Ontario’s premier says he’s confident the environmental concerns about a long-proposed highway have been studied closely and that the Toronto-area project should move forward.
“Let’s build the damn highway,” Rob Ford said at a news conference Monday, when asked about Highway 413, construction of which he and his government have said will start next year.
CBC News has obtained internal government documents that lay out some ideas the government has been considering for supporting the building of priority highway projects — including the still-unbuilt 413, which would connect Halton, Peel and York regions.
Beyond the premier’s comments on Monday, the provincial government declined to comment to CBC News on the possible measures relating to Highway 413 that are laid out in the documents. It’s not clear if those ideas have been presented to cabinet.
But as CBC News has already reported, one such measure includes potentially allowing 24/7 construction for such priority highway projects.
Another includes applying a “customized” environmental assessment process for the 413, which the premier was asked about at the news conference.
Ford said he was confident the Highway 413 project would pass a standard environmental assessment, expressing the view that it had already been studied enough.
“We have been working on this environmental assessment since before Moses,” he said.
“There’s hundreds of thousands of people stuck in their cars, backed up from here to Timbuktu, and you’re worried about a grasshopper jumping across a highway,” Ford added. “We need to start building and we’re going to start building.”
Tim Gray, the executive director of the activist group Environmental Defence, contends that the Highway 413 project is an unnecessary effort that could have “devastating impacts” on the province’s protected Greenbelt, and on rivers, farms and “dozens of endangered species.”
It would also encourage urban sprawl, Gray said.
The Ontario government “seems very determined to eliminate proper environmental due process in order to start building it without a proper evaluation or consideration of how to avoid the impacts of this highway,” Gray said in an interview.
Ford’s comments echoed those of Ontario Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria, who recently pointed to the long history of the highway project, which stretches back to before the Progressive Conservatives were in power.
The environmental impact “has been studied for nearly 15 years,” Sarkaria said Friday, adding that the government had “received a strong mandate to build that highway.”
Highway 413 was first proposed under the Liberal government led Premier Dalton McGuinty in 2007. But it was cancelled by his successor Kathleen Wynne’s government just over a decade later.
The project was revived by the governing Progressive Conservatives in 2019.
“This highway was cancelled once before. It’s a bad idea, everyone knows that,” said Gray.
‘Hogwash’
The same government documents CBC News has obtained describe other measures under consideration by the province — including a potential move to prohibit the installation of bike lanes when lanes of car traffic would be removed as a result.
The Ontario government is looking at possible legislation that would prohibit adding bike lanes if a lane of traffic has to be cut, sources say. CBC’s Lorenda Reddekopp dives into what we know so far about the proposed legislation.
Those same documents also warn that removing lanes in this manner might not relieve congestion.
Ford dismissed that warning as “hogwash” when asked about it on Monday.
The premier also suggested that, in his view, bike lanes are more of an issue on some roads than others.
“We want to make sure that all forms of transportation moves quickly,” he said. “And that’s what it comes down to, making sure you aren’t putting bikes lanes in the middle of some of the busiest streets in the country.
“Put them on the secondary roads.”
The Ford-led Progressive Conservatives are halfway through a second term in power. The next election is not scheduled until 2026.
