Flying taxis, passenger drones? PortsToronto CEO talks Billy Bishop airport and the future of Toronto air travel

When small airports need to make big changes, they call in Roelof-Jan “RJ” Steenstra.
Steenstra established his reputation as the country’s go-to small airport reformer as CEO of the Red Deer Airport Authority from 2011 to 2016. During that time, he spearheaded a development program that transformed an underutilized airport into a regional commuter hub.
Then in 2016, Steenstra was tapped to rebuild and revitalize the Fort McMurray Airport Authority in the wake of the wildfire that devastated the community.
“The airport was still being used for evacuation, still being used for firefighting,” Steenstra said. “Ultimately, a number of our structures were damaged and destroyed, including the hotel, and ironically, our firefighting hangar where our firefighting equipment is housed.”
After six years overseeing the reconstruction effort as President and CEO of the Fort McMurray Airport Authority, Steenstra began his latest challenge in 2022, helping PortsToronto — which includes the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport — rebuild in the wake of the pandemic.
Billy Bishop, which is Toronto’s oldest airport at 85, is the ninth busiest airport in Canada by passenger volume, and the fifth busiest transborder airport, employing 150 staff and generating an estimated economic output of $2.1 billion.
Steenstra sees the organization where he is president and CEO as a “city builder” and the downtown airport — as well as the Port of Toronto and the Outer Harbour Marina, which PortsToronto also owns and operates — as key to Toronto’s future.
Realizing that opportunity, however, will require managing the ongoing fallout of the pandemic, overhauling many of the organization’s underlying systems and technologies, and connecting the downtown hub to more destinations.
The Star recently spoke with Steenstra about his vision for the airport, why the conversation about loud jets has gone quiet, and why Billy Bishop could be the centrepiece of a future that includes flying taxis and passenger drones.
It was a passion of mine at a young age, although I didn’t build my career around it at first.
My dad was a pilot for Pacific Western Airlines, and he was flying cargo planes on the DEW (distant early warning) line. My mom didn’t want to live all the way up there, so she moved us from Vancouver back to the Netherlands, where she was born, but after a few years apart we all moved to Winnipeg, which was the closest major city to where my dad was based. My dad eventually got out of the aviation industry, but it remained a passion of mine.
It took a while.
I earned a Bachelor of Science in anthropology, and then a degree in communications, and then I went over to South Korea to teach English at a University for a few years. When I got back, I worked in communications and advertising, but I eventually decided to go back to school to earn an MBA.
I ended up doing a few different things after my MBA, and ultimately got a call through a search firm out of Edmonton to take on a small central Alberta airport that was underutilized and undervalued as an asset for the community. I started my journey in aviation in my mid-30s, but by that point I had spent a lot of my life in airports.
There was a lot of work that had to be done internally from a system, process and operations standpoint. It was busy from a general aviation standpoint, facilitating pilot training schools and housing a firefighter air spray outfit, but the only commercial carrier was Buffalo Airways, which was based in the Northwest Territories.
I embarked on a path to transform the airport, which started with the team, bringing in the skills that were necessary, working with the board to create a new strategy, and then executing. We did a runway extension, and brought CATSA (Canadian Air Transport Security Authority) screening back, which allowed Air Canada to go in.
It was really a great environment to get your feet wet and understand the entire business. That airport is still my baby.
It was immensely challenging. Not only were we trying to get an airport back into operation, but we were dealing with a community that was really struggling.
There are still people rebuilding and dealing with insurance to this day; in fact, our insurance issues took five years to settle. It’s something I wouldn’t wish on any community, and unfortunately, our neighbours down in Jasper are going through this exact thing again in Alberta.
But you know, Fort McMurray has a lot of spirit and a lot of community goodwill, and everyone just got to work to rebuild.
PortsToronto is responsible for three primary business units: Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, The Port of Toronto, and the Outer Harbour Marina.
Billy Bishop was Toronto’s first airport, which is why we’re YTZ, and Toronto Pearson is YYZ. In fact, Pearson — or Malton Airport as it was called originally — was built as a reliever airport for Billy Bishop in the ‘30s.
The Port of Toronto is about 10th or 11th in the country in terms of tonnage received out of the country’s 17 major ports, and we do bulk materials like steel, sugar, salt, but we also have a very diverse environment on our port lands. We have a film studio that’s owned by Cinespace and leased out to Netflix, and they’re looking to develop a second facility. We also have a cruise ship business that continues to thrive; last year we had 45 cruise ships start or end a Great Lakes journey in Toronto, which contributed about 20,000 tourist visits.
And then we have the Outer Harbour Marina, one of — if not the — largest marina on Lake Ontario, with about 700 recreational boats that spend spring through the fall in our waters.
We are self-sustaining — the revenue we generate is the revenue we use to invest in infrastructure. We have a big mandate to broadly serve the community, and that’s what we do.
Well, I have a track record of instigating change and dealing with change.
We don’t like to continue referencing COVID and the recovery, but the reality is that’s still happening. We were one of the few airports that literally went to zero traffic for almost two years, so there is still an element of getting back to where we were, while looking to the future.
Ports Toronto has been around for over 100 years, contributing to the transition from nothing to industrial to what we have today in terms of a mixed-use waterfront. When I joined the organization had more of a caretaker vision, and working with the board we determined that we needed to set new goals for the future that get back to our roots as a city builder, an economic engine, and a contributor to Toronto’s economy.
It’s really taking a look into how transportation will be needed for this region in the future, and how our organization can lead some of that.
We’re seeing a lot of closures around us — like Buttonville Airport — so there’s a significant opportunity for Billy Bishop to serve the needs of Toronto as the city projects out in terms of its population growth, its transportation needs, its connectivity to different city centres.
In 2025 Billy Bishop is going to be opening the country’s ninth pre-clearance site into the US. Not every airport in America has international customs, so by having preclearance you can go from about 70 to about 270 or 280 cities, so it’s a massive benefit to U.S.-bound passengers.
We also have the benefit of land, air and sea — or lake — so we’re thinking about how those come together to create a multi-modal environment that connects people and goods.
It’s not about jets anymore. The agreement that we operate under was written in 1983 when we didn’t even have cellphones for the most part, so we are looking at it in terms of the future.
There are electric aircraft that are being developed that can’t fly into this airport under that agreement, like electric VTOLS (vertical takeoff and landing vehicles) which many big cities around the world are looking at to relieve congestion.  
We want to set this place up to ensure that it’s meeting the needs of the community in a way that enables technology, enables a cleaner environment, and enables a quieter environment.
Well, it’s certainly an opportunity that we need to look at as transportation modes continue to change, not only locally but around the world. What can it look like? What should it look like? And how can we take advantage of that to serve the community? We believe we can be an ingredient in that, and we will keep looking forward, not backwards.