Ontario Premier Doug Ford is once again musing about maybe buying back Highway 407 — an idea he has gone back and forth on for months — saying he won’t rule out the potential purchase.
On Wednesday, at an unrelated event, Ford was asked if he was still considering buying out the toll highway, which Ontario sold to a private operator in the 1990s.
The premier said the province had had conversations about the idea, but didn’t say if it was under any kind of meaningful consideration.
“The public service kind of goes back and forth, the Ministry of Transportation, but you know, without throwing any numbers, we should never have sold the 407,” Ford said.
“They’re going to be at capacity in 10 years, and I’d never rule out acquiring it, but we also have to build capacity.”
Ford said it would cost “tens of billions of dollars” to take the highway back into public ownership.
The comments came the day after the premier confirmed Ontario would remove tolls from the publicly owned portion of Highway 407 as part of Thursday’s budget.
Those changes only impact a small section of the highway, which runs across the Greater Toronto Area and is privately owned and tolled for most of its route.
Government critics have suggested the province should consider buying the route instead of building Highway 413 between Milton and Vaughan or tunnelling a new expressway under Highway 401.
Ford has mused about the idea but generally seemed to lean against it.
At one point, he said the government should sit down with executives at Highway 407, and his transportation ministry said it was something being discussed, before the premier appeared to cool on the idea during the election.
“We need more capacity — that’s what we need — that (buying the 407) doesn’t add more capacity,” he said in February.
Despite months of musing about the potential to buy back the route, the vast majority of references to Highway 407 have come from the premier and not the Ministry of Transportation.
The government has announced no formal talks to buy the highway.