The Ontario government will shell out $9.1 million for a Canadian company to study whether or not Premier Doug Ford’s dream of tunnelling underneath Highway 401 is possible or practical.

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Transportation confirmed on Thursday afternoon that WSP Canada Inc. had been awarded a contract to produce the Highway 401 tunnel feasibility study.

“Our government is making significant progress on the transformational project to build a tunnel under Highway 401 that will get people and goods moving across the province faster,” they said in a statement.

Awarding the contract, however, comes more than a year after the idea was first floated and means it is likely to be another two years until results are known.

As Global News previously reported, internal work has already taken place studying whether an expressway can be built beneath Highway 401 — work that was paused in 2021 after it was found there was a “potential for roadway collapse.”

That study has not been released, and Premier Doug Ford has said it won’t play a role in future studies of the project.

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The idea of a tunnel under Highway 401 has been considered by the Ministry of Transportation — in some form — since 2019, but was only shared with the public in September 2024. That was when Ford announced his plan to build a 50-kilometre tunnel under Highway 401, stretching from Mississauga to Markham.

The concept was first sparked after several private-sector bids were sent to Infrastructure Ontario with ideas on how to relieve congestion in and around Toronto.

Over a three-year period, the Crown agency received three unsolicited proposals to specifically alleviate traffic along the 401 — among them tunnels, tolled roads and managed lanes.

According to internal documents, the government directed civil servants to assess “the feasibility and benefits of a tunnel or similar large-scale capital infrastructure project on the central Hwy 401 corridor.”

The studies considered three tunnel concepts and two elevated roadways.

All of that work was paused in 2021 — and restarted sometime in the summer of 2024, when the transportation and infrastructure ministers “caught wind” of the past work.

The feasibility study which WSP Canada is taking on is not set to include the unreleased internal work and will be used by the government to determine the length and potential cost of a tunnel the premier has said he will build whatever the report finds.

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