Should we buy back the 407?

Every driver in this region has done the same arithmetic at the same on-ramp: forty minutes of the 401 for nothing, or fifteen minutes of the 407 for the price of a decent lunch.

The 407 was built with public money and leased to a private consortium in 1999, for $3.1 billion and 99 years. The province does not set the tolls. On January 1 they went up again: the weekday rate for a car now runs from about 50 cents to well over a dollar a kilometre depending on the stretch and the direction, and the company’s own estimate is that a typical transponder customer pays roughly $5 a month more than last year.

The buyback has been mused about from Queen’s Park for more than a year. When CBC asked the company, its answer was that no talks have taken place. There is no mechanism to take the road back that does not involve buying out the remainder of the lease, and nobody has ever put a defensible number on that.

There is one real change, and it is east of here. The stretch from Brock Road in Pickering to Highway 35/115 was always the province’s, not the consortium’s, and its tolls came off on June 1, 2025. Pickering to Clarington is now free. Everything west of Brock Road still charges, which is most of the highway and most of the traffic.

Sources: CBC, no buyback talks have taken place · 407 ETR, the 2026 rate schedule · Global News, tolls removed from 407 East