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Likely, the latter. The three firms in question are well known in Ontario infrastructure circles. Aecon has been building highways for the province for decades, with a board that currently includes former Ford cabinet minister Rod Phillips. Cintra, a division of the Spanish firm Ferrovial, operates the 407 toll highway and is digging a segment of the Ontario Line. Acciona, an Italian multinational, is also a contractor on the Ontario Line and a bidder on the Eglinton West LRT.

Of the three companies, only Acciona has experience building a highway tunnel, under the Sydney harbour in Australia — a project that will be far shorter and narrower than Ford’s Big Doug fantasy.

Governments regularly receive unsolicited proposals, and the documents obtained by the CBC suggest these firms were all pitching Queen’s Park at roughly the same time — 2019 to 2021 — as they were auditioning to build large scale transit projects for Metrolinx.

How did a highway tunnel find its way into the mix? Had Ford let it be known that he wanted some kind of analysis to backfill a decision he’d already made? Did these evaluations include peer-reviewed cost estimates? Most crucially, what did the provincial government’s own analysts conclude about the pitches before shelving the idea, at least until last year? What was the advice to cabinet?

Both NDP leader Marit Stiles and Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie are “demanding” more information. “I’d like to know what the economic benefits are,” Crombie said. “I’d like to know what the environmental impacts would be. Will it meet the goal of reducing traffic and gridlock?” At minimum, we should know way more, not least because Ford has set the wheels in motion again, with a feasibility study is expected to take about two years.

Obviously, the answer to the ‘why now’ question involves politics. Did a new tunnelling technology surface since 2021? No. Have the economics of megaprojects improved since then? No. Will the province’s economy, now under siege from Trumponomics, be robust enough to sustain a megaproject that will cost tens of billions and produce years of disruption? Not likely.

But in the run-up to the provincial general election earlier this year, Ford felt a need to brand himself as the anti-gridlock candidate, which he has tried with the Big Doug idea and his plan to tear out ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½’s bike lanes (the subject last week of a scathing court ruling).

In the background, as provincial officials concoct the terms of reference for the next 401 tunnel feasibility study, is the old and well-recognized problem of shopping around for the technical justifications you need to persuade voters that it’s all serious and above-board. Which means, in practice, fitting out said study with rosy economic projections and a plausible timeline. Savvy consultants understand how to cater to the political pressure to deliver a yes.

Yet as two decades of research by megaproject expert , an Oxford University geographer, shows, massive infrastructure ventures have notoriously poor track records: they go way over budget, drag on for years, and often fail to deliver the promised benefits, leaving taxpayers holding the bag.

With the 401 tunnel, the predictable result of constructing a 40-to-60-km-long traffic sewer will be epic backups thanks to induced congestion.

Flyvbjerg also point to the peculiar psychology of such politically freighted plans, which is that they tend to blind governments to cheaper and more easily executed alternatives. Such as, in the case of the 401: deploying outstanding east-west GO Bus service on dedicated lanes, which would cost a fraction of the Big Doug and provide some gridlock relief within our lifetimes.

The engineering giants that pitched Queen’s Park on the tunnel between 2019 and 2021 make their profit by building very large things. As the old saying goes, if your only tool is a hammer …

But as Queen’s Park shambles its way toward a feasibility study, the policymakers and consultants designing it should consider Plan Bs that can solve a very real issue without bankrupting the government.

To get there, the opposition parties, voters and even Ontario’s auditor general must demand maximum transparency, which begins with the documented unearthed this week, but now includes the advice the government buys for itself.

Then we’ll all know.