This story is part of Toronto’s Climate Right Now, a collaboration with The Local about vulnerability and adaptation in Canada’s largest city.

Hundreds of years ago the northern shores of Lake Ontario, not far from the mouth of the Don River in Toronto, were home to a vast marshland. If you stood at what is today Cherry Street and Villiers Street and looked to the north, you’d see a great forest. To the south, a beach that stretched for miles in both directions, finally meeting white bluffs in the east. And all around you, swaying bulrushes and other wetland plants.

And then, English colonists established a naval base called Fort York. A town grew around it, year by year, displacing Indigenous communities and wildlife. Beaches and wetlands became shipyards, warehouses and eventually oil refineries and manufacturing plants. The harbour was filled in so people could build even more. Toronto stretched and heaved past the original boundaries of York, the population rapidly increasing as the 21st century dawned. 

Standing today at the intersection of Cherry and Villiers, the view in the distance is a forest of condos and skyscrapers. The air smells of metal and earth — the byproduct of thousands of kilos of dirt being moved into piles several stories high every day.

A rendering of what Villiers Island in Toronto should look like when completed. Illustration: Waterfront Toronto

This neighbourhood is now undergoing another transformation. An unprecedented public works project is forging a river valley, raising the land height, and carving out an entirely new island on Toronto’s waterfront. When Villiers Island is complete, it will be a neighbourhood built from scratch, with almost 5,000 new homes for about 10,000 people. It will not only be one of the first “climate positive” communities in the city, but a community built to withstand the climate emergencies to come. It is a dream of a (mostly) car-free neighbourhood, where apartments are heated by geothermal energy and residents are only steps from boat launches and bike paths, surrounded by reinvigorated wetlands and greenery.

It’s the next evolution for this neighbourhood, and perhaps a model for neighbourhood building worldwide — though what the end product will look like still remains to be seen.

Villiers Island should help ease flooding in Toronto while also making space for new housing

Toronto has flooded before and it will flood again — more often and more dangerously. According to the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, climate change will bring more severe storms to the city, along with about 10 per cent higher average precipitation by 2040. This will cause property damage as well as contaminated runoff that can affect the quality of our drinking water and aquatic ecosystems. In 2013, the city got a preview of how bad it could get; a torrential storm dumped 126 millimetres of rain on Toronto, stranding a GO Train in the Don Valley where passengers reported seeing a snake slithering through the cars. 

That water needs to go somewhere. Villiers Island is part of a larger plan to ease flooding, and send that water into floodplains and, eventually, back to Lake Ontario. The new mouth of the Don River will extend south of Commissioners Street, emptying into the harbour. The Keating Channel, just north, will remain, effectively providing two release valves for stormwater rushing down the Don River. The new valley system around it will act as a floodplain, able to absorb more water in the event of heavy rain. In the process, it will renaturalize what was once a heavily industrialized neighbourhood. New wetlands will provide support for aquatic ecosystems. Large debris from storms will drop out at the widened river upstream, and be filtered through the soil as it makes its way through the river valley, cleaning the water.

The Don River currently makes a 90-degree turn at the man-made Keating Channel (blue) before entering the inner harbour at Lake Ontario. This is an unnatural path for the river and the reduced flow leads to flooding during major storms. The new mouth of the Don River (dashed line) will carve a more natural path. When completed, the Don will have two paths to the lake, and the land in between will be Villiers Island. Illustration: Waterfront Toronto

This plan also presented a new opportunity. Toronto is in desperate need of housing stock. Greater Toronto’s population will likely increase from 6.2 million people to eight million people by 2030, and to 10 million by 2045. Within the core, there is limited space where new buildings can go up, and exclusionary zoning regulations prohibit building anything but single family homes in many neighbourhoods.

Villiers Island provided an opportunity to design a neighbourhood not quite from scratch, but close. “I would say this was both a blank canvas and at the same time a very, very richly populated canvas,” says Michel Trocmé, a partner at Urban Strategies, the firm that created the Villiers Island precinct plan. 

If completed as currently planned, Villiers Island will have a mix of medium and tall buildings. A minimum of 20 per cent of units will be affordable housing. New Cherry and Commissioners streets will be modern thoroughfares, with room for pedestrians, bike lanes, light-rail transit and cars. Almost 3,000 people will also work on the island. Parking will be limited. “The plan is not about catering to the car,” Trocmé says. 

That’s one way the project is trying to reach its goal of being a climate positive community: a place that has net-negative greenhouse gas emissions. “Ensuring that there are active public and low-carbon opportunities for transportation is vital to achieving the climate positive goal,” says Aaron Barter, the director of innovation and sustainability at Waterfront Toronto. Among the design recommendations being implemented on the island are building to Passive House standards, which require tight insulation and great ventilation so minimal heating or cooling is needed, and organizing buildings on the island so that they can harvest solar energy. Since the precinct plan was released in 2017, the planners have favoured a plan that would use geothermal exchange to heat buildings. This would likely produce an excess of energy than is actually needed for the neighbourhood. The extra energy could then be rerouted to other places, helping Villiers meet its climate positive goal. 

Excavation is underway to create a new mouth for the Don River. Here, it will flow beneath the new Commissioners Street bridge, which will connect Villiers Island to the mainland. Photo: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Local

The construction itself aims to reuse materials. David Kusturin, the chief project officer at Waterfront Toronto, navigates the mounds of dirt at Villiers Island like he can already see the neighbourhood that will one day be there. His role is strategic leadership of the project, which on a typical day means overseeing excavation, where huge machines are digging out the river valley.

But, last year, Kusturin got involved with show business. The television show The Expanse was filming its final season and the crew had built a forest inside one of the warehouses on Cherry Street, within the construction zone of Villiers Island, complete with actual trees. After filming was done, they had to get rid of them. “Why don’t we just take them from you?” Kusturin asked the producers. Waterfront Toronto bought them, and now these trees will become part of the wetlands and river valley.

While buying trees from a movie set was an unusual example, Kusturin says that as they uncover old concrete blocks and peat, it has been reintegrated into the site. 

“It’s amongst the largest projects of its size in the world,” Barter says. “And across Canada, it really stands alone as a master-planned precinct that has this ambitious goal of being climate positive.” While the team has looked at some precedents to inform its planning decisions, much has been custom developed for the site, with experts in urban planning, construction, landscape architecture and more pitching in. Some of this knowledge in planning will, inevitably, filter into other city projects over the years.

Where the new Don River meets Lake Ontario will be Promontory Park South, a naturalized area that will include spaces for active recreation, public gardens, kayak/boat launches and a year-round events building. Photo: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Local

Villiers Island will be climate resilient. But will it be a neighbourhood?

Pitmaster Lawrence La Pianta opened his restaurant, Cherry Street Bar-B-Que, in 2016. He chose an industrial area because it gave him freedom to pursue his craft exactly as he wanted. La Pianta’s cooking style requires barbecuing meat all night over a wood fire — he and his staff chop the wood on site. “I needed to be in an area where I’m not going to get my neighbours saying, ‘Oh, all I smell is wood burning all the time,” he says. 

The Villiers Island site may not have been residential but it is still a neighbourhood. Just around the corner from La Pianta’s restaurant is Cherry Beach Sound, a recording studio in an old munitions factory. There were once functional storage facilities and metal recycling — one of the last true industrial areas in Toronto, where lots of people worked.

While a few heritage buildings have been retained, including the former bank that houses Cherry Street Bar-B-Que, most of the buildings that these businesses called home are gone. Villiers’ planners hope that some of those businesses will come back or, like Cherry Street Bar-B-Que, stick around. But creating a community is a tricky business. 

Not all buildings on Villiers Island will be new. Heritage buildings like this one, currently home to Cherry Street Bar-B-Que, will also be located on the new island. Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Local

Alex Bozikovic, The Globe and Mail’s architecture critic, believes the current design for the precinct endangers attempts at building community ties on Villiers Island. “This is going to be 10,000 people, slightly isolated,” he says. “It doesn’t have offices, retail and cultural facilities right on the doorstep. It’s got this chunk of stuff surrounded by … empty space.” 

He believes this could be combatted by increasing the density of the area, which would not only house more people, but likely take more cars off the road if they are given viable alternate transportation options. Instead of driving in from the suburbs, they could bike or take the light-rail transit to jobs in the downtown core. It would also create a sense of enclosure that makes people want to stay in a neighbourhood. 

Some of the medium density in Villiers can be attributed to the climate positive goal for the area. In Canada, buildings up to 12 stories tall can be constructed using mass timber, which is more environmentally friendly than building with concrete and steel. Letting buildings get more sun exposure also means they are less expensive to heat in the winter, and tall buildings cast shadows that make this more challenging. Passive housing standards, such as overhangs and exterior sunshades, will minimize the need for air-conditioning in the summer. However, housing more people where they don’t need cars may offset some of these losses. Bozikovic notes it’s challenging to figure out which is most sustainable in the long term.

While the flood protection project and the contours of Villiers Island are scheduled for completion in 2024, the construction of buildings won’t begin until 2025 at the earliest. Photo: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Local

Waterfront Toronto is also building Villiers to be climate resilient. The weather is only going to get worse. “So what we ask [in development agreements] is the design teams take into account a post-2050 climate and incorporate that as part of their energy modelling, to make sure that as we have more extreme weather or heat days during the summer, that these buildings will be resilient in the face of those changes,” Barter says. Plans also have to include backup power and refuge sites in the case of emergencies. 

“The thing about cities is they take time and patience, and they take the dedication of a lot of different people,” Trocmé says. To make Villiers a place people want to live and visit, you need interesting businesses and community organizations who will bring the area to life.

Villiers Island is happening, no matter what. But exactly what that neighbourhood will look like in the end is still an open question. The procurement process for developers hasn’t even started yet. The earliest shovels will be in the ground for buildings is 2025, and Kusturin says that is an ambitious goal because there is still much excavation that has to be done.

But it leaves a few years for Torontonians and planners to figure out what kind of neighbourhood this will be. And La Pianta is staying as long as he can make a go of it while surrounded by excavations for a whole new community. “I think it’s gonna be a beautiful, amazing neighbourhood when it’s finally finished,” he says. “I hope that people make room for Cherry Street Bar-B-Que to remain here and be a part of the neighbourhood in the future.”

Wildlife and peat are already returning to the new mouth of the Don River

Until now, most of the work on Villiers Island has been hidden behind fences. But later this summer, Torontonians will finally get a glimpse of the vastness of this undertaking. The original Cherry Street bridge will be closed so that construction crews can finish excavation of the river mouth, and cars will be rerouted to the new bridge. It’s a modern white and yellow piece of infrastructure that wouldn’t look out of place in a sci-fi film. From there, people will be able to clearly see the length and breadth of the work that has been done. “I think they are going to be gobsmacked when it opens,” Kusturin says.

While the mounds of dirt will still be there, more plantings will be in the ground. Already, wildlife is finding its way to the site — some excavation had to be halted after bank swallows, a threatened bird species, built nests on the site. Kusturin expects it won’t be long before more animals follow. Planting has slowly begun, starting the process of renaturalization. Felled tree stumps, shipped from northern Ontario, line the river banks where, one day, they’ll become habitats for fish.

There was also a most unexpected discovery. A peat layer, exposed to the elements for a month or two, suddenly sprouted. “It wasn’t the usual weeds we see, it was bulrushes,” Kusturin says. A group from the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority determined that when the peat was exposed, 100-year-old seeds from the Ashbridge’s Bay Marsh germinated.

Some of the soil is now being studied at University of Toronto, to see if more native plant seeds can be found. But the bulrushes are going to be planted in the river valley, where they’ll grow anew.

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On April 19, Metrolinx and Infrastructure Ontario announced that a consortium of seven contractors, all under the name ONxpress, had won the estimated $1.6 billion contract to electrify the GO train commuter network in southern Ontario. The promise of this project is that, once work finishes in 2032, there will be 15-minute, or better, all-day service on the core GO train lines — mostly delivered on electrical rail.

While awarding the contract was an important step forward, it was also a very slow one. Metrolinx, an arm’s length provincial transit agency, has been studying electrification since 2010. In 2014, former premier Kathleen Wynne promised the region’s trains would be fully electrified by 2024. But it’s very likely most, if not all, GO Transit trains will still be running on diesel engines by then.

As the rest of the world has embraced electrifying rail, bureaucratic delays and political jostling has pushed greener and faster travel further into Ontario’s future.

In many European countries, a majority of rail is already electrified, or well on the way to it. Nations whose GDPs are far below Canada’s, including Greece, North Macedonia, Romania and Spain, have all electrified over 30 per cent of their rail lines. Meanwhile, in Canada, less than one per cent of all tracks are electric, mostly urban rail networks like Toronto Transit Commission, for example.

“The fact is that we have watched Europe electrify its rail since the 1800s,” says Deborah de Lange, an associate professor at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University) who researches sustainable development. 

De Lange says the common excuse that Canada’s low population doesn’t justify expanding or electrifying rail does not bear out when you home in on the country’s most populated regions. She points to the Windsor-Quebec City rail corridor as a region that has equal or greater density to many European countries, but has much less electrified rail. 

Marit Stiles is the MPP for the Toronto riding of Davenport, where both GO and UP Express trains run through the Junction Triangle neighbourhood. She said that people in the community have been pushing for electrification for years due to the air pollution caused by diesel engines. Photo: Jenna Muirhead-Gould

Canadian transit advocates have been pushing to electrify rail for years. In 2010, when Metrolinx was planning the UP Express rail link between Toronto’s Union Station and Pearson Airport, an advocacy group called the Clean Train Coalition pushed back against plans to purchase diesel-fueled engines. Now, with GO expansion plans, even more trains will be running on the same tracks.

“The concern for folks in my community is the air quality is going to be deeply impacted as more of these trains come through,” says Marit Stiles, MPP for the Toronto riding of Davenport. A number of Metrolinx trains pass through the Junction Triangle neighbourhood in her riding, including the Kitchener and Barrie corridor and the UP Express. 

A 2017 study of GO Transit diesel exhaust emissions within train cars found that in some cases cars had over nine times the amount of black carbon and ultra-fine carbon as an average city street. Black carbon and ultra- fine carbon also affect nearby communities, though not in as high volumes. Metrolinx’s own studies found that switching to electric would save about $17.9 million in health care costs.

Metrolinx’s first publicly released study of electrifying rail came out in 2010. The report found there were many upsides to fully electrifying the system. Future greenhouse gas emissions produced by GO trains would be reduced by 94 per cent. While that reduction alone would be a very small dent in Ontario’s overall carbon goals, the agency also estimated that, were electrification completed by 2031, ridership would go up by 10,000 a day,  removing 1.6 million car trips from the roads, per year. 

Electric locomotives can accelerate and decelerate faster than diesel trains, saving commuters time. They would also save Metrolinx money — the agency pinned overall savings for operation at $79 million per year in 2010 dollars, assuming the price of diesel continued to rise at twice the price of electricity. 

A Metrolinx graphic about the promised benefits of an expansion project that is meant to include electrifying GO train lines. Illustration: Metrolinx

It would also mean savings for customers — a point that’s even more relevant now, as fuel and other costs spike. “From an economic standpoint on an individual level, the cost of a car, the gas and the insurance are huge costs that a lot of people don’t recognize because they see it as a necessity,” de Lange says. “But if you had real choices, viable choices, you would choose the more economic option when it’s possible to choose it. And it’s only made possible when the service is there.”

In 2014, then-premier Wynne and her transportation minister at the time, Glen Murray, committed to electrify GO Transit by 2024, also promising trains every 15 minutes. “When I think about the convenience we are aspiring to, it’s the notion that you could show up at a station knowing that within the next 10 to 15 minutes there is going to be a train,” Wynne told reporters at the time. 

By 2017, Metrolinx had completed its pre-construction assessments and environmental reports. A timeline in the 2017 environmental assessment called for tenders to start in 2017-2019, for construction to begin by 2020 and for all work to be completed by 2025. On Dec. 11, 2017, then-minister of the environment Chris Ballard signed a notice to proceed with the transit project, which permitted Metrolinx to complete the final phase of its assessments and start construction. But it didn’t.

It’s difficult to get clear answers as to why the project stalled after this go-ahead. When asked about the cause of the delays, Metrolinx spokesperson Fannie Sunshine says the procurement process started in 2019 and ended in 2022 — a typical timeline for a large project.

Steven Del Duca, another former Wynne transportation minister who is now Liberal party leader, laid the blame mostly at the feet of the Progressive Conservatives, who have been in power since 2018. Del Duca said in an emailed statement to The Narwhal that “Ontario went backwards.” He also noted that electrification work is “inherently arduous, requiring environmental assessments, in-depth community consultations and complicated planning work.” 

The current minister of transportation, Caroline Mulroney, did not respond to repeated requests for comment on this story.

Ontario Liberal leader Steven Del Duca was a transportation minister in the last Liberal government. He pins the delay in electrifying Ontario’s GO train service on the difficulty of the work, and the current Progressive Conservative government. Others say Del Duca’s push to explore hydrogen fuel cells as a power source also contributed. Photo: Christopher Katsarov Luna / The Narwhal

But there are a couple of things we do know for certain. First, in 2017, Del Duca initiated a Metrolinx study on the feasibility of using engines powered by hydrogen fuel cells, as opposed to the overhead contact system that is used in many countries and was the assumed technology for GO train electrification in both the 2010 report and the 2017 assessments. While hydrogen has been floated as a green solution to powering large vehicles like locomotives, producing it and the lithium batteries it uses still takes a heavy toll on the environment. 

“Our suspicion and concern back then was that electrification would get further derailed,” says Stiles, who was a school board trustee at the time. “And we could all see the writing was on the wall that this government was on its way out.” (Del Duca did not respond to questions about whether the hydrogen study delayed electrification of the GO Transit network.)

As well, Infrastructure Ontario, the agency that leads Ontario’s infrastructure planning, issued the request for qualified bidders to design, build, finance, operate and maintain the expansion project in April 2018. Two months later, the Liberals lost to the Progressive Conservatives, who very quickly after taking power cancelled green energy projects and committed to investing more in highways. 

While electrification plans lingered, work moved forward on two other transit projects.

Later in 2018, after Doug Ford’s government was elected, the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks approved environmental assessments on six new SmartTrack stations, running on existing GO Transit corridors. (Sunshine told The Narwhal that SmartTrack does not impact Metrolinx’s electrification project.) Metrolinx also released its business case for expansion, which includes 205 kilometres of new track, six new maintenance and storage facilities and electrification of a majority of its rail.

The short list of bidders and call for proposals on electrification wasn’t issued until a year later, in 2019, just a month after Ford announced his own $28.5 billion transit plan for Toronto, heavily focused on subways. 

And then, in 2020: the pandemic spread across the world, generally disrupting work and construction on infrastructure projects. 

All of which likely contributed to the winning bidder for the project not being selected until 2022 — well after the original timeline set out by the 2017 assessment. 

Under Ontario’s Environmental Assessment Act, any change to a project plan that makes it inconsistent with a previous environmental assessment triggers a new assessment. Which is why a fresh one was kicked off in 2021, after Metrolinx cited three major changes since the 2017 assessment was released: plans for new track and facilities required to complete its expansion plans, changes to infrastructure at the Union Station corridor and changes to anticipated GO Expansion service levels. Sunshine says the new assessment did not delay the electrification project as it was run concurrently with the procurement process.

Nations whose GDPs are far below Canada’s, including Greece, North Macedonia, Romania and Spain, have all electrified over 30 per cent of their rail lines. In Canada, less than one per cent of all tracks are electric. Photo: Ontario Municipal Affairs and Housing / Flickr

Another ongoing issue is that Metrolinx does not own all the rail lines GO trains travel on. Some corridors are owned by Canadian Pacific Railway or Canadian National Railway, which operate diesel freight trains. While both organizations have plans to start operating electric locomotives, they will use different systems than GO Transit: GO routes that require using other services’ lines will have to continue running diesel trains.

Now that an election is underway, parties are jostling for positions on transit. While the Ford government budget didn’t mention electrification, it does commit to expanding GO Transit. Del Duca told the Narwhal in an emailed statement, “The Ontario Liberal Party is fully committed to GO expansion and electrification” and that he would accelerate work on the project. The NDP has also committed to expansion.

Last year, Stiles and fellow NDP MPPs Bhutila Karpoche, Faisal Hassan and Tom Rakocevic co-sponsored a bill asking the government to electrify and increase the service capacity of UP Express. UP vehicles were designed to be converted to electric propulsion and Metrolinx lists that as a priority. However, in 2019, it was announced that UP would undergo a large overhaul including buying new electric vehicles. 

But had the focus been on electrifying the system with urgency from the start, Ontarians might be riding faster GO trains already. “I think that all of those technical issues, had they been paid attention to in a serious way and a more urgent way, all of it could have been worked out,” de Lange says. 

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.