCMP Cpl. W.P. Heckendorn, 24 July 1974. 128 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, report by RCMP Cpl. W.P. Heckendorn, 24 July 1974. 129 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, letter from B.L. Campbell, Inspector, Toronto International Airport Detachment, 7 August 1974. 130 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, letter from B.L. Campbell, Inspector, Toronto International Airport Detachment, 7 August 1974. 131 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, letter from B.L. Campbell, Inspector, Toronto International Airport Detachment, 7 August 1974.

267 toward security” and lambaste the airline for practices that “clearly subverts a multimillion dollar security program being conducted directly by your Department [the Ministry of Transport] and this Force.”132 Another blow-up between government officials and airline staff occurred only days later at the same airport. According to a report filed by RCMP Constable G.M. Jenkins, an RCMP officer saw an Air Canada supervisor allow approximately 20 people booked on a flight to Winnipeg to pass through security without being properly searched. Once aware of the incident, Jenkins confronted the supervisor, who told him he had received permission from the RCMP Sergeant on duty, even though the Sergeant subsequently denied giving permission. Jenkins then went to the aircraft to tell the captain, B. Moore, that some of the flight’s passengers had not received security clearances. He stated that Moore “expressed his pleasure in this procedure and stated that the passengers should be re-scanned…[and] that if we start making allowances for particular groups [we] are defeating the whole purpose of Security.”133 The RCMP returned the passengers to the terminal to be searched and then allowed them to re-board; in total, the flight’s departure was delayed by three minutes. Protesting the move, an Air Canada Duty Manager supported the supervisor’s earlier actions, claiming the airline had the authority to exempt certain persons from the searches because “it is Air Canada’s plan and that they would be responsible.”134 These deliberate security oversights not only threatened to undermine the federal airport security regime. They also revealed rising frictions between authorities and airlines at security checkpoints over how to efficiently move bodies and goods to aircraft without compromising the mandatory screening process that government officials had only recently erected. At its heart, these disagreements underlined the tension between speed and slowness that had become symptomatic of mass aeromobility.135 On the one

132 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, letter from B.L. Campbell, Inspector, Toronto International Airport Detachment, 7 August 1974. 133 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, report by RCMP Cst. G.M. Jenkins, 2 August 1974. 134 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, report by RCMP Cst. G.M. Jenkins, 2 August 1974. 135 Some people made this connection even before the introduction of the jumbo jet in the late 1960s. See Ken Conoley, Airlines, Airports and You (Don Mills, ON: Longmans, 1968), 235. On the relationship between speed and security in mass air travel, see also Schaberg, The Textual Life of Airports, 22.

268 hand, airlines sold to the public a vision of jet age travel based on speed and convenience and recognized the practical and economic appeal of having their aircraft in the air and not parked at airport gates.136 But this vision belied the reality of worsening congestion and delays that travellers faced at airports worldwide as passenger volume steadily rose and surveillance measures took effect.137 Some airlines, then, prioritized speed and convenience for the travelling public over comprehensive airport screening. Although airlines like Air Canada felt entitled to adjust security procedures as they saw fit, the RCMP disagreed. In his report, Constable Jenkins accused Air Canada of complacency for operating as if “it [an attack] just won’t happen here [in Canada]”. He argued that the guards staffing the checkpoints would perform at a higher standard if “not constantly harassed by Air Canada supervisory personnel in an effort to speed the flow of passengers through the security line.”138 Moreover, Jenkins noted that patchy security enforcement defeated the purpose of a national surveillance program and weakened Canada’s role in the global security push against aeromobile risk. “This situation is incredible when one considers events which have occurred in other parts of the world,” he wrote. “The security screening procedures…are nothing more than a window dressing and are designed to impress rather than be effective. It is anticipated that sometime we are going to be faced with a serious incident which might well have been deterred, had we had effective security screening procedures.” If a serious incident occurred, Jenkins predicted that airlines would be widely blamed for deviating from international regulations.139 What Jenkins failed to consider, however, was the federal government’s own role in the security embarrassments of the 1970s. Having constructed an airport surveillance culture, it bore significant responsibility for any failings, irrespective of the RCMP’s frustration with airlines. The proliferation of accidental and orchestrated security breaches over the course of the decade had brought to light the fact that the screening process at passenger checkpoints nationwide functioned unevenly and arbitrarily. Even

136 Gordon, Naked Airport, 170-71. 137 Kenneth Hudson and Julian Pettifer, Diamonds in the Sky: A Social History of Air Travel (London: Bodley Head, 1979), 231. 138 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, report by RCMP Cpl. W.P. Heckendorn, 24 July 1974. 139 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, report by RCMP Cpl. W.P. Heckendorn, 24 July 1974.

269 though federal authorities largely managed to transform the material character of airports as they sterilized these environments against risk, the numerous security problems and tensions at passenger checkpoints provided evidence that it had much less success in engineering a cultural shift towards security-conscious behaviour to accompany the spatial transformation. Collectively speaking, then, episodic security breaches revealed serious vulnerabilities in airport surveillance leading into the 1980s.

Air India 182 and Narita Airport Bombings: Airport Security, Global Terrorism, and Neoliberalism The June 23, 1985 bombing of Air India 182 not only reignited public debate about Canadian airport security policy, but also pushed it into unprecedented terrain.140 As Air India 182 crossed the Atlantic Ocean en route to New Delhi via London, an explosive device on board the aircraft detonated, killing 329 people, including 280 Canadian citizens, and thrusting global terrorism into the national arena more acutely than at any point during the 1970s.141 Only an hour earlier, another bomb had exploded at Tokyo’s Narita Airport in a piece of luggage being transferred from CP Air 003, which had just arrived from Vancouver, to Air India 301, departing shortly for Bangkok. The blast killed two airport baggage handlers and injured four other people.142 These twin bombings, both allegedly linked to a group of Sikh nationalists living in Canada who opposed Indian rule, underlined the abject failure of the federal government’s effort to sterilize national airports against individual and organized terrorism on a global scale.143 The Air India 182 and Narita Airport bombings not only firmly brought to light the structural weaknesses in airport surveillance that had first emerged during the security mishaps in the 1970s. It also helped illuminate the neoliberal ideological forces that had begun to reshape dominant ideas about screening aeromobile populations. Although

140 In 2006 the federal government launched a public inquiry into the bombing, the findings of which were released in a nine volume, 3,864-page report four years later. See Air India Flight 182: A Canadian Tragedy (Ottawa: Commission into the Investigation of the Bombing of Air India Flight 182, 2010). 141 Bob Rae, Lessons to be Learned: The Report of the Honourable Bob Rae, Independent Advisor to the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness on Outstanding Questions with Respect to the Bombing of Air India Flight 182 (Ottawa: Air India Review Secretariat, 2005), 1. 142 Rae, Lessons to be Learned, 1. 143 After a prolonged investigation, one man from British Columbia was convicted of involvement in the bombings and two others were acquitted in 2005 due to lack of evidence. All three allegedly had links to Sikh nationalists overseas. Angela Failler, “Remembering the Air India Disaster: Memorial and Counter- Memorial,” The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 31, 2-3 (2009), 150.

270 officially committed to the international push to scrub airports clean of risk, federal authorities became less interested in overseeing this process in the years leading up to the 1985 bombings. Instead, they pivoted towards a neoliberal vision of risk prevention, withdrawing resources that had been devoted to security enforcement and delegating more responsibility to airlines that were already ambivalent about passenger and baggage checks. This ideological shift effectively granted airlines more freedom over their screening practices, enabling them to draw more from a pool of precarious labour to staff key security positions. While government oversight of airport security in the 1970s left much to be desired, the Air India 182 and Narita tragedies demonstrated that neoliberalism had made national airports and air surveillance worldwide less safe than before. In particular, it undermined the idea of sterile airports by introducing greater risk into one part of the system from people who were barely more qualified than the general public to search travellers and their baggage. Neoliberal ideology began to affect political orthodoxy in the 1970s. David Harvey has noted that as a set of ideas neoliberalism endorsed less state and more private sector involvement in economic and social policy, trumpeting the market instead of bureaucracy as the best means of generating growth and prosperity.144 Neoliberalism grew more influential in policy circles by the mid-1970s as business and state officials turned away from the Keynesian welfare state model that had shaped the political culture inside and outside Canada since the Great Depression.145 Spurred by the Energy Crisis and oil embargo by the Organization of Petroleum Exporters in 1973, the global economy worsened over the course of the decade and soon went into recession as individual nations grappled with slower growth, rising unemployment, and runaway inflation. Opponents of Keynesianism then began to mobilize against its model of big government by framing the economic downturn as a crisis that could only be solved by a radically different politico-economic vision.146 Their efforts soon bore fruit in public policy circles. By the early 1980s, newly elected governments in North America and Europe, including the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the United States and Britain, respectively,

144 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 145 On Keynesianism in Canada, see Robert Campbell, Grand Illusions: The Politics of the Keynesian Experience in Canada, 1945-1975 (Peterborough: Broadview, 1987). 146 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 1-38.

271 had embraced austerity programs comprised of concentrated budget cuts, support for free trade, and greater deregulation and privatization in order to significantly curb government spending and garner more private sector involvement in the economy.147 The appeal of neoliberalism, then, lay in transferring much of the responsibility for socio-economic stewardship from government to the market where private capital and the entrepreneurial spirit prevailed. Neoliberal ideology began to influence national public policy in the late twentieth century, first with the Trudeau Liberals and later more fully with the Progressive Conservatives under during the 1980s.148 Although Canada was not immune from the global economic tremors of the 1970s, it continued to post annual growth rates of more than 4% between 1973 and 1979 even as unemployment steadily rose. However, when the global economy entered a recession in 1982, the national economy sharply contracted by 5.5%, prompting the Liberals to introduce stimulus measures to try and restart growth. Although this move successfully revived the economy, it failed to reduce the national unemployment rate of nearly 12% and also exponentially increased government debt. Annual deficits grew from between 1.5 to 3 percent of GDP in the late 1970s to between 6 and 7 percent in the early 1980s.149 Once in power, the Mulroney Progressive Conservatives swiftly pulled back spending to tackle the ballooning deficit and debt and pursued a largely neoliberal agenda during its nine years in power, including dismantling Trudeau’s National Energy Program in 1985 and signing the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement in 1988 and the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Mexico in 1992.150 Federal authorities did not exclude air transport from this ideological shift. Broadly speaking, the Trudeau and Mulroney governments oversaw the deregulation of

147 On the Reagan era, see Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008 (New York: Harper, 2008). On the Thatcher era, see Eric J. Evans, Thatcher and Thatcherism (London: Routledge, 2013). 148 Jonathan Swarts, Constructing Neoliberalism: Economic Transformation in Anglo-American Democracies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 51-56, 71-74. 149 Swarts, Constructing Neoliberalism, 72-73. 150 NAFTA officially came into force on January 1, 1994. For a generally supportive look at the Mulroney years, see Raymond B. Blake, ed., Transforming the Nation: Canada and Brian Mulroney (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007). For a more critical take, see Stephen McBride and John Shields, Dismantling the nation: the transition to a corporate rule in Canada (Halifax: Fenwood, 1997).

272 the country’s air travel industry, a process that was completed by the late 1980s.151 In the late 1970s, the Liberal government took significant steps in this direction by passing the Air Canada Act in 1978, which severed Air Canada’s ties to the Canadian National Railway and transformed the airline into a wholly owned government subsidiary. It also imposed on the airline the same regulations that other Canadian airlines faced, which ended the preferred status Air Canada had enjoyed on certain domestic and international routes since its inception in 1937. By the mid-1980s, the Progressive Conservative government had decided to completely cut the government’s ties to the airline. It proceeded to enact the National Transportation Act in 1988, which privatized Air Canada and turned it into a publicly owned entity.152 The Liberals and Progressive Conservatives also moved to restructure airport security along more neoliberal lines during the 1970s and early 1980s in a variety of ways. The NASP and amendments to the National Aeronautics Act in 1973 actually contained the seeds of this dramatic change. As part of its amendment to the Act, the Trudeau government made individual airlines, both domestic and foreign, responsible for screening passengers and baggage on their flights.153 While the RCMP airport detachments, which reported to the federal Ministry of Transport, would oversee this process and the government would continue to certify the guards who were hired, the airlines themselves were in charge of operating the mandatory passenger checkpoints, assuming some of the costs of managing aeromobile risks.154 The federal decision to delegate this key responsibility to airlines represented an early cost-cutting measure that substantially removed a significant layer of regulatory oversight. A sharp decline in skyjackings and air sabotages by the end of the 1970s gradually weakened federal interest in airport surveillance.155 In Canada, for example,

151 Garth Stevenson, The Politics of Canada’s Airlines from Diefenbaker to Mulroney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 194-96. 152 Peter Pigott, Flying Colours: A History of Commercial Aviation in Canada (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1997), 189. 153 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, NASP status report, October 1974. 154 The federal responsibility for certifying airport security guards was later cited in Canada, House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 33rd Parliament, 2nd Session, Vol. 11, 25 March 1988, 14148. 155 For example, the United States averaged only eight skyjackings a year between 1974 and 1978. See Choi, Aviation Terrorism, 15.

273 there were no successful skyjackings after 1974.156 The precipitous drop in air violence led federal officials to argue that some elements of the security regime could now be relaxed. In 1977, Minister of Transport Otto Lang hinted that austerity measures were coming. “Hijacking in North America has been almost eliminated and there has not been a successful hijacking in Canada for more than 4 years,” he argued. “The federal government is concerned over the rising costs for policing and security at airports and…is looking into ways of reducing these costs at airports through use of revised security criteria.”157 But for those who felt responsible for aircraft and passenger safety, particularly airline pilots, the declining number of incidents was no reason to radically descale screening measures. “We find ourselves constantly striving to maintain the level of security we consider necessary,” said Fred Deveaux, Air Canada pilot and spokesman for the security division of the Canadian Airline Pilots Association. “Just because you haven’t had a fire in 10 years is no reason to get rid of the fire department.”158 But Deveaux soon found himself in the minority. Buoyed by the drop in air violence, federal officials began scaling back the NASP by curtailing its budget less than a decade after it was enacted. For example, even before trimming overall governmental spending during the 1982 recession, the Trudeau government began reducing financial commitments to the airport security program. One of its targets was the RCMP airport detachment. The RCMP presence had steadily grown at airports in preceding years, eclipsing 800 officers nationwide in 1976 and remaining above that figure into the next decade.159 However, in a bid to save $1.5 million in security costs the Liberals swiftly removed more than 300 positions nationwide and significantly downsized airport detachments in smaller places that largely handled domestic traffic, such as Prince George, British Columbia.160 Individual airlines, meanwhile, were unhappy with being responsible for passenger screening. They began to fiercely lobby government officials to scale back security, particularly as skyjackings and sabotage incidents declined and as annual

156 Air India Flight 182: A Canadian Tragedy, 168-69. 157 LAC, RG73, Volume 1063, File Number 11-88, Part 2, File “RCMP – National Airport Security Program – General”, letter from Otto Lang to Iona Campagnola, 17 May 1977. 158 “A high-priced fight against hijackers,” Maclean’s, 27 September 1982, 13. 159 LAC, RG12, Volume 5067, File Number 5172-4-1, Part 4, File “Airports – Security and Policy – National Airport Security Program – General”, clipping from Edmonton Journal, 3 July 1974. 160 “A high-priced fight against hijackers,” Maclean’s, 27 September 1982, 13.

274 growth helped to make the industry more lucrative and competitive.161 As mentioned earlier, national airlines had sometimes undermined the airport security regime in the 1970s by foregrounding passenger security checks to speed up the screening process. They did this to avoid departure delays and being saddled with extra costs – which could run into the thousands of dollars – that would accrue from aircraft grounded longer than scheduled.162 Airlines, in other words, had a stake in seeing greater speed and minimal slowness or stasis in mass aeromobility since their business model, and profitability, was predicated on achieving timely departures and arrivals to keep total operating costs low.163 Privatization and deregulation combined to consolidate the neoliberal airport security vision by the early 1980s. Once legally assigned the responsibility for passenger screening, fiscally conscious airlines proceeded to outsource it to private companies, part of a larger evolution in transport governance by the end of the century that saw greater privatization of public transport services.164 From the airlines’ perspective, tendering security contracts offered them an additional means of keeping costs low by hiring a company willing to underbid its competitors, a prospect that held great appeal as competition between airlines became globalized by the late twentieth century.165 In practice, however, tendering actually softened airport surveillance by transferring more responsibility for risk management to private companies that prioritized the profit motive above public safety and failed to treat airport security as a public good.166 Both the Air India disaster and the Narita Airport bombing occurred in part because of neoliberal deregulation and privatization of national airport security. A series of technological and procedural security failures leading up to Air India 182 directly influenced the tragedy that soon unfolded. In the early morning of June 22, a man calling

161 Stevenson, The Politics of Canada’s Airlines, 62-75. 162 For more on the economics of the global aviation industry, see Rigas Doganis, The Airline Business (London: Routledge, 2006). 163 Expenses incurred on the ground represent one type of airline operating cost. For a brief discussion, see Pat Hanlon, Global Airlines: Competition in a transnational industry (Burlington, MA: Elsevier, 2007), 37- 47. 164 Richard Knowles, Jon Shaw, Iain Doherty, eds., Transport Geographies: Mobilities, Flows, and Spaces (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 69. 165 Peter Belobaba and Amedeo Odoni, “Introduction and Overview,” in Peter Belobaba, Amedeo Odoni, and Cynthia Barnhart, eds., The Global Airline Industry (West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2009), 1- 12. 166 Barry E. Prentice, “Canadian airport security: the privatization of a public good,” Journal of Air Transport Management 48 (2015), 52-59.

275 himself “Manjit Singh” successfully convinced a busy flight attendant at Vancouver International Airport to accept his suitcase and check it for Air India 182 even though he was waitlisted for the flight.167 At the same airport that night, L. Singh checked in a separate bag for CP Air 003 to connect in Tokyo to Air India 301, which was destined for Bangkok. The bag was not x-rayed in Vancouver because the airline had not instituted mandatory inspections for that flight.168 Guards did x-ray baggage for Air India 182 because the airline had stipulated such measures for Toronto-New Delhi flights. Prior to departure on June 22, however, the x-ray machines at Toronto broke down after finishing 75% of the checked baggage. Rather than trying to acquire another machine to finish the job, Air India managers on duty ordered staff of Burns Security, which had won the airline’s contract to handle security at Toronto, to instead use the PD4 device to scan the rest. The PD4 was a more portable, hand-held explosives sniffer that could detect, but not identify, traces of metal. Air India managers made the decision to use the PD4 in spite of the fact that Burns security guards had not received any formal training with the devices.169 Concerned about the PD4, a Burns employee objected to using it to scan the remaining baggage, but was rebuked by an Air India supervisor who allegedly demanded, “you do it the way I want it done”.170 Some of the hand-scanned bags, including Singh’s checked luggage, triggered an alert, but guards refrained from re-scanning or opening them before they were loaded on the aircraft. Burns neglected to inform Air India about the alerts because they were of a different tone and duration than the sounds they had been instructed to listen for.171 Several hours later, Singh’s suitcase exploded at 35,000 feet as Flight 182 neared Ireland, killing everyone on board.

167 On the sequence of events leading up to Air India 182, see Kim Bolan, Loss of Faith: How the Air India Bombers Got Away With Murder (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2005) and Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee, The Sorrow and the Terror: The Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (Toronto: Viking, 1987). 168 Air India had adopted stricter passenger screening policies than federal regulations at the time because of recent threats made by Sikh nationalists against the airline. Rather than only screening carry-on luggage as required by the Aeronautics Act, the airline x-rayed all passenger baggage. 169 Air India Flight 182: A Canadian Tragedy, Volume 1, 104-06. The report noted that the RCMP had serious concerns that the PD4 was an unreliable screening tool, but did not make Air India aware of its position. 170 “Air India bags loaded despite alarm: witness,” Toronto Star, 26 June 1985, A1. 171 “Breakdown revealed in baggage security for Air India flight,” Toronto Star, 26 November 1985, A1. Air India had instructed its guards to listen for a long, shrill beep rather than a short, low beep that Singh’s suitcase generated.

276 The Air India 182 tragedy revealed that global terrorism and neoliberal ideology had combined to further erode airport surveillance practices that had already appeared vulnerable in the 1970s. Nonetheless, the Mulroney government swiftly moved to frame the incident not as a security failure, but as an unforeseeable manifestation of global shocks migrating to the national arena. “We’re probably entering a new era of reality,” declared Don Mazankowski, Minister of Transportation, “where we as Canadians thought we were immune to the horrors of terror and sabotage.”172 He later returned to the same point to stress the theme of collective national victimhood: “Part of the shock of these tragic events has been the thought: ‘Why here? Why Canada?’” he said. “The fact that terrorists have chosen to strike in one of the most non-violent countries in the world underscores how vulnerable every country is. We share a common problem.”173 Deputy Prime Minister Erik Nielsen concurred, thundering that “we will not allow this country to become a killing ground for international terrorism.”174 Other international observers analogously expressed disbelief that Canada had become linked to international terrorism, while downplaying national culpability in favour of condemning terrorism and calling for a stronger global response. “Civil aviation is under siege”, declared Rodney Wallis, director of security for the International Air Transportation Authority, in a Maclean’s article that was published in the wake of the bombings. He added that “while the causes of last week’s disasters are not yet clear, they have already exposed the weakest link in Canadian airport security: the myth that terrorists have no interest in Canada. In the wake of last Sunday’s terror, the era of innocence may be gone forever.”175 Writing in the Montreal Gazette shortly after the bombings, Dalton Camp absolved federal authorities of any fault and singularly blamed terrorist violence. He suggested that it was impossible to link international terrorism to the national arena because terrorist violence against civilians was antithetical to Canadian values and those of many other countries. “It can not any longer be said that we are any more secure from indiscriminate terror than anyone else…After the shock and horror all civilized people

172 Canada, House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 33rd Parliament, 1st Session, Vol. 4, 25 June 1985, 6153. 173 “Tough tactics urged to combat terrorism,” Globe and Mail, 28 June 1985, A10. 174 Canada, House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 33rd Parliament, 1st Session, Vol. 4, 25 June 1985, 6136. 175 “A New Reign of Terror,” Maclean’s, 8 July 1985, 24.

277 must have felt, there follows the questions of why Canadians were chosen as victims,” he wrote. He proceeded to make this point more forcefully: Canada, as a nation, has been studiously uninvolved in and disengaged from the blood feuds of these several murderous factions, as becomes a lesser power with a prudent policy of protecting its own interests and its nationals by avoiding even the appearance of intervention. This could not have been a blow struck in reprisal against injury, real or imagined. Instead, it could only have been a blow struck against our vulnerability.176

Others shared Camp’s feelings, including opposition Liberal MP George Baker who declared: “the Canadian public today is asking for better screening of people who enter this country and bring their political battles with them.”177 Comments like these not only had the initial effect of constructing the bombing as largely a non-Canadian tragedy involving non-Canadian citizens and suspects.178 They also paradoxically helped deflect real criticisms of the national airport security regime by positioning terrorism as a distinctly foreign expression that eluded the knowledge of authorities. The Mulroney government, for its part, took some steps to tighten airport security in the wake of the bombings. It issued a Ministerial Directive and later amended the Aeronautics Act to stipulate all checked baggage now had to be x-rayed, all cargo had to be held for 24 hours in air terminals to prevent against timed bombs, and any baggage left unclaimed for two hours had to be rescanned.179 Moreover, Transport Canada ordered 20 extra x-ray luggage scanners, each of which cost around $70,000, to add to the six already in use nationwide.180 Of those, it assigned 17 to Toronto, Montreal-Mirabel, and Vancouver as the country’s primary international hubs.181 At these airports, Transport Canada also established a new pre-security checkpoint to screen passengers and their luggage before they picked up tickets and checked their baggage. They were then screened again along with any carry-on items at the existing checkpoints closer to the

176 “Canada’s anti-terror security may be lax,” Montreal Gazette, 26 June 1985, B3. 177 Canada, House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 33rd Parliament, 1st Session, Vol. 4, 25 June 1985, 6145. 178 Maya Seshia, “From Foreign to Canada: The Case of Air India and the Denial of Racism,” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 27 (Spring 2012), 218-223. 179 Air India Flight 182: A Canadian Tragedy, Volume 1, 168-69. 180 Canada, House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 33rd Parliament, 1st Session, Vol. 4, 25 June 1985, 6148. 181 “Mirabel begins scanning cargo luggage,” Montreal Gazette, 2 July 1985, A4.

278 departure gates.182 These changes placed greater value on inspecting cargo as much as people, underscoring how the shift from skyjacking and bomb threats to air bombings had recast objects and things, like passenger baggage and cargo, as mobile risks in their own right within the surveillance net.183 In late June 1985, the federal government also ordered a review of security at national airports to be overseen by a specially created Interdepartmental Committee on Security and Intelligence consisting of several deputy ministers, the RCMP commissioner, and the director of CSIS.184 It appointed Blair Seaborn, the intelligence and security coordinator in the Privy Council office, to chair the committee and produce the report. The resulting document, known as the Seaborn Report, was released in September 1985.185 The bulk of the Report focused on the role of security execution, or the lack thereof, leading up to Air India 182, offering a series of recommendations on how to improve future security procedures. Seaborn stressed that airport security had to become more flexible and adaptive while maintaining a basic level of efficiency that each group of actors with a vested interest in the system – which included not only the government, airlines, and airport employees, but also the general public – would help enforce. In other words, Seaborn felt it was critical to resurrect a security-conscious mindset that would define the airport surveillance culture so that “in the event of a heightened threat or incident, each player [at the airport] knows what to do.”186 Even prior to the release of the audit and Seaborn Report, however, public outrage over the Air India 182 and Narita bombings had led some people to link the failure of national airport security to the competency of its labour force. Although the state largely remained silent, others raised concerns about worker preparedness and the role it had played in the bombings. No longer assured that its passengers and planes were sufficiently protected, Air India suspended flights to and from Canada after the bombing,

182 “Mirabel begins scanning cargo luggage,” Montreal Gazette, 2 July 1985, A4. Air India Flight 182: A Canadian Tragedy, Volume 1, 169. 183 Peter Adey, “Secured and Sorted Mobilities,” Surveillance & Society 1, 4 (2004), 503; David Lyon, “Filtering Flows, Friends, and Foes,” in Mark Salter, ed., Politics at the Airport (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 42. 184 “Official defends terminal safety,” Globe and Mail, 25 June 1985, 11. 185 Blair Seaborn, Report on Security Arrangements Affecting Airports and Airlines in Canada (Ottawa: Transport Canada, 1985). For a summary of the Seaborn Report, see Air India Flight 182: A Canadian Tragedy, Volume 4, 32-36. 186 Seaborn, Report on Security Arrangements Affecting Airports and Airlines in Canada, 7.

279 declaring it would not lift the suspension “unless security gets tight”.187 Duane Freer, director of the International Civil Aviation Organization’s Air Navigation Bureau, intimated that airport security alertness had been relaxed once skyjackings and bomb threats had begun to decline in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “Canada’s situation is like a firemen who work at a station where there is never a fire to fight,” he stated. “After a while, you get rusty and maybe a bit careless.”188 In a critical editorial, moreover, the Toronto Star declared that any functional airport security system began and ended with guards and other workers employed by the airlines or by the government. “Airport security is only as good as the people who operate it day in and day out,” the Star reasoned. “Checking airport luggage is a boring, but regrettably necessary job in a dangerous world. Even a moment’s inattention by someone watching an x-ray scanner could cost hundreds of lives…there’s a lot more to beefing up our airport security than buying the latest hardware.”189 Other critics more forcefully claimed that federal attitudes about national airport security had shifted towards a neoliberal model. Opposition politicians, for example, bemoaned privatization and deregulation policies that had seen individual airlines assume greater authority over passenger and baggage inspection since the 1970s. “They [the government] naturally want to cut costs”, stated NDP Transport critic Les Benjamin. “[But] the [Mulroney] Government must set the standards. It must not be left up to the airlines. Any smart terrorist knows that he can move stuff around Canada without much trouble…There can be no compromise on safety, and by extension, on security.”190 Benjamin, along with some Liberal MPs, also expressed concern about uneven federal surveillance nationally and suggested that weaker security at smaller, domestic airports would entice people who were seeking to bypass comprehensive inspections at the nation’s international hubs.191 Groups closer to the aviation industry, such as flight attendants and pilots, also seriously questioned the government’s handling of airport security before the twin

187 “Canadian airports safe, minister tells opposition,” Toronto Star, 26 June 1985, A21. 188 “The imposition of a state of seige,” Maclean’s, 8 July 1985, 24. 189 “Editorial: Attitudes shape airport safety,” Toronto Star, 28 June 1985, A18. 190 “All baggage going abroad to be X-rayed,” Globe and Mail, 25 June 1985, 1, 2. 191 Canada, House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 33rd Parliament, 1st Session, Vol. 4, 25 June 1985, 6148-58.

280 bombings, while expressing anxiety about their own safety if preventative measures ever failed again. CP Air flight attendant Attilio Gandolfi claimed that officials were “more worried about contaminated grass than whether or not someone is carrying a machine gun or bomb on to a plane.”192 Airline employees also expressed alarm that airlines did not take the continued threat of terrorism seriously enough after Air India 182. In mid-July 1985, George Surette, an Air Canada baggage handler at Montreal-Dorval, claimed that “things are getting pretty rough” after the airport had three false luggage bombs and bomb threats that month. In one incident, Surette observed the supervisor on duty put a suitcase that was vibrating and buzzing in a garbage bin outside the baggage room, which was located about 50 yards away from the domestic arrival lobby, without proceeding to evacuate the area.193 The Canadian Airline Flight Attendants Association (CALFAA), meanwhile, contended it had warned federal officials one year earlier that security guards should be government employees because airlines commanded less respect on the ground and were too preoccupied with the profit motive to be security-conscious enough. Said Larry Leblanc, President of the CALFAA: We’ve been unhappy about this [security] for some time…We do not believe this should in any way be an airline responsibility…The security guards have no authority. They let these things go. If they were Government employees, wearing Transport Canada uniforms, they would command more respect. They would have an official status, giving them the authority to cite regulations to airline supervisors and passengers…They would also probably be better paid and better trained.194

Airport security guards and other workers also began to publicly speak out against their working conditions. Their comments, later proven to be true, fuelled critiques about creeping neoliberalism in national airport security and linked the erosion of airport surveillance culture to the rise of precarious labour in private security during the late twentieth century.195 Workers reserved their harshest words for Burns Security, which

192 “Air terrorists are ‘unseen enemy’, flight crews say,” Montreal Gazette, 29 June 1985, B4. 193 “Airline ignores scares: agent,” Montreal Gazette, 16 July 1985, A3. 194 “Airport security force ill-trained, guard says,” Globe and Mail, 25 June 1985, 14. 195 Air India Flight 182: A Canadian Tragedy, Volume 1, 108-11. On the rise of private security and the job conditions these workers typically experienced, see Clifford Shearing and Philip Stenning, “Modern Private Security: Its Growth and Implications,” Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research 3 (1981), 193- 245; Jeff Maahs and Craig Hemmens, “Train in Vain: A Statutory Analysis of Security Guard Training Requirements,” International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice 22, 1 (1998), 91-101;

281 numerous airlines, including Air Canada, CP Air, and Air India, had contracted to handle their security at Toronto in the mid-1980s. In the first place, many former Burns employees claimed that they had received insufficient training from their employer to adequately perform their job. For its part, Burns touted its training program as comprehensive, pointing out that it consisted of four supervised shifts, an assigned binder of reading material, a Transport Canada-mandated video, and a culminating test. Nevertheless, in the days after the twin bombings an employee at Toronto’s Terminal I said that he knew of three colleagues who had never watched the video and that he had personally never taken the test.196 A company supervisor sided with this view, stressing that Burns prioritized smooth terminal flows because of the financial implications: Burns just doesn’t train you…They tell us to check for bombs but we don’t even know what they look like. I am aware of only one guard, with five years at the airport, who knew about bombs. The only real way to find out is to ask questions yourself…They [the airlines and Transport Canada] just want the flights to leave on time. If there are long line-ups they come along to hurry us up…That’s their biggest concern.197

Burns also came under fire for underpaying its workers. At the time of the 1985 bombings, Burns employees at Toronto allegedly made between $3.85 and $4.20 an hour, with some denied hospital insurance or life insurance. These became sticking points in contract negotiations later that summer as Burns resisted worker demands to increase hourly wages to a minimum of $5 and to extend insurance coverage to more employees.198 This startling disconnect between workers’ responsibilities and their pay as federally contracted employees was not lost on observers, particularly since the federal minimum wage was lower than every province’s minimum wage.199 Dave Kiddie, sales manager for a national x-ray manufacturer that sold to the aviation industry, claimed “there’s no replacement for a competent individual. They [Transport Canada] pay $75,000 for an x-ray machine and then they (Burns) pay a guy $4 an hour to watch it. It

Paul Seidenstat, “Terrorism, Airport Security, and the Private Sector,” Review of Policy Research 21, 3 (2004), 281-82. 196 “Bomb sniffers being made after request from Ottawa,” Globe and Mail, 26 June 1985, 9. 197 “Airport security force ill-trained, guard says,” Globe and Mail, 25 June 1985, 14. 198 “Tougher curbs sought in talks on airport security,” Toronto Star, 27 July 1985, A13. 199 The federal minimum wage at the time was $3.50. Cited in Canada, House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 33rd Parliament, 1st Session, Vol. 4, 25 June 1985, 6156.

282 doesn’t make sense, does it?”200 MP Les Benjamin, a staunch opponent of de-regulation, certainly did not think it did, fuming that tendering attracted “jerkwater, fly-by-night security companies…[from them] we get cheap work and cheap results.”201 In the ensuing years, private tendering continued to keep hourly wages of airport security guards low and, in turn, helped produce high job turnover and a rise in overtime work to fill those shortages. In 1986, one security guard, Milan Durecek, worked a total of 96 overtime hours during his first two weeks at Toronto and also worked 22 continuous hours because of worker shortages.202 He recalled seeing his coworkers regularly slacken on the job and sometimes deliberately refuse to check potentially suspicious items, a situation he attributed to their labour precarity: “they [the guards] are at the bottom of the ladder; the same guy guarding the airport is the same person who guards a construction site. This is why people look down at us…The phrase ‘who cares’ I’d hear daily [from fellow guards], not just on the screens but on a general approach to work.”203 By 1991, workers still made as little as $7.25 an hour, prompting the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers to claim that the tendering process airlines used to award security contracts to private companies had created “economic job ghettos” that attracted people who could not find work anywhere else. According to one security guard at Toronto, this only served to deepen workplace apathy: “Who can survive on $7.25 an hour? A lot of guards are here because it’s all they can get right now. If I made $10 an hour, I’d care about my job. People get lazy. I’ve seen it myself. They let stuff through that should be checked.”204 A Toronto Star investigation of surveillance at Toronto in late December 1985, meanwhile, revealed a growing workplace indifference towards security enforcement within the airport surveillance culture writ large. The report reinforced the precarious position of airport security guards and other workers: low wages, little training, and workplace exploitation (including stints at checkpoint x-ray monitors for as long as two hours without a break, despite industry recommendations that guards should switch every

200 “‘Human element’ called weak link in airport security,” Toronto Star, 26 December 1985, A1. 201 Canada, House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 33rd Parliament, 2nd Session, Vol. 11, 25 March 1988, 14144. 202 “Pearson guards working to exhaustion, ex-staffer says,” Toronto Star, 13 July 1986, A6. 203 “Pearson guards working to exhaustion, ex-staffer says,” Toronto Star, 13 July 1986, A6. 204 “Guards’ low pay sparks airport security fears,” Toronto Star, 2 July 1991, A9.

283 15 minutes to avoid concentration lapses).205 It also revealed a pattern of diminishing enforcement throughout the airport environment for which all key players – the state, airlines, and private security companies – were responsible and reluctant to collectively resolve.206 Among other things, the Star uncovered a failure by airlines to examine crew- owned luggage or packages on flights; improperly maintained television monitors on baggage scanners in airport terminals; poor background checks on guards hired for security duty; lack of control over temporary security passes distributed to airport employees; irregular identification checks in restricted areas and employee borrowing of badges to gain access; and widespread employee resentment with the badge system as well as a refusal to wear them unless supervisors were present.207 Moreover, in another incident that illustrated the relative powerlessness of guards within the security regime, one security guard was transferred to a more remote position at Toronto for barring a representative of a national corporation from a restricted area because he did not have an identification badge.208 Subsequent government inspections of airport security workers revealed how dysfunctional this culture had become. Between April 1986 and June 1987, the Mulroney government decided to test the skills of guards at airport security checkpoints nationwide to detect smuggled weapons and other items, the first time the government had officially commissioned such a measure. The results were discouraging. More than half of the 223 security guards employed at Toronto failed an unspecified security test taken during the first three months of government examinations, and 26 also failed the retest.209 Additionally, screeners missed 25 percent of the fake weapons, an astonishing figure that eclipsed the American rate of 20 percent. Although pledging $60 million to substantially improve guard training, Transport Minister John Crosbie claimed the high rate was

205 “‘Human element’ called weak link in airport security,” Toronto Star, 26 December 1985, A1. 206 The Air India 182 Commission of Inquiry concluded that information sharing between the RCMP, Transport Canada, airlines, and private security firms was haphazard at best, as each “operated in its own silo” and lacked a complete picture of security threats as a result. Air India Flight 182: A Canadian Tragedy, Volume 1, 110-11. 207 “‘Human element’ called weak link in airport security,” Toronto Star, 26 December 1985, A1. 208 “‘Human element’ called weak link in airport security,” Toronto Star, 26 December 1985, A1. 209 “Crosbie insists security better despite failures in airport tests,” Toronto Star, 1 October 1987, A8; Canada, House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 33rd Parliament, 2nd Session, Vol. 9, 1 December 1987, 11362.

284 reasonable since inspectors had tested every airport in Canada while American tests had focused on major hubs.210 Further evidence that neoliberal policies were harming airport security workers became clear as the decade progressed. In a January 1988 CBC report on airport security, several former and current employees of Canadian Protection Services, contracted to handle airport security at Calgary International Airport, decried its training approach as grossly inadequate. This was a serious allegation since the airport was poised to receive hundreds of thousands of additional international travellers during the Calgary Winter Olympics the following month. Although Canadian Protection defended its training standards and said workers had to pass several tests, the complainants alleged that they had started using metal detection wands before completing most of their security training, which amounted to watching two videos about pre-boarding screening procedures. Said a female employee who worked at the airport, “the first day I started I didn’t have any training, but was handed a wand and they told me to look for bombs. It’s ridiculous. I don’t want to be responsible for what happens.” Another former guard concurred, suggesting that the challenge of scanning travellers and luggage for risks without adequate training had made workers more anxious: “Everybody is scared up there. We are there to keep the public happy. We are there as figureheads and that’s it.”211 Making matters worse, in June 1988 the government confirmed that more than 7,000 airport security guards, baggage handlers and loaders, and gate attendants across the country, including 10% of all employees at Toronto, were working without mandatory CSIS security clearances because of a “serious backlog” in its screening procedures.212 These incidents underscored the fact that airport surveillance culture and security practices, particularly at passenger checkpoints, had begun to erode as the 1980s progressed. Creeping neoliberalization during this decade saw a growing number of low- wage, short-term, undertrained, and overwhelmed labourers overseeing key surveillance positions in the national airport security regime. As aeromobile risks shifted from

210 Canada, House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 33rd Parliament, 2nd Session, Vol. 8, 30 September 1987, 9493. 211 “Former guard slams security at airport for Winter Olympics,” Toronto Star, 4 January 1988, A4; Canada, House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 33rd Parliament, 2nd Session, Vol. 11, 25 March 1988, 14149. 212 Canada, House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 33rd Parliament, 2nd Session, Vol. 13, 3 June 1988, 16111.

285 skyjackings to air bombings and culminated in the Air India and Narita incidents, beleaguered airport security guards assumed more responsibility for screening risk precisely as their working conditions became more precarious and exploitive. The horrific 1985 twin bombings and the ensuing discourse about labour precarity indicated that neoliberal approaches to security had substantially weakened the state’s commitment to sterilizing airports against risk in the late twentieth century.

Conclusion In 2010, after four years of work the Commission of Inquiry into the Bombing of Air India Flight 182 released its report on the 1985 incident. The Commission concluded that the bombing had revealed serious security flaws at major national airports, particularly with respect to the “inadequate protection of the aircraft, inadequate control of access to restricted areas, deficiencies in airport security plans, and the need for improved security awareness”.213 It placed much of the blame for these shortcomings with the federal government, arguing that it had allowed a “lax and ineffective security culture” and “soft” screening mentality to prevail at the country’s international airports because of poor regulatory and funding decisions in the years leading up to the bombing.214 As a result, the Commission contended that federal oversight had made airports less safe and vulnerable to security breaches and failures merely a decade after regulatory measures had first been introduced. Written nearly twenty-five years after the bombing, the Commission of Inquiry can certainly be read as a product of a different political and security climate ushered in by 9/11.215 At the same time, however, its conclusions help to reinforce the changes sketched out in this chapter concerning the adoption and erosion of airport security and surveillance during the 1970s and 1980s. The growth in skyjackings and other acts of air violence in the late 1960s and early 1970s prompted federal authorities to institute sweeping security reforms that were designed to deter incidents domestically as well as

213 Air India Flight 182: A Canadian Tragedy, Vol. 1, 177. 214 Air India Flight 182: A Canadian Tragedy, Vol. 1, 24, 104-06. 215 On international airport security in the post-9/11 era, see John Harrison, International Aviation and Terrorism: Evolving Threat, Evolving Security (London: Routledge, 2009). On airport security in Canada after 9/11, see David Lyon, “Airport Screening, Surveillance, and Social Sorting: Canadian Responses to 9/11 in Context,” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice 48, 3 (June 2006), 397-411.

286 conform to new international anti-hijacking regulations. These changes collectively transformed the nation’s major airports into technocratic surveillance environments that had been materially and culturally reimagined as sterilized, risk-free places. But in some respects, the transformation proved to be more cosmetic than comprehensive. By the 1980s, neoliberal security approaches based on deregulation and privatization began to appeal to federal authorities that were less keen to maintain sterile airports as air violence decreased. The Air India 182 and Narita bombings tragically demonstrated that neoliberalism had exacerbated existing surveillance deficiencies and made national airports less safe by creating a pool of precarious workers who assumed security responsibilities that far outstripped their level of competency.

287 Conclusion

In 1991, Lee Richardson, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport, spoke in the House of Commons in support of the Mulroney government’s impending move to restructure airport governance in Canada. “The government’s objectives from the beginning [of the Conservative mandate],” he declared, “were to allow…the national airport system to operate in a most cost-effective and commercial manner…and to respond quickly to changing needs and market forces with innovative ideas.”1 What Richardson and his government favoured, essentially, was scaling back federal stewardship of airports, a marked departure from the approach that Canadian authorities had embraced between 1950 and 1990. Their desire to find a more efficient way to run airports charted a different course in the state’s jet age airport project, one that saw older processes continue to some extent, but also saw a more pronounced emphasis on capital than in earlier decades. Jet age Canada did not end in the early 1990s, in other words, but it did enter a new phase of airport development. The Mulroney government began to take steps to lessen government involvement in airports not long after Richardson’s speech. In 1992, it ceded day-to-day control of Toronto-Pearson, Montreal-Dorval, and Vancouver airports to newly created Local Airport Authorities (LAAs) under a long-term lease agreement with an ostensible non- profit focus. As part of the terms of agreement, the government still owned these airports and regulated air safety and services there, but was no longer responsible for operating and managing them. Two years later, the government cemented and broadened this shift by announcing the National Airports Policy (NAP).2 Heralded as a “new direction for ”, the NAP put “commercialization” – which the government defined as “any of a series of approaches by which market discipline and business principles can be introduced to traditional government activity” – at the centre of the nation’s transportation systems.3 In principle, this meant a shift from subsidizing to investing in transport systems, reducing “outdated or unnecessary regulations”

1 Canada, House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 34th Parliament, 3rd Session, Vol. 1, 3 June 1991, 942. 2 For an overview of the NAP, see David Gillen and William G. Morrison, “The economics of franchise contracts and airport policy,” Journal of Air Transport Management 11, 1 (2005), 43-44. 3 Transport Canada, “National Airports Policy,” http://www.tc.gc.ca/eng/programs/airports-policy-menu- 71.htm, accessed January 30, 2017.

288 “streamlining of the regulation-making process”, and getting users to pay instead of the state and citizens.4 Under the NAP, Transport Canada relinquished many of its regulatory responsibilities, including air traffic control, which the government transferred to NAV Canada, a privately run corporation, in 1996.5 At airports, meanwhile, the task for fulfilling the NAP’s objectives fell to LAAs. By 2000, LAAs had taken over operation and management of 23 of the nation’s 26 busiest airports.6 The NAP’s commercialization focus suggested that LAAs – although officially non-profit entities – were in fact expected to operate with a neoliberal, market- oriented mindset. This often meant working more closely with the private sector to build and finance airport improvements. In 1997, for example, an international consortium headed a $2.5 billion project to redevelop Toronto-Pearson’s Terminal I and II, one of many privately financed airport improvement projects across the country in the 1990s.7 It also meant embracing the potential new revenue streams – seeing people passing through airports, for example, as consumers as much as travellers. In 1998, Calgary International Airport, by then the fourth busiest airport in the country, began a seven-year, $300 million upgrade that included new shopping and entertainment features.8 Similarly, the Toronto-Pearson Terminal I project, which was completed in 2004, boasted extensive retail concessions, including new Roots, Sunglass Hut, and Lush stores, a “Streetcar” convenience store where Toronto transit maps and photographs of popular city landmark were on sale, and 22 shopping areas designed to reflect the character of different Toronto neighbourhoods.9 And as similar changes have taken place around the world, airports increasingly compete globally to offer the best travel experience to passengers in a bid to increase their market share. Canadian airports are very much a part of this local-global

4 Transport Canada, “National Airports Policy,” http://www.tc.gc.ca/eng/programs/airports-policy-menu- 71.htm, accessed January 30, 2017. 5 J.A.A. Lovink, “Choosing the right autonomy for operators of privatized government services: the case of NAV Canada,” Canadian Public Administration 42, 3 (Fall 1999), 371-386. 6 Randy Lippert and Daniel O’Connor, “Security Assemblages: Airport Security, Flexible Work, and Liberal Governance,” Alternatives 28, 1 (2003), 347. 7 “Gallery architect joins team redeveloping Pearson airport,” Toronto Star, 5 June 1997, A4. 8 “Flurry of expansions at airports near, far,” Toronto Star, 15 September 1998, G4. 9 “Travellers to get taste of Toronto,” Toronto Star, 3 April 2004, B3.

289 capitalist exercise; in 2016, Toronto-Pearson was ranked the eighth best airport in North America for shopping and other terminal facilities.10 Nevertheless, 9/11 showed that airports continue to be shaped by many different forces and dynamics. In the wake of the attacks, Canadian authorities passed Bill C-36, anti-terrorism legislation that in part strengthened airport security, and later introduced the Advanced Passenger Information/Passenger Name Record program.11 The latter was a particularly significant expansion of federal power, requiring airlines to provide authorities with passenger and crew information before they arrived in Canada so that the data could be analyzed and anyone judged to be risky could be intercepted before reaching the country.12 At the same time, the government took other steps to limit its regulatory involvement and ensure that neoliberal initiatives could continue to flourish in the post-9/11 era. In 2002, it created a new Crown Corporation, the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, and made it responsible for overseeing and monitoring airport security, but not for providing the service or workforce itself, something that was still tendered to third parties.13 Moreover, authorities approved other initiatives, such as NEXUS, that actually reduced security checks at airports and other entry points for people who qualified as low-risk travellers, as part of a broader push to harmonize the Canadian-American border through the use of “smart” computerized technologies.14 The cumulative effect of LAAs, the NAP, and 9/11 is that jet age airports have simultaneously become more open and more closed, as economic and safety imperatives operate in almost constant tension. In other words, airports increasingly act as filters that maximize and impede individual mobility, sorting travellers according to their commercial potential and level of risk.15 And as such, airports embody the contradictory effects of globalization, acting as necessary conduits for the global flow of goods while

10 “Airports have figured out the key to traveller happiness,” Toronto Star, 25 December 2016, https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2016/12/25/airports-have-figured-out-the-key-to-traveller-happiness- bump-up-the-luxury.html, accessed 30 January 2017. 11 On Bill C-36, see Howard Adelman, “Canadian Borders and Immigration Post 9/11,” International Migration Review 36, 1 (Spring 2002), 15-28. 12 David Lyon, “Airport screening, surveillance, and social sorting: Canadian responses to 9/11 in context,” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice 48, 3 (2006), 400. 13 Philippe Villard, “Funding and administering airport screening in Canada: A transportation policy like the others?” Journal of Transportation Security 6, 2 (June 2013), 121. 14 Lyon, “Airport screening, surveillance, and social sorting: Canadian responses to 9/11 in context,” 400. 15 Mark Salter, “The Global Airport,” in Mark Salter, ed., Politics at the Airport (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 12.

290 also emerging as security fortresses to guard against possible terrorist attacks and criminal activities.16 But this dual system has still enabled cooperation between regulatory and business interests. At Toronto-Pearson’s Terminal I, for example, 90% of the new retail space in 2004 was accessible only to travellers who had cleared security and had time on their hands before their flights.17 Initiatives like this suggest that LAAs have successfully adapted their neoliberal airport vision to the post-9/11 security climate. But LAAs and the many businesses that now operate airports also regularly grapple with problems that emerged decades earlier. Security guards have missed prohibited items while screening travellers, raising questions about the quality of CATCA’s training and enforcement programs.18 Communities around airports have protested noise from nearby aircraft and criticized NAV Canada, now in charge of that file, for doing not enough about it.19 Air traffic controllers have continued to demand technological and infrastructure upgrades in their workplace, accusing NAV Canada of jeopardizing air safety and contributing to a spate of near misses between aircraft.20 And more of the country’s major airport infrastructure has aged rapidly and will have to be repaired or replaced entirely in the coming decades, a challenging task since Canada has fallen behind more than $123 billion in infrastructure spending since the 1950s.21 Meanwhile, jet age growth has soared remarkably over the last twenty years. Annual air passenger traffic in Canada climbed from 56.7 million in 2001 to 133.3 million in 2015, an almost three-fold increase.22 This growth, moreover, has remained heavily concentrated at the same group of airports that have enjoyed the largest share since the 1950s. In 2015, Toronto-Pearson handled more than 39.6 million passengers,

16 David Lyon, “Filtering Flows, Friends, and Foes,” in Salter, ed., Politics at the Airport, 34-35. 17 “Travellers to get taste of Toronto,” Toronto Star, 3 April 2004, B3. 18 “Pipe bombs and hair gel,” Toronto Star, 17 January 2014, A14. 19 “Toronto residents unite to fight for their airspace,” Globe and Mail, 8 January 2016, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/toronto-residents-unite-to-fight-for-their- airspace/article28090042/, accessed 30 January 2017. 20 “Runway near misses raise fears for safety,” Toronto Star, 4 May 2013, A1. 21 “To fix Canada’s infrastructure, billions are just drops in the bucket,” CBC News, 27 August 2015, http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-liberals-infrastructure-deficits-1.3206550, accessed 30 January 2017. 22 Transport Canada, Transportation in Canada 2011, Appendix A: Statistical Addendum, Table A18: Air Passenger Traffic in Canada, 2001-2011, https://www.tc.gc.ca/eng/policy/anre-menu-3044.htm, accessed 30 January 2017; Statistics Canada, Air Carrier Traffic at Canadian Airports, 2015, Table 1-1: Passengers enplaned and deplaned on selected services, Top 50 airports, http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/51-203- x/2015000/t002-eng.htm, accessed 30 January 2017.

291 Vancouver more than 19.6 million, Montreal-Dorval (now renamed Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport) more than 14.7 million, and Calgary more than 14.5 million.23 Taken together, these four airports now process two-thirds of the nation’s passenger air traffic, an incredible statistic that only serves to confirm that a few key sites and cities have taken on oversized roles in the nation’s air transportation network. All of these developments underline the fact that jet age airports continue to be sites of activity amidst a shifting political and ideological backdrop in early twenty-first century Canada. As this dissertation has shown, the roots for this can be traced back to airport development between 1950 and 1990. During this period, multiple institutions and diverse forces transformed the look, experience, and underlying structure of a key group of Canadian airports. These changes were in no small part shaped by air travel’s rapid growth in the late twentieth century. Private and public airlines carried more and more passengers and goods, so airports played an increasing role in an air transportation network that was becoming more globalized. At the same time, wider political, social, and cultural developments also fuelled the infrastructural change. Central issues of the postwar era, including mega-project development, noise and modernity, language rights, immigration and citizenship, and security and terrorism, all shaped and were shaped by the changes taking place at and around airports. These changes facilitated capitalist activity in many ways, but jet age airport development between 1950 and 1990 was a state project, one that could be anticipatory or reactive at different times as conditions changed. During this period, the federal government worked to bring certain airports into the jet age. Officials devoted a particularly significant amount of money, expertise, time, and political capital to upgrade, expand, improve, and build a key group of airports that had quickly come to handle the majority of flights nationwide. Nevertheless, air travel’s soaring growth and global expansion between 1950 and 1990 left federal officials relying on a combination of strategies to redevelop airports. Their initiatives constantly shifted, were sometimes unpopular (or, worse, draconian), and often had to be revised and revisited. Officials and their partners also had to confront the reality that jet age airports had become key hubs of

23 Statistics Canada, Air Carrier Traffic at Canadian Airports, 2015, Table 1-1: Passengers enplaned and deplaned on selected services, Top 50 airports, http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/51-203-x/2015000/t002- eng.htm, accessed 30 January 2017.

292 economic activity and global capitalism. From the messy first phase of airport redevelopment in the late 1960s and early 1970s to public critiques of noise mitigation approaches in the 1970s to the exposure of airport security and surveillance failures in the 1980s, the state’s airport development over these decades was messy, ambiguous, and unfinished. The jet age airport project also reached across multiple scales. On the one hand, federal authorities undeniably redeveloped airports with national interests in mind. Governments believed that airports symbolized modern mobility and, over time, projected government power. On the other hand, their plans required dealing with local, provincial, and global actors. These different geographic scales were often in tension but were never mutually exclusive, so tensions were inevitable. In the 1960s, local residents around airports complained about noise, and governments responded with new technologies and mediation efforts. In the 1970s, global mobility collided with national language politics, as the Trudeau government sought to bring bilingualism to control towers in Quebec’s airspace. And beginning around the same time, immigration and security decisions smoothed the flow of some travellers while slowing, or stopping altogether, the movement of others. All told, the collision of scales at airports produced many forms of social and political conflict and complexity. Lastly, as state projects, jet age airports became increasingly central and visible parts of the postwar order. As active and unstable socio-technical systems, airports inserted the jet age into everything from daily experience to political debate. At the same time, the jet age affected people differently depending on who and where they were. To irate travellers delayed by construction and poor planning, airports were troubled megaprojects. To suburbanites who endured roaring engines over their homes, airports were noisy neighbours. To exhausted air traffic controllers, airports were exploitive and alienating workplaces. To supporters and opponents of bilingualism, airports were key sites of conflict. To unsuccessful asylum claimants, airports were closed gates, not open bridges, the first steps to detention and deportation. And to many observers, airports were places of risk, vulnerable to global threats because of security breakdowns and failures. Many of these issues persist today, showing that the developments and conflicts of the

293 first four decades of the jet age continue to shape Canada’s airports in our more neoliberal era.

294 Bibliography

Archival and Manuscript Sources

Canadian Air Traffic Controllers Association (CATCA) Archives

Annual Yearbook Journal – quarterly National Council Bulletin – monthly Newsletter (until 1980) and News (after 1980)

City of Richmond Archives

Government Publications GP416: Official Community Plan Issue Paper No. 6

Series 17: Dominion government File 2606 File 2606-1 File 2606-2 File 2622-1 File 2644

Series 113: Alpha-numeric subject files (Richmond Engineering Department) File D-1

City of Toronto Archives

Urban Alliance on Race Relations Series 39 File 228: Refugee and Immigration Committee, 1989 Series 231 Item 13: Currents: Readings in Race Relations, 1987

General job files of the City of Toronto Planning Department Series 618 File 630: New Refugee Determination Process

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