Questions for David Miller

Here are some questions for David Miller. To see more details about each question, run your mouse over the question text.

Mr. Miller, you claim to have made neighbourhoods a centrepiece of your campaign. Maybe you can tell us why, when you spoke of "consolidating" air traffic at Pearson International Airport, you did not give the people of Rexdale and Malton the courtesy of a mention.

David Miller claims you build a city "neighbourhood by neighbourhood". But the policy of letting each neighbourhood look out for its own interests can profoundly divide a city. To build a city "neighbourhood by neighbourhood" you have to recognise real conflicts between the interests of different neighbourhoods, and mediate fairly between them. You can only build a city "neighbourhood by neighbourhood" if you act as the mayor of the whole city. Do you really think you do that when you make a speech about the importance of "consolidating" air travel at Pearson and don't acknowledge the existance of Rexdale once?
Mr. Miller, you've used your education to reach your present position. Since we have a fair bit of evidence that mitigating aircraft noise helps preserve the potential for students to succeed in school, you should take a look at these schools. Many days, the students here live with jet flights loud enough to startle them and make conversation and learning difficult. What does your plan for a "magnificent city" have to offer them, except for more of the same?

Our lady of the Airways school in Malton (left) sits five hundred metres from the Pearson perimeter fence, about a kilometer from the flight paths. Transfiguration School (right) in Rexdale regularly experiences jet overflights which subject it to twice as much noise as the Dash-8 takeoffs produce along the waterfront.

You want us to dismiss a proposal that could reduce the traffic at Pearson by about four percent, and cut the number of noisy jet flights over the schools of Rexdale and Malton by up to ten percent. You seem to think the prospect of an "excellent" waterfront and a "magnificent" city justifies the noise these children live with. But why can this "magnificent" plan not find a crumb of mitigation, anything to compensate for the effects that "consolidating" commercial air traffic at Pearson will have on the children who live and grow up in this part of the GTA?

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