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Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government has passed a controversial bill aimed at speeding up the construction of Highway 413 through Ontario’s Greenbelt, and removing downtown Toronto bike lanes.
Bill 212, also known as the Reducing Gridlock, Saving You Time Act, passed Monday night after a chaotic, divisive month of protests, capped off when the government pushed through a raft of last-minute additions. Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria has argued the package will help relieve the Greater Toronto Area’s major traffic problems, even though decades of evidence shows new highways make congestion worse in the long run and new bike lanes can often make it better.
Some of the bill’s biggest changes are aimed at highways. It aims to accelerate a short list of priority projects, including Highway 413 and the Bradford Bypass, both of which would cut through Ontario’s protected Greenbelt. And for the 413 in particular, it allows the government to start building it before finishing its environmental review or consultations with Indigenous communities.
Most of the chatter about the bill, however, has revolved around the bike lane issue: hundreds have turned out to protests in Toronto as different sides argue about the number of people that use cycling infrastructure and how it affects everything from local businesses to emergency response times.
Adding to the controversy, the Trillium reported that a leaked document shows the Ford government was warned internally that taking out bike lanes could actually worsen traffic. And in another story, the news outlet found that one of the major groups pushing against cycling infrastructure is backed by a former Progressive Conservative candidate, party donors and big players in the real estate industry.
Premier Doug Ford has hinted an early election may be on the way, and opposition parties accused him Monday of using Bill 212 to stoke division and distract from other problems like the crisis in Ontario’s health care system.
Now that the bill has passed, here’s what it could mean for how Ontarians get around.
Most of Bill 212’s text is aimed at highways. The biggest environmental impact on the table relates to Highway 413, which would run through endangered species habitat, cross waterways and cut through sensitive farmland, wetlands and forests on its way through suburbs north and west of Toronto.
The bill puts an end to the highway’s environmental assessment. Though the Ford government says it will still complete a set of environmental studies for the project, it just gave itself new power to withhold those reports from the public. The province will also be able to begin construction before those studies are complete, and before it has finished consulting with Indigenous communities.
For a list of priority projects, including the expansion of the Garden City Skyway in the Niagara region as well as Highway 413 and the Bradford Bypass, the province will be able to override municipal bylaws to enable 24-hour construction. The law allows the government to do the same with any other highway project it chooses in the future.
It also makes it easier for the province to take land from private owners for these priority projects — a process called expropriation — by placing strict limits on how much time people are given before they have to leave. The bill also creates new fines for people and companies along the routes of those projects who try to stop officials from the Ministry of Transportation from entering their property for field studies.
All of this could make construction for Highway 413 go faster. But there are a lot of other factors that could make it go slower, too. The provincial government’s engineers are on strike, and have stopped work on a variety of projects, including Highway 413 and the Bradford Bypass, which could cause major delays.
The federal government could also throw a wrench in the whole thing. Soon after Sarkaria introduced Bill 212, an advocacy group asked federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault to give it a deeper review — Guilbeault is required to give his answer by Jan. 19, 2025.
That request could reignite an intergovernmental feud that has already held up Highway 413 once before. The federal government previously decided to intervene with the project in 2021 after a very similar ask from advocacy groups, effectively pausing major work on the project for three years. But in response to a legal challenge from Alberta, a Supreme Court decision found part of the law enabling such reviews was unconstitutional, prompting Ontario to file a court case of its own. In April, the federal government agreed to voluntarily drop the review and instead collaborate with the province as part of a Highway 413 working group.
Guilbeault’s office has said the minister will base his decision on science and input from Indigenous communities.
The legislation gives the Ford government the power to rip out existing bike lanes, overriding municipal authority to decide what happens on the road.
It also means new bike lanes will be a whole lot harder to build, requiring cities and towns to get an okay from the province to install bike lanes that would involve the removal of a car lane.
That’s an environmental and public health issue, of course: bike lanes encourage more people to get out of their cars and swap four wheels for two, which helps reduce the air pollution fossil fuel-powered vehicles cause, with consequences for human health and climate change.
It also could have major consequences for safety, with cycling advocates arguing it will lead to more people on bikes being hurt or killed on Ontario streets. Last week, the province amended the bill to include a clause to shield the government from lawsuits from injured cyclists or the families of bike riders who are killed on the road.
The bill specifically orders the removal of three Toronto bike lanes. They’re the same three Ford has already expressed ire about: the ones on Bloor Street West, University Avenue and Yonge Street. It’s not clear yet when that work could start or how quickly it would move. The City of Toronto has said the process could cause “multiple years” of further traffic disruption in the city, currently experiencing record levels of gridlock.
The government also hasn’t clarified whether it intends to remove the entire lanes or just some sections, though Sarkaria said it’s possible the government will tear them out in their entirety.
There’s also the question of which level of government will pay to decommission bike lanes and how high the bill may be. Ford has said the province will cover the cost. But the legislation itself doesn’t require that, and even says the province isn’t required to pay cities back for the costs of installing or removing bike lanes.
The City of Toronto and the Ford government are currently arguing over what the price tag for the work will actually be. The city says it paid $27 million to install the three bike lanes and it will cost another $48 million to take them out. Ford and Sarkaria fired back, saying the estimate is impossibly high and pointed to previous bike lane removals that cost far less — though the province hasn’t attempted to come up with its own figure.
Of course, there are also plenty of other cities with bike lanes in Ontario, and what could happen to them is even less certain. Ottawa has come up: though Sarkaria has pointed to some lanes there as examples of what could be in the province’s crosshairs, Ford has said he has no problem with the bike lanes in the national capital.
It’s not clear if any other bike lanes across the province could eventually be on the chopping block. Sarkaria has said the province is working on developing a set of criteria for future bike lane removals.
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