Both the province and the federal government have now passed legislation that will give their respective cabinet broad powers to designate certain building projects as priorities and waive the requirements of many laws — including but not limited to environmental protection and impact assessment laws. The federal law, the Building Canada Act (one-half of Bill C-5), is more narrowly tailored than the provincial Bill 5, but both largely work the same way: a minister can designate a particular project as a government priority and thereby clear the regulatory pathway for the project to receive government approval.
We’ve written about this pair of bills before, and the apparent cross-party consensus that our current regulatory apparatus isn’t letting governments deliver on promises to get vital infrastructure built. This is a real concern, and a valid one in an era where nearly all parties have some ambitious ideas of big projects they’d like to see built.
But for all its faults, the much-maligned bureaucratic process of project approval at least provided a process for people to challenge the government’s claims about costs and benefits. In the absence of that process (or even if that process is simply shortened) we’re left asking where, exactly, is the role for people to point out that some projects are simply bad ideas?
Take, for example, the Ford government’s obsession with a tunnel under much of the existing Highway 401 as it crosses through the northern half of Toronto. This project almost certainly won’t be built; it would be a disaster for congestion during its construction if anyone were foolish enough to try; and it would cost tens of billions of dollars that could be better spent elsewhere. Even if it were free, it would still be a bad idea.
But don’t take my word for it! The Ontario Society of Professional Engineers and the Tunnelling Association of Canada — two groups who stand to catch quite a bit of free money if Ontario starts making it rain — released a statement this week on the government’s initiation of a feasibility study for this (bad) idea. After the usual numbered list of requests that the government ensure their members benefit from all this, pretty please, the joint statement included another fascinating addendum.
“Finally, while we commend the government’s willingness to explore bold solutions, we emphasize that alternatives such as evaluating alternative underground alignments, expanding rail corridors, integrating regional transit networks, and revisiting underutilized infrastructure (e.g., Highway 407) may offer cost-effective, lower-risk options that align with long-term transportation and sustainability goals.”
To translate with only a little bit of editorial license: even two of the groups who would stand to benefit first and most directly from this idea (they’d start cashing paycheques years and perhaps decades before this project could actually welcome a single travelling motorist) are all but begging the government to go back to the drawing board and think of something less absurd and more likely to actually ameliorate the GTA’s real congestion problem.
The 401 tunnel is uniquely silly but it’s far from alone. To illustrate the limits of what we can and cannot do by easing up on regulatory scrutiny, consider the Scarborough subway extension in Toronto’s east end. Promised by Rob Ford in his election campaign in 2010, eventually defeated by a majority on city council, only to be revived by then-premier Kathleen Wynne in the summer of 2013 to win a byelection, the subway became a provincial priority after Doug Ford won in 2018.
At no point since 2013 has the project faced meaningful opposition or even real scrutiny from anyone in authority. Which isn’t to say it hasn’t faced delays; it’s just that the delays have been the fault of its proponents, not its critics. Mayoral candidate Rob Ford all but promised a subway would be free, or paid for by private enterprise. By 2013 that turned into $2.2 billion, but most of that covered by the province. Costs increased to $3 billion by 2016, with Mayor John Tory saying amusingly that the city was now “being honest” about the costs.
Many of those cost revisions sparked debates at council, and some spurred changes in the project’s design to try and control costs. That was until the province took over, at which point costs seemingly became no object. Predictably, last month we learned the subway will now cost $10 billion. This, for a subway extension that even its proponents concede will carry fewer riders than some of the city’s streetcar routes.
The lesson, for anyone wanting to learn it, is that while there are real problems that legislation like Bills 5 or C-5 can address, it doesn’t absolve our leaders from exercising judgment, and not simply engaging in infrastructure-planning-by-pandering. Choosing priorities is good and much better than the alternative, but if you’re going to pick a priority, your project still needs to be an actual good idea — and not just what’s politically urgent to your party. These recent laws have intentionally deleted one opportunity for someone in the process to yell “stop,” but premiers and prime ministers alike may come to regret not giving that job to someone else.
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