[URBAN NOTE] "Is it time to rethink Toronto's air show?"

[rfmcdonald]

I wonder. From CBC's Metro Morning:

It's the sound of the city this weekend: the roar of planes overhead as the Canadian International Air Show features vintage and modern planes in aerial displays. It's been running since 1949, and draws thousands of people to the waterfront.

Some people love the spectacle; others hate the disruption, or object to the military display.

But for some in the city it can also have an unsettling, perhaps even traumatic, effect.

Maya Bastian is a writer and filmmaker with family roots in Sri Lanka. In 2009, as the war in that country was ending, she went there to work in conflict zones. "I had never seen anything like it," she told CBC Metro Morning's Matt Galloway.

Bastian returned at the end of the summer, shortly before that year's air show. Standing out on the street, "any time a plane flew over I was paralyzed, I couldn't move ... I was reliving a lot of the things that I saw and experienced and heard in that moment."