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Let it never be said that old fights die easy here. In Canada, political battles, dormant for decades, are always prone to reappear.

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tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or See inside the just-opened Toronto island airport tunnel that burrows 30 metres under Lake Ontario Back to video

So it was that Conservative Lisa Raitt, the federal minister of transport, appeared in Toronto Thursday to finally stick it to Liberal foes, one of whom died 18 years before she was born.

Raitt was presiding over the opening of a long-touted fixed link between Toronto’s oft-controversial island airport and the downtown mainland. The 260-metre pedestrian tunnel is the culmination of a Conservative policy conceived 80 years earlier, in the Great Depression, and originally killed off by Mackenzie King.

The tunnel is also — and this still seems remarkable in Toronto — a useful thing that was proposed, paid for and actually finished. It cost $82.5 million to build, funded through airport improvement fees, and will augment rather than replace the existing ferry service, providing what Raitt called a “reliable, convenient, predictable” way for the 2.4 million passengers who use the facility every year to reach the island.