Rob Ford announced Friday that he will seek to bury the Scarborough portion of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT if he’s re-elected, a move that would cost over a billion dollars.

In a Toronto Sun op-ed, and then again at a hastily assembled news conference near Jane St. and Finch Ave., Ford said the city could pay for the proposal in part by cancelling the $250-million Eglinton Connects project, recently approved by council to revitalize the thoroughfare by adding bike lanes and widening sidewalks, among other things. Ford has frequently criticized the project for reducing driving lanes.

“If we show that we have some skin in the game — which we’ve shown — we can get this Eglinton Crosstown built underground,” Ford said. “People want to go underground.”

But the mayor’s plan faces several big hurdles. The expense alone may be prohibitive: it would cost $1.4 billion to put the Scarborough section of the line underground, Metrolinx said Friday. The cost of the Crosstown project is currently pegged at an estimated $5.3 billion.

Ford has suggested that the vast majority of the extra money would have to come from the provincial and federal governments.

“We know the province just won a majority government on subways: they want to build subways,” he said. “The federal government, as you know, supports subways – they’re running an election next year. They want to fund subways.”

But the province has been non-committal so far on Ford’s proposal, which would not be a subway but an underground LRT.

“Our government is committed to building the plan adopted and endorsed by Toronto City Council,” said Patrick Searle, spokesperson for Minister of Transportation Steven Del Duca, in an email. “The approved Eglinton Crosstown project is currently under construction, is on schedule and is on budget.”

Ontario Infrastructure Minister Brad Duguid also shied away from supporting the idea at a press conference Friday, and suggested that Ford would need to raise taxes to put his plan into action. “I’m waiting to see what taxes Mayor Ford is going to raise to find the extra billion dollars or so he will require to put that underground,” Duguid told reporters at Queen’s Park. “I didn’t see that in his announcement, but I’m sure that’s coming later in the campaign.”

The Eglinton Crosstown has been under construction for over a year, and is expected to be completed by 2020. 10 of its 19 km’s will run underground, from Keel St. in the west to Laird Dr. in the east. Ford would like to see the remainder of the line buried, too, all the way to Kennedy Rd.

Construction hasn’t begun on the Scarborough section yet, but Metrolinx spokesperson Anne Marie Aikins said that tearing up the current blueprint could mean additional costs.

“We’re prepared to work with whoever becomes mayor, and we’ll deal with their proposals at that time,” she said.

Even if other levels of government pay for their share of the project, the municipal money Ford has mentioned could be difficult to come by. Council voted 26-7 in July to approve Eglinton Connects, so funneling its funding into the Eglinton LRT appears unlikely to happen. Council also rejected a fully underground Eglinton transit plan in 2012 over Ford’s objections.

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The mayor argued that the municipal election on Oct. 27 will bring in a council more sympathetic to his ideas. “We’re gonna get new councilors, that I think have got the message loud and clear, that people in Scarborough, in North York, want subways. They have to listen to what the people say: and that’s the bottom line.”

With files from Daniel Dale

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