Wynne approves mayor’s toll proposal

Premier Kathleen Wynne will give the green light to Toronto 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.

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?” he said.