Premier’s bike lane takeover covers up the real agenda: Highway 413

Premier Ford’s dismantling of bicycle lanes via Bill 212 is clearly a distraction from its failure on pressing issues like housing and health care. But the ulterior motive is to divert all eyes from the draconian changes the bill introduces to grease the wheels of Highway 413.

The proposed Highway 413 is the biggest, most controversial highway project in 50 years. It will cut through a large swath of Ontario’s Greenbelt—despite the Premier’s promise to protect it—destroy thousands of acres of the best farmland in Canada, cross 85 rivers and streams, blow a hole through the environmentally fragile Humber River valley and wipe out untold numbers of wetlands, forests and endangered species. 

It turbocharges a new frontier of urban sprawl and gridlock in an area controlled by major developers close to the government—fueled by the Province’s recent repeal of the Growth Plan for the Golden Horseshoe and its transit supportive suburban density and housing mix requirements which leaves developers free to pursue their preference for expensive, single detached houses.

Because of their significant impacts, new major highways are subject to full impact assessments under Ontario’s Environmental Assessment Act (EAA)—which requires a comprehensive analysis of impacts on air, land, water, plants/animals and human life—including a demonstration of need and consideration of alternatives.   

Bill 212 does an end run around this long tradition of guard rails by introducing the Building Highways Faster Act and Highway 413 Act—effectively making the 413 a “done deal”. 

The 413 Act exempts this proposed highway from the EAA. Instead, it proposes a severely narrowed scheme that, despite the clear sub-provincial and intra-regional significance of the proposed 400-series highway, limits analysis to “local environmental conditions”—omitting major matters such as need/justification, public health, climate change, endangered and threatened species, cost and transit implications.

The PC government claims the highway is needed to save drivers time compared to using Highway 401 and 400. Yet it ignores the under-utilized Highway 407 which parallels the 413 route mere kilometers south of it. It also ignores where the real demand for cross GTA travel is—as revealed in the Premier’s Hwy 401 tunnel musings—not a massive highway from Milton dead-ending in King Township. As for cost, it is radio silence from the government—a condition likely to remain as the Bill gives the government the ability to keep secret any information it wants.

The legislation then completely exempts “early works” such as bridges and ramps from study, which predetermine the alignment and thus remove the ability to avoid natural features on either side of these works. “Early works” directly contradict the comprehensive approach required under the EAA—and further entrenches the highway as a fait accompli.

Not done yet, the Act exempts the entirety of this watered-down scheme from Ontario’s Planning Act and its requirements for decisions to conform with the Provincial Policy Statement and the Greenbelt Plan—effectively by-passing the Greenbelt Plan’s farmland and environmental protections policies.

In a show of force, Bill 212 proposes repressive elements on landowners in relation to expropriation and site inspections of private property while including other “orders” for privately owned utilities—all under the threat of making non-compliance an offence and mobilizing police to enforce the government’s bidding.

It caps things off by exempting the entirety of the proposed Highway 413 from the Environmental Bill of Rights, thereby further restricting public participation while removing the ability to seek referral of the proposed highway to the Ontario Land Tribunal. 

Bill 212 continues the PC’s pattern of authoritarian behavior—as seen most recently with the Rebuilding Ontario Place Act—to simply pass legislation to exempt its pet project of the day from all existing environmental laws while stripping citizens of their democratic rights under a veil of complete secrecy. It’s literally “my way and/or the highway”.

Victor Doyle led the development of Ontario’s Greenbelt Plan and is the former Manager of Provincial Planning for Central Ontario.

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