Kathleen Wynne will co-operate with John Tory’s toll plan

Premier will approve Toronto mayor’s proposal to toll the Don Valley Parkway and the Gardiner Expressway.

Thestar.com
Dec. 7, 2016
By Robert Benzie

Premier Kathleen Wynne will give the green light to Mayor John Tory’s proposal to toll the Don Valley Parkway and the Gardiner Expressway to bankroll transportation infrastructure.

“If Mayor Tory and his council determine that they would like to embark on a tolling of certain roads - local roads in the city of Toronto - then we will work with them,” Wynne told reporters Wednesday at an announcement related to the Eglinton Crosstown LRT project.

“Because I think that it’s important that they have the ability to raise the money to augment (provincial funding), because we’re investing billions of dollars in Toronto,” she said.

“If there’s more that they need to do, they need to find resources to do that and we need to co-operate with them as they make those decisions,” the premier said.

“Having said that, there hasn’t been a request come forward. Council hasn’t had a vote yet and I think we owe it to the city of Toronto and the council to allow them to have that discussion.”

With Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown vowing to stop Tory from tolling the two city-owned highways, Wynne said such transit should not be a “political football.”

“We’re standing on a line that had the previous Conservative government not filled in the hole we would have had a subway running along Eglinton Ave.,” she said, referring to former Tory premier Mike Harris’s decision a generation ago to scrap the Eglinton underground, cementing the tunnels so they couldn’t be repurposed for the new Crosstown LRT.

“That was the kind of short-term thinking that I absolutely think has no business in politics.”

But Brown warned allowing Toronto to toll its highways would be the thin edge of the wedge, enabling other municipalities to engage in road-pricing.

“It takes a provincial regulation to toll the DVP and the Gardiner. What would Kathleen Wynne say if the mayor of Richmond Hill or the mayor of Vaughan or the mayor of Mississauga now ask for tolls?” said the PC leader.

“This is going to create a war of tolls,” said Brown, who is tabling a motion opposing the fees in the legislature on Thursday.

Tory, who was Conservative leader from 2004 to 2009, has been urging a $2 toll on the two highways in order to pay for new public transit and road improvements and isn’t happy with the signals from his former party.

“I know John quite well. We’ve talked many times since I became PC leader,” said Brown, playing down his rift with the mayor.

“He’s been very clear to me, he can’t criticize Kathleen Wynne. He needs to be nice to this government otherwise he loses his infrastructure funding, so I get that. I get the politics around that.”