Premier Doug Ford is doubling down on his vision to build a tunnel underneath Highway 401, telling reporters that “just because it hasn’t been done, doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”
Ford made the comment during an unrelated news conference on Friday when asked to make his pitch on why the tunnel should be included on a list of new “nation-building” projects that Prime Minister Mark Carney hopes to fast track with legislation tabled in the House of Commons earlier in the day.
“The 401 is a nightmare, I don’t even have to sell this. You can’t even get around this city and then outside the city when you start going west and you start going east it is jammed everywhere,” the premier said. “It is jammed because the visionaries who built the highway should have thought of this 40 or 50 years ago but we are visionaries and we are going to get it done. We are going to build that tunnel as sure as I am talking to you today.”
Ontario has already begun the process of seeking interested parties to help carry out a feasibility study on a potential Highway 401 tunnel, with the deadline for the initial requests for proposals passing just last week.
However, some experts have questioned how realistic the project is, given that it would likely cost billions of dollars and take decades to build.
Carney’s legislation, tabled Friday, includes several specific criteria for “nation-building” projects, including that they strengthen “Canada’s autonomy, resilience and security,” provide “economic or other benefits to Canada, have a “high likelihood of successful execution,” advance “the interests of Indigenous peoples” and contribute to “clean growth and to Canada’s objectives with respect to climate change.”
Ford was asked whether the Highway 401 tunnel fit that ball on Friday and argued that it does due to the billions of dollars in lost productivity associated with Toronto’s crippling traffic.
“You can’t just think of next year. You have to be thinking of a generation or two generations, down the road,” he said. “I go back to the 1950’s when the Bloor Viaduct was being built and one of the people in the works department here said ‘Let’s put a rail on there’ and that was before the subways and everyone criticized him. Well thank God they put the rail on there. This is the exact same thing.”
Ford previously sent a letter to Carney in March outlining several projects that he would like to see funded.
The Highway 401 tunnel was one of five projects on that list. The other projects include the development of Ontario’s mineral-rich Ring of Fire region, nuclear energy generation, a new James Bay deep-sea port and an expansion of GO Transit infrastructure in the Golden Horseshoe known as “GO 2.0.”
Ford first floated the idea of building a tunnel underneath Highway 401 to divert traffic in September. He has suggested the tunnel could span from east of Highway 410 in Mississauga to east of Scarborough.
