Port Authority CEO Lisa Raitt endures a hail of hostile questions from Island airport opponents at the September AGM.

Just one unelected person can wreck everything that costly careful planning and public deliberation has recommended for Toronto’s embattled waterfront.

Call her the Waterfront Czarina. Her name is Lisa Raitt and she is the CEO of the benighted Toronto Port Authority (TPA), unaffectionately known as the Pork Authority by the multitudes who consider it a Liberal pork barrel.

For Toronto taxpayers it’s an ugly wart on the waterfront that sucks millions of their dollars each year into the pockets of a few special-interest elites.

For federal taxpayers it’s a boondoggle that lets politicians and swivel servants flying on public dollars avoid traffic delays by landing on the waterfront.

Councilor Pam McConnell says she is outraged after learning that Raitt single-handedly approved the normally complex Environmental Assessment required for the planned $15 million airport ferry dock at the foot of Bathurst St. in order to expand the money-losing operation despite the city’s intention to convert the failed airport to waterfront park land.

Raitt’s TPA board, which consists of only two people, didn’t make the call.

Since one board member, Paul Hayes, is affiliated with the Dillon Consulting firm that conducted the controversial Environmental Assessment, he would have to declare a conflict and abstain from voting.

At the TPA’s AGM in 2003, ex-president Henry Pankratz inadvertantly revealed that Raitt received a huge bonus for finalizing all the bridge “approvals,” including the Environmental Assessment. Ottawa canceled the bridge and the ferry is a replacement concept to keep the failed airport flying.

Canada’s environmental regulations are weak and likely would recognize this current Environmental Assessment that Raitt approved as valid.

“I think this could be exceedingly disastrous on waterfront planning for waterfront use,” says McConnell. “That it could be derailed by one authority—and even one individual—is a strike against accountability, transparency and democratic control.”

McConnell says the residents of Toronto have been clear in their views that “all we want on our front porch is waterfront and the new federal government had better take notice and correct this.”