Private investors profit. Travellers pay. Doug Ford stays silent.
There's talk in Ottawa of selling Canada's airports to private investors, everything from Pearson on down. Ottawa calls it 'asset recycling.' You should call it what it is: a fire sale on infrastructure the public already owns and already paid for.Ontarians know exactly how this movie ends, because we've lived it. In 1999, Ontario sold Highway 407 to private investors for $3.1 billion. Today we pay about $2 billion in tolls every single year, and we'll keep paying forever. Private investors don't buy public infrastructure out of generosity. They buy it to maximize profit, and the profit comes from you: higher fees on every ticket, thousands of jobs on the chopping block, and service cut wherever it doesn't pay.Doug Ford should be Ontario's loudest voice against a sell-off. Instead, silence, and his record tells you why. This is the Premier who handed Ontario Place to a luxury spa company, locked every teacher's classroom supply card into American-owned Staples, and pushed for a Billy Bishop expansion to benefit a company with close ties to a Wall Street bank. Selling off what belongs to the public isn't a mistake he might make. It's his playbook.Marit Stiles and the Ontario NDP are calling on the Premier to publicly oppose any sale of our airports and tell Ottawa clearly: Ontario expects our airports to stay in public hands, working for travellers and workers, not investors.
Authorized by the CFO of the Ontario NDP.