The Globe and Mail

In the seemingly eternal civic debate about how -- or whether -- to slay the Gardiner Expressway, an old and strange idea has resurfaced: Stick it in the lake. Several sources close to the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation have confirmed that the agency's planners and technical advisers have been informally revisiting variations of a blue-sky idea put forward 14 years ago by Ottawa developer Bill Teron. As part of his vision for a beautified waterfront, Mr. Teron's dream was to eliminate the unsightly Gardiner. His plan involved constructing an enormous earth berm in the harbour, stretching from Jameson Avenue to the foot of the Don River. The water and muck would be dredged out, leaving an east-west trench into which the highway could be shifted. Afterward, the trench would be covered and backfilled, creating a new strip of land along the lake's edge. This megaproject rested on the fact that the bedrock needed to support such a roadway is only four or five metres below the lake's bottom.