What our Ground Lease review revealed

After years of attending consultations and receiving inconsistent explanations, the community decided to examine the federal Ground Lease directly. We read all 500 pages of the agreement between the Government of Canada and the GTAA.

What we found was clear: many of the messages presented to residents over the years do not align with the obligations set out in the actual lease. Much of what communities were told — about wind, runway selection, demand forecasting, and what “cannot be changed” — was not grounded in engineering requirements or statutory limitations.

Key discoveries

• The Ground Lease requires meaningful environmental stewardship, community consultation, transparency, and public reporting — responsibilities that are not being met in practice.
• Operational explanations often repeated in public meetings — including claims that wind “fully dictates” configurations — are contradicted by actual ATIS, METAR, and field-specific wind data.
• Lease provisions require the GTAA to operate in the public interest, not solely to maximize throughput. Yet operational decisions routinely prioritize demand and capacity over respite, noise mitigation, or health.
• The message that “traffic will double by 2037 and nothing can be done” is a communications narrative — not a requirement of the lease, not federal law, and not an engineering inevitability.

These findings revealed a significant gap between public communications and contractual reality. PAA was created to close that gap by providing residents with direct access to the facts, the documents, and the science — rather than narratives shaped by communications teams.