Hwy 17 for sale?

Don't look now, Saultbies, but Andre Riopel wants to sell your Highway 17.

Highway 69 too.

And for that matter, all of the highways in Ontario.

Sault Ste. Marie's Green Party candidate in the October 10 provincial election doesn't much like motor vehicles.

And he thinks the province's highways should be sold off to the private sector.

Riopel floated the idea at this week's first all-candidates debate (shown) sponsored by the Sault Ste. Marie Accessibility Advisory Committee.

He was responding to a question about whether the province should demand accessibility features on the Algoma Central Railway as a condition to its recent $5 million investment to replace the Agawa Canyon Tour Train cars.

"The future does not belong to the car, it belongs to public transit and rail," Riopel said. "We have to stop spending money on road expansion projects," he said, instead advocating a high-speed rail network covering the entire nation.

"Highway 69, Highway 17 - Let it go, sell it to the private sector," he said.

"I think the Conservatives tried that already," responded Sault MPP David Orazietti, in an apparent reference to the controversial sale in 1999 of Highway 407 for $3.1 billion.

Orazietti and all other participants in the debate (shown, left to right, are Riopel, Orazietti, NDP candidate Jeff Arbus, Family Coalition candidate Bill Murphy and Progressive Conservative candidate Josh Pringle) all agreed that the ACR should be fully accessible and that the $5 million provincial investment should be conditional on that.