Ontario Should Upload All Former Provincial Highways

Jeff Green | Dec 06, 2023

It's too bad that Ontario Premier Doug Ford was not a former council member in Frontenac County instead of the City of Toronto.

Because, if he was, then maybe Road 38 and Road 506/509 would have been uploaded last week instead of, or along with, the Don Valley Parkway and the Gardiner Expressway.

In the hug-fest of all time between former rivals, Ford and Olivia Chow, announced that the roads were being uploaded.

Like many other roads in the province, they used to be provincially maintained, but were downloaded as a consequence of municipal amalgamation in 1998 by the Harris government.

It costs the City of Toronto millions each year to maintain the two roads, but since they have a budget in the tens of billions, that is not the biggest reason why Toronto was looking for the upload. The cost of re-developing the Gardiner Expressway is running into the billions, and the City of Toronto is already unable to cover its other costs, given all of the responsibilities that it has for the well being of its nearly 3 million inhabitants.

While it does not cost millions to maintain Road 38 each year, it does cost millions to rehabilitate the road every 20 years or so, as South Frontenac Township is finding out now, and Central Frontenac knows only too well.

The rebuild of the Gardiner Expressway is now running at $1.2 billion (and climbing), and financing that is a burden on the City of Toronto budget of around $20 billion, between operating and capital expenditures.

But in 2006 in Central Frontenac, the cost of rebuilding Road 38 was set at $6 million, and the township received $4 million in grants ($2 million each from provincial and federal granting programs) leaving a $2 million cost to the township, whose total per year spending at that time was about $6 million.

While it is unfair to compare the budget pressures faced by a rural township like Central Frontenac that provides a minimal scope of services, with the City of Toronto, which deals with so many demands for social and cultural services, the impact of upgrading and even maintaining Road 38 has been a tremendous, almost insurmountable, burden on Central Frontenac ever since the township was formed in 1998.

South Frontenac Township, which is just now dealing with upgrading Road 38 for the first time, has more resources to work with, and their plan is to repair the road in stages to mitigate the impact on taxation.

And for their portion of roads 506-509, North Frontenac has folded reconstruction costs into their budget for many years, so the impact has been absorbed.

But whether you look at the Central Frontenac case, or the less extreme cases of North and South Frontenac, the costs that came with the download of formerly provincial roads back in 1998, has and continues to be a significant burden, limiting the capacity of the townships to address all of the needs of their residents.

The Ontario government has not indicated that the deal with Toronto over the DVP and the Gardiner is anything but a one-off deal between the two largest government entities in Ontario.

But if they are the government for all of Ontario, which we all pay into, then why not look at all the roads that were dumped on unsuspecting new municipalities back in 1998?

The cost would run into the billions, which is why it is not something that the province wants to look at, but we all pay provincial taxes equally.

A road is a road after all, whether it is located in Toronto, or out in the boonies of Frontenac County.