Malton sits in the northeast corner of Mississauga, wedged between Toronto Pearson International Airport and the Brampton city line. Unlike the lakeside villages further south, Malton’s history isn’t really about farms turning slowly into suburbs. It’s about an airfield and an aircraft plant that briefly made this corner of the city one of the most important industrial sites in the country.
In 1937, agents for the Toronto Harbour Commission began buying up farmland south of the village of Malton to build a new airfield, an alternative to the cramped Toronto Island Airport downtown. The first aircraft landed at Malton Airport in August 1938, and Trans-Canada Air Lines, the predecessor to Air Canada, began using the field the following year.
The Second World War turned Malton into an aircraft manufacturing town almost overnight. In late 1942, the federal government expropriated farmland next to the airport to build housing, known ever since as Victory Village, for workers at the new Victory Aircraft plant on the airfield. The plant’s workforce grew from roughly 3,300 in 1942 to more than 9,500 by 1944, close to a quarter of them women working as riveters, welders, and inspectors. By the time production wound down in November 1945, Victory Aircraft had built 430 Avro Lancaster bombers, at points completing nearly one a day.
After the war, the plant passed to A.V. Roe Canada, better known as Avro, which built the CF-100 fighter and later the CF-105 Avro Arrow, an advanced supersonic interceptor designed and assembled entirely in Malton. The Arrow program was cancelled without warning on February 20, 1959, a day still remembered locally as Black Friday, when the federal government scrapped the program and the existing airframes were cut apart. Roughly 14,000 workers at the plant lost their jobs that same afternoon, with estimates of the total job losses across subcontractors running far higher still. Some of the laid-off engineers went on to work at NASA in the years that followed.
Malton GO Station, on GO Transit’s Kitchener line, sits close to the airport but isn’t directly connected to any terminal. Getting from the station to Pearson’s terminals means a short bus ride or a taxi, not a walk. The dedicated rail link to the airport itself is the separate UP Express, which runs from Toronto’s Union Station to a station built directly at Terminal 1. MiWay buses connect Malton to the rest of Mississauga. See our transit guide for the wider picture.