Steven Guilbeault is an “extremist… who handcuffs himself to trains.”Ontario Premier Doug Ford.Join the club.Ontario Premier Doug Ford lashed out at federal Minister Steven Guilbeault’s comments over halting road construction on Wednesday, saying on Twitter (“X”) that he was “gobsmacked” a Liberal cabinet minister would say such a thing.“I’m gobsmacked,” he wrote. “A federal minister said they won’t invest in new roads or highways. He doesn’t care that you’re stuck in bumper to bumper traffic. I do. We’re building roads and highways, with or without a cent from the feds.”.It comes after Guilbeault on Tuesday told a Montreal transit conference that the federal government would no longer allocate new funding to build out road networks and urged municipalities to do the same.Instead, the Liberals would use taxpayer dollars to promote so-called ‘active transportation’ methods — walking, biking and even cross country skiing and rollerblading — even as it mandates 100% EV sales by 2030.“Our government has made the decision to stop investing in new road infrastructure… there will be no more envelopes from the federal government to enlarge the road network,” he said.“The analysis we have done is that the network is perfectly adequate to respond to the needs we have. And thanks to a mix of investment in active and public transit, and in territorial planning and densification, we can very well achieve our goals of economic, social and human development without more enlargement of the road network.”.That sent Ford off the rhetorical deep end. But he also has been engaged in a war of words of his own with Guilbeault for months, over his proposed King’s Highway 413, also known as the GTA West Corridor that has been on the books since 2002.The 52-km conduit was formally cancelled in February 2018 and then revived a year later.The latest stumbling block is Guilbeault’s insistence on a federal environmental assessment under the Impact Assessment Act — the same one that was struck down by the Supreme Court on appeal from Alberta.In the wake of that decision, after Guilbeault said he intended to “rework” it, the Ontario government in October applied for a judicial review of the entire legislation to have completely scrapped once and for all..And like Alberta leaders Premier Danielle Smith and and Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz, Ford has labelled Guilbeault an “extremist… who handcuffs himself to trains.”“Unfortunately, we’ve had to bring them back to court again,” Ford told the Brampton Board of Trade in December. “We’re gonna win again. We already won last time.”
