More than two months after Ontario Premier Doug Ford stood at the edge of Highway 401 and promised to dig a 50-kilometre tunnel below the gridlocked expressway, the province has barely started the work required to get the project off the ground.
Ford announced his tunnel vision in September and said work to study it would urgently take place.
He said a feasibility study would assess how many lanes his underground highway should have, if it could accommodate transit and how long it would ultimately be, with the option of running from Brampton in the west to Scarborough in the east.
“We want to move this as quickly as possible, get this done and start moving,” Ford said announcing the plan on Sept. 25. “We’ll be doing soil testing along the route and then the experts will come back and give us an idea of timeframe.”
Internally, however, Global News has learned that very little progress has been made in the two months since Ford made that promise.
Limited meetings have taken place to discuss the feasibility study required to move the project forward. At the same time, there has been limited movement to issue a request for proposals or qualifications — the first step to work out who will conduct the feasibility study for the tunnel project.
A spokesperson for the minister of transportation said that, when the study eventually gets underway, it will be a competitive procurement.
“The feasibility study will be procured through an open tender process following the upcoming market sounding, which will provide feedback directly from industry on how best to proceed with this project,” they said.
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A cost has not been shared for the feasibility study, nor when it is expected to begin or conclude.
Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles said on Tuesday that she thought the project would cost “tens of billions of dollars” and “take decades” to complete.
“It would have to be an open and transparent process, without question,” Stiles said after Global News revealed the original idea for a tunnelled highway came from a major Canadian construction company.
“If they even want to head down the road of a feasibility study on this, then we are going to demand absolute transparency and accountability.”
Ford had initially said the feasibility study would be conducted internally but, while some work will be supported by the ministry, it was ultimately decided the study should be through an external company.
“It’s going to be internal, right, so people are working already,” Ford said on Sept. 25. “But we’ll get an exact cost but these are people who work within the Ministry of Transportation and within the Ministry of Infrastructure, it’s not that we’re going outside just now.”
Later, after it was confirmed the government planned to go to the market to complete the feasibility study instead, the minister of transportation said internal support work was underway.
Speaking in an interview on Focus Ontario, Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria suggested the study could run “over the next months, years” for the tunnelled highway.
“We’re looking to the experts in the field to help us understand and appreciate what it’s going to take to study the feasibility of this,” he said.
“We know the urgency, given the gridlock people are facing, so we got to work right away to see what we can possibly do to look at this project.”
Experts have suggested the tunnelled highway project, which had been pitched to the provincial government and the City of Toronto in different forms over the past decade, could be an extraordinarily expensive and complicated engineering feat.
“You have to build shafts regularly so you can have a ventilation system that clears out the smoke (if there’s a crash),” Shoshanna Saxe, a professor in the University of Toronto’s civil and mineral engineering department, previously told Global News.
“You also have to build cross-connections between the two tunnels, so if there’s a problem on one side, people can run to the other. And those you build every 250, 350 metres. You need to have huge fans, it’s a massive, massive undertaking; it would take a generation to build.”