It’s wrong to build a new Highway 7 between Kitchener and Guelph even if all mainstream political parties want it done, Michael Parkinson says.
He’s distressed by its unrevealed total cost and by the environmental impact on fields and wetlands. He feels the spending steals from higher priorities such as eliminating homelessness, improving health care and expanding public transit.
“This project has always appeared to be less about good transportation planning and more about providing a giant corporate welfare cheque to subsidize urban sprawl,” said Parkinson, part of a failed grassroots effort to stop the new highway two decades ago.
He advocates for widening or improving the current highway. Planners rejected the idea long ago as insufficient and overly complicated by restrictions on turning movements and by service roads needed to maintain access to businesses.
The political consensus in the current election is the same as in elections past: build a new highway. All mainstream parties seeking your vote Feb. 27 agree it is needed to safely speed the movement of goods and people. But when?
As soon as possible, says Mike Harris, the Progressive Conservative candidate seeking re-election for the Doug Ford government in Kitchener-Conestoga.
Harris vowed in a statement to “continue to champion this project that will allow families to spend less time on the road and more time where it matters most.”
Ontario approved a new highway in 2007, five elections and 11 transportation ministers ago. Since taking office in 2018, the Ford government has advanced the project incrementally while further delaying it.
Most recently, the government awarded a $33-million contract to replace the Frederick Street bridge spanning the expressway in Kitchener. The bridge must be lengthened to support a new Highway 7 interchange. Construction will begin this year.
This was delayed three years after the government advertised bridge work in 2021 but did not award a contract.
The province will soon complete the engineering design for two bridges across the Grand River, Harris said. Ontario previously said it would finish the bridges by 2020, but currently proposes no date to launch construction.
The new highway is planned at four lanes divided by a 22-metre grass median that will run for 18 kilometres just north of the current two-lane highway. The province won’t say when it will be completed or how much it will cost after spending more than $130 million to buy the route and design it.
“We’ve already put so much money into it, we might as well get the job done,” said Mike Schreiner, the Guelph MPP who leads the Green party.
It bothers Schreiner and other critics that the Ford government hasn’t built a new Highway 7 even as it proposes contentious new highways in the Greater Toronto Area.
“It always does feel like Groundhog Day when we talk about Highway 7,” said Catherine Fife, New Democrat candidate seeking re-election in Waterloo. “This for me is very problematic, for the government to continually make promises but not work toward any tangible deadlines or costings.”
She said “commuters deserve to travel a safe, efficient highway, because this is ultimately an economic driver for the region.”
”Highway 7 is something we would proceed on,” Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie said. “This is something that’s been under work for some time and there’s been considerable investment.”
The Greater Kitchener Waterloo Chamber of Commerce says the new highway is needed to move goods more efficiently, easing pressure on Highway 401 and helping Canada expand trade while under threat of possible U.S. tariffs.
“We have to build that infrastructure to get products in the position where they can move into the global markets,” said Art Sinclair, vice-president of policy for the chamber.
Supporters of a new highway are not put off by evidence suggesting congestion may be easing on the current highway while safety improves.
Driving trips on all roads between Kitchener-Waterloo and Guelph fell eight per cent between 2016 and 2022, according to a scientific travel survey by the Ministry of Transportation. The start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 likely played a role.
Fife has a sense of this. She campaigned on the doorstep of a Waterloo resident who wants a new highway because he is frustrated to be stuck in traffic while commuting to his job in Guelph.
He also told her he now works from home two days a week “because the traffic was so bad and he was wasting so much time,” she said.
Crashes on Highway 7 are down by more than a third since 2020, according to collision records obtained by The Record from the Ministry of Transportation in a Freedom-of-Information request.
