MoWest’s Stuart wants TMR’s Danyluk to lead on airport issues

Montreal West mayor Campbell Stuart says he is waiting to see what Town of Mount Royal mayor Vera Danyluk chooses to do next, as she launches an effort to resolve airport issues through a coalition of affected municipalities.

Stuart was among handful of people who turned out for an information meeting held in Town of Mount Royal recently to hear presentations about the impact of the airport on people living under flightpaths.

Citizens for a Quality of Life (CQL), a grassroots group highly critical of the airport’s current location in Dorval, was one of the presenters.

CQL has been asking questions about the airport since international flights were transferred from Mirabel in the 1990s. The group maintains that Aéroports de Montréal, the airport authority, made the decision without impact studies and without consulting people.

After years of leading the effort on its own legally, CQL recently began encouraging all affected Montreal Island cities and boroughs to form a coalition, which would have the clout to challenge ADM politically.

The municipalities and boroughs are Côte St. Luc, Dorval, Lachine, LaSalle, Laval, Montreal West, Pointe Claire, Saint-Laurent, Saraguay-Cartierville and Town of Mount Royal. During the meeting, Danyluk suggested strongly that she is willing to lead the coalition. “I am very, very interested in finding out how Mrs. Danyluk would like to proceed on this,” Stuart said in a later interview. “I have an enormous amount of respect for Vera Danyluk. She used to run the MUC. She’s been around for quite a while. She is a person with a lot of experience … The reason I was there was definitely to find out what she had to say … “There are people who hold very, very strong views on this, who have a very well laid out but very rigid, I think, plan of what they would like to do,” he continued. “And I’m interested to know what they have to say, and I’ve very interested to know what Vera Danyluk has to say and where it’s going to go from here. My view, as I told them then, is that I’m going to follow Vera Danyluk’s lead. I want to find out where she’s headed on this.”

Despite that, Stuart insisted he has not been invited to join an actual coalition. “I think it’s fairly embryonic right now and I think it would be unfair to say that Vera Danyluk was actually organizing a coalition,” he said. “I think that what’s really important is that we have a dialogue and that we actually get somebody to say something from the other side on this. I will wait to hear what Mrs. Danyluk has to suggest.”