The Canadian government cleared around 324 square kilometres of farmland to build Mirabel International Airport, and planners were expecting as many as 60 million passengers a year
An airport which uprooted thousands of locals and was projected to be the world’s biggest was abandoned and ultimately left to rot after a string of setbacks.
Back in 1969, the Canadian government cleared around 324 square kilometres of farmland – displacing around 10,000 local residents – to build Mirabel International Airport, dreaming of a mega-hub that would serve Montreal and beyond – boasting six terminals and six runways. The airport opened in October 1975, just in time for the Montreal Olympics, and at the time planners were expecting as many as 60 million passengers a year by 2010.
But instead of booming traffic, airlines fell away and crucial transport links were never built. A promised high-speed rail connection between downtown Montreal and Mirabel failed to materialize, leaving the airport cut off and far from the city. Even with publicly boosted capacity, Mirabel never exceeded three million passengers a year – a far cry from the grand scale once expected.
With domestic flights stubbornly staying at the older Dorval (now Trudeau) Airport and airlines put off by Mirabel’s isolation, passenger numbers dwindled. The writing was on the wall. On 31 October 2004, Mirabel saw its last commercial passenger flight, a final take-off by Air Transat to Paris. With no more passengers, the terminal lost its purpose and was left to rot.
A demolition firm was hired and by 2016 the vast building was torn down. Unlike some abandoned airports, Mirabel didn’t vanish entirely – it survived as a cargo hub, aerospace testing ground, and plane-assembly centre. One of the most eerie relics of Mirabel’s passenger past is the derelict Château de l’Aéroport-Mirabel, a 344-room hotel built beside the terminal in the 1970s. By 2002 it had shut it doors, crippled by the airport’s decline. To locals, the failed project still serves as a haunting reminder of broken promises. The original master plan included six runways and multiple terminals, but only one terminal was ever built.
Describing the monumental failure, Benoit Labonté, the president of Montreal’s chamber of commerce, said: “It was a catastrophe for Montreal. There was no point in any passenger coming into Canada to make a transfer at Montreal.” He claimed that Montreal’s failure to provide strong air connections was one of the reasons the city lost out to Toronto as Canada’s commercial capital.
Mr Labonté went on: “Building Mirabel was a very sad decision for Montreal. From that moment, many businesses decided to shift westward to Toronto.” James Cherry, president of Aéroports de Montréal, a non-profit authority that now runs both of this city’s major landing strips, told the Toronto Star that “it was a project that was doomed to fail”. He said: “The access to that site is a real problem. A lot of times it takes an hour and a half to get here, and the majority of air travellers these days are looking at flights of less than 2 1/2 hours.”
