Down with the Canadian International Air Show
Every year, the air show makes entertainment from devastating machines of warfare. But it’s not entertaining for everyone.
Aug. 29, 2024
Summertime in Toronto is marked by days and nights at beaches, park gatherings and, of course, festivals. From Salsa on St. Clair to Taste of Manila to the Caribbean Carnival, they reflect the immense ethnic and racial diversity of this city, which has a population that is more than 50 per cent people of colour and home to many immigrants and refugees.
Among these many festivals is an event that is marred by controversy.
Every Labour Day weekend one of Toronto’s busiest events, the two-and-a-half week long Canadian National Exhibition (CNE), hosts an air show to mark the end of the fair. The Canadian International Air Show is prefaced by days of flight rehearsals spanning the entire city and, every year, various communities around the city voice their fierce opposition to the spectacle.
Pet owners condemn the ear-busting screeches of the jet engines as they rattle the walls of their homes, traumatizing their pets in the process. Parents, tired and stretched thin, begrudge the air show’s role in disrupting their children’s sleep. There is also significant environmental impact, with each jet consuming vast amounts of fossil fuels, spewing exhaust into our neighbourhoods.
Behind the funnel cakes and popsicles of the CNE lies a hidden motivation for the show: military recruitment. By showcasing the “skills” of the very same CF-18 fighter jets that have carried out 1,598 bombing missions around the world over the past 30 years, the air show makes entertainment from these devastating machines of warfare. But it’s not entertaining for everyone.
For people whose homelands and communities have been devastated by war and bombings, the Canadian International Air Show is not, as its website claims, “educating future generations on the exciting opportunities within the aerospace industry which are inclusive for all.” On the contrary, it is a painful reminder of the resultant humanitarian and refugee crises and of immeasurable displacement, loss and grief.
Lockheed Martin’s F22 Raptors will also be “performing” at this year’s air show. These stealth jets are designed to carry bombs and missiles that cause massive devastation, similar to the Lockheed war planes that are currently being used in Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza. Lockheed Martin is the world’s largest weapons producer and draws huge profits from war and bloodshed. Is it unreasonable to think that arms dealers should not be able to invade our public and private spaces with ear-numbing advertisements? I certainly do not think so.
Among the litany of reasons to oppose the airshow, none deserves more attention than the retraumatizing impacts of the sounds of these jets on people who have fled war zones. Toronto boasts populations from Sudan, Palestine, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ukraine and many other regions that have experienced or are currently experiencing aerial bombings and genocide.
I’m not the first to make this case. Last year, Mayor Chow sent a letter to the organizers of the air show in which she wrote “Millions of Torontonians chose to take root in this City as a place of hope. A place of refuge. For many residents, the tremendous noise generated by high-powered jets flying overhead brings back unwanted memories of the violence and war they fled to call Toronto home.” In 2021, then Councillor Joe Cressy, publicly called for an end to the air show on X (then called Twitter), writing “For the sake of the toddlers napping, the pets hiding in the closet, the many newcomers triggered by such events, and so many others simply disturbed by the noise.”
It’s impossible for any one festival or event in Toronto to please every single resident of such a diverse city. However, what is possible and very much within council’s reach is to stop knowingly disrupting the lives of its residents with an event that sells violence as “family-friendly entertainment.”
For Toronto to truly celebrate its diversity, it must take seriously the many concerns about the harm caused by the air show. To borrow the words of Joe Cressy, it’s “time to move on and start new traditions.”
Phillip Dwight Morgan is a Toronto-based writer and editor.
of course it would be a nimby faggot writing this, and in the Star too. Will fully wager he was also one of the midwits calling for cancelling Canada Day fireworks because "muh heckin indigenous insensitivity"
