001-45_127_NOV-DEC_LAYOUT_PT - Flipbook - Page 35
CONSTRUCTION
RECLAIMING THE WATERFRONT
How EllisDon built a river to secure Toronto’s future by John Tenpenny
EW INFRASTRUCTURE endeavours in North America can
match the sheer scale, ambition, and technical complexity of Toronto’s Port Lands Flood Protection and
Enabling Infrastructure project. Spanning 400 hectares along the mouth of the Don River, what was
once a patchwork of heavily polluted industrial land
has been radically transformed into an ecologically rich,
resilient urban district.
Delivered by EllisDon under a Construction Management model for Waterfront Toronto, the $1.3-billion
project stands as one of the largest earthworks, soil remediation, and water management undertakings in the city’s
history. Beyond safeguarding 174 hectares of Toronto’s
downtown core and east end from catastrophic 昀氀ooding,
ELLISDON
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RENEWCANADA.NET
the project has fundamentally rede昀椀ned how modern cities integrate civil engineering, environmental restoration,
and public realm development.
Re昀氀ecting on the project’s execution, Josh Manning, Senior Vice President and Area Manager, Civil at EllisDon,
emphasized that the true measure of success lay in taking
on challenges that had never been attempted at this scale
in a dense urban environment.
Building a river in the heart of the city
At the core of the project was an engineering challenge almost unheard of in modern civil construction:
constructing a new, naturalized river valley through a
heavily industrialized urban centre. To relieve the Don
The Port Lands Flood
Protection project
renaturalized the mouth of
the Don River by digging a
one-kilometre naturalized
river valley, creating two new
outlets to the Inner Harbour,
and lifting approximately 290
to 400 hectares of Toronto’s
eastern waterfront out of the
floodplain.
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2026 – RENEW CANADA 35
