To slay traffic gridlock, Ontario Premier Doug Ford proposes a tunnelled expressway project — construction costs still to be determined — across Toronto.
“Why wouldn’t I be upfront?” Ford said on Wednesday when asked about the cost of his tunnel plan.
“We’ll be transparent,” the premier said against a backdrop of traffic flowing freely on the 401. “But I’ll tell you one thing. We’re gonna build this tunnel.”
But the people of Ontario, whose government is grappling with a $430-billion debt load and will borrow $10-billion to stay afloat this year, could be in for a dose of superhighway price shock.
According to Ford, expansive and expensive efforts to build Highway 413, a new superhighway through the last green spaces directly north of Toronto, are already in motion. “The shovels are in the ground,” he said of the 413 after floating his new highway tunnel vision.
As for the sticker price of the 413, "we’ve been pretty transparent on costs,” said in response to a question from The Trillium. “I’ll get the exact number for you."
Shortly afterwards, however, the premier's staff declined to share the government’s cost estimate for the 413, saying it needs to be kept confidential until after the procurement process has finished and the contracts are awarded.
During recent public consultations for Highway 413, many members of the public asked for cost information, including information about land acquisition costs, according to a newly released MTO report on its Highway 413 consultations.
But in answer to those questions MTO claimed it still doesn’t know what the 413 will really cost.
"A detailed construction budget will be developed as the project advances into Detail Design and the route is refined," MTO announced.
According to Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner (IPC), however, MTO currently knows a great deal more about the true costs of the 413 than it’s telling the public.
Last Tuesday, following a long-running inquiry into MTO's refusal to publicly release information about the costs of the 413, the IPC ordered MTO to provide much more detail about its Highway 413 land acquisition costs than it has so far.
“The ministry has broadly stated that disclosing the information at issue would harm the province’s negotiating power,” the IPC's order stated with regard to its refusal to release documents containing land cost information for the 413, “but it has provided little evidence or even specific arguments about how this would occur.”
While ordering greater transparency from MTO, the IPC cited the existence of “voluminous information” that was “used to generate final property cost estimates.”
In the case of Highway 413, the superhighway's sticker price is about much more than just the land acquisition costs, however.
No matter how hard MTO tries to keep its numbers secret, building Highway 413 — which would run 59 km and could be as many as 10 lanes wide in parts -— will require expensive concrete, steel and highly skilled labour at a time when GTA construction costs are surging by an estimated 8 percent annually.
As for MTO’s public claim not to have prepared current construction cost estimates for the project, in a ruling last July, the Information Commissioner confirmed that MTO has in fact prepared “specific cost estimates” for the project in order “to determine capital funding decisions and strategic plans for the province.”
In his September 24 ruling, Information Commissioner adjudicator Chris Anzenberger ordered MTO to make much greater detail about its Highway 413 land purchase cost estimates figures more transparent by October 31.
But yesterday, Premier Ford had suggested he’d get us cost figures for Highway 413 a lot sooner than that.
“We’re an open book,” Ford said.
Paul Webster is a freelance writer who has reported extensively on the Highway 413 project.
