They're finally going to tear down the Mirabel Airport passenger terminal.
The terminal is built in the middle of farm-land and has sat unused for 10 years. There's asbestos in the walls, the sprinkler system must be replaced and the roof is finished. In its current state, it would be impossible to use it as a passenger terminal, and all efforts to rehabilitate the facility into something else (indoor outlet mall, office space, an entertainment complex, etc) have failed. The airport authority spends at least $3 million a year just to heat it and keep the vandals and looters away.
It needs to go.
But there are plenty of otherwise intelligent people are shocked - SHOCKED I tell you - by the idea of demolishing this unused and useless drain of money. And I just don't understand their resistance. I can sympathize with their disappointment, certainly, but not with their insistence to keep it standing.
Since the issue is all over the news, I have learned more of the history behind this fiasco. Despite being old enough to have traveled through the airport, its inauguration in 1975 makes it so that I have no living memory of the events that saw this airport come to life. Other than knowing it was in a stupid location and that it was hard to get to, the only other thing I knew about it was that many, many families and farmers were expropriated from their lands and homes in order to build the airport.
And so now I learn more about the incredible hubris and short-sighted nature of the entire project, where Montreal would be welcoming 50 million passengers by 2000 (we welcomed about 12 million in 2013) and at least 4 more terminals, three more landing strips and a train running between Mirabel and Montreal would be added. The land was taken from the locals and only 1 terminal and 1 strip were built. The terminal building was described as an example of the modern architecture Quebec was capable of building. Oh, glorious day.
Except it wasn't. The air industry adopted Toronto as a hub, and times, they were a-changin. Without a good way to get people to and from Montreal efficiently, eventually all air traffic was moved back to Dorval and Mirabel was cooked. And then the terminal stayed unused for ten years while we paid millions and millions every year just to leave it standing.
And now that somebody has finally put their grown-up pants on and decided that this ridiculous, unjustified spending of money had to stop, we have mayors and residents getting their dreamy underpants in a bunch. Oh, noes, we can't tear it down!! Because, you know, that would be admitting defeat and what about the people who were expropriated?? There was a LTE in La Presse over the weekend that even lamented that the tearing down of this money pit meant that we we no longer allowed to dream, or some other philosophical nonsense that didn't deserve to be printed. Even Montreal's new uber-Mayor says that he will ask for a injunction to keep the demo from happening and to buy time in order to 'rehabilitate' the building.
Do I feel for the people who lost their homes for this out-of-all-proportion pipe dream? Of course I do. But nobody has explained how the wrong of keeping the building standing 'rights' the wrong of those useless expropriations. How, exactly, would this monument to governmental error and misjudgement soothe the hurt caused by the expropriations? I would think that nothing could right that wrong. And if it were me, I would curse the presence of that reminder everyday that it remained standing.
How can we even afford to leave it up as a silent, empty museum? We can't. Not in a province that has a huge deficit and is wondering how they will provide its citizens with adequate health care and pay their retirement pensions.
And call me unsophisticated, but a squat rectangle covered in curtain-wall glass in the middle of a field is not the type of architecture that I feel needs to be preserved through a $3 million maintenance bill. This ain't Mount Rushmore or even The Big Owe. It's a building nobody goes to and nobody ever sees. I would bet a dollar that if you showed a picture of the terminal to most people on the street that they would not be able to identify it.
Those who are opposed to the demolition accuse the pro-demo people of lacking vision. Hey... wasn't Mirabel built because people had a little too much "vision" in the first place? Maybe it's time we had a little less vision and more open-eyed reality.
Is this airport and its terminal a giant flop? A mistake? You betcha. But a mature and intelligent society does not fear its mistakes. It admits them, learns from them, and moves on. It does not keep making a yearly $3 million mistake to bury its head in the sand over the initial error.
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