How a not-completely-stupid idea became a multi-billion-dollar policy mistake

Another step in the long, slow, agonising death of a white elephant: the federal government is selling land it had expropriated for the Mirabel airport back to its original owners.

If you have the benefit of thirty years' worth of hindsight, the Mirabel airport is a pretty easy project to mock: it made many of the classic mistakes in policy-making:

• Extrapolating trends in air traffic to the stratosphere.
• Choosing a losing technology, in the form of the 'buses on stilts' to get people from the terminal to the plane. Although pilots probably thought it was a good idea - no more of that fiddly business of taxiing to the gate - it added yet another delay for passengers.
• Missing trends in technology that made re-fueling in Montreal unnecessary for flights arriving from Europe.
• Not building the proper infrastructure: highways and rail transport to Montreal and Ottawa.

And many more besides.

That said, the Mirabel project wasn't completely stupid. Airports did turn out to be the important centres of economic activity that the Mirabel planners were expecting. And since they're subject to (locally) increasing returns, an intelligent case can be made for government intervention. In retrospect, Mirabel was a mistake, but it wasn't obviously stupid, and there are imaginable scenarios in which it could have worked.

But Mirabel isn't a total loss - it's generated a not-inconsiderable amount of silliness. My personal favourite is that of certain Quebec-based commentators (including this BQ Member of Parliament) who claim that 

Mirabel's problems were a result of the federal government's decision to authorize air connections directly between Toronto and Europe,  thus stripping Mirabel of its exclusive status as the Canadian point of entry for transatlantic flights.

It's not often you get to see Bastiat's 'negative railroad' proposed as serious comment these days. But as amusing as this is to economists, it's still not entertaining enough to justify the billions of dollars that Mirabel cost.

Comments

[EclectEcon]

Entertaining? that's downright scary that a politician could put this forward with a straight face. What's worse, I expect over half the voters in that riding agree.