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Ontario Line 3 and GO Expansion reached another milestone this past week with the ground being broken on East Harbour Station, announced by Mayor Chow and Premier Ford on June 17, 2025. Located between Eastern Avenue, Lake Shore Boulevard East, and the Don Valley Parkway, the station site is beside where the historic Lever Brothers soap factory once stood. Demolished in 2023, the cleared site will eventually be transformed into a large mixed-use development featuring office and residential towers. Once the new development around the station is complete, East Harbour is expected to become the second busiest transit hub in the GTA, serving as an interchange between Ontario Line 3 and the Lakeshore East and Stouffville GO lines.
Standing in a parking lot off of Eastern Avenue, Mayor Chow opened the groundbreaking ceremony as a crowd of construction workers looked on. Praising the investments made by the Province of Ontario into Toronto's rapid transit network, Chow lauded the working relationship she and Ford have developed since her election as Mayor in 2023. This wasn’t without a few jokes about cycling, as Chow referenced the ongoing dispute between Toronto and the Province over the fate of bike lanes on some of the city’s major streets.
Following remarks from the Minister of Infrastructure, Kinga Surma, and Minister of Transportation, Prabmeet Sarkaria, Ford took the stage. As he greeted the audience, a GO train crossed the Don River and entered onto the Lakeshore East rail corridor, its diesel engine roaring over the construction site. As the rails screeched, Ford proclaimed it was music to his ears and launched into a recitation of the work being done to improve and expand the public transportation across the GTA.
Once a hub of industry, the Unilever property beside the future station has been an underutilized brownfield site for years now, sitting just a few kilometres east of the bustling financial district. Plans for the redevelopment of the site, initially preserving the now demolished factory, circulated for over a decade following First Gulf's purchase of the site in 2012. A core challenge that long hindered this deceptively central site, even before office vacancies surged in the wake of the pandemic, was its poor mass transit access. With no direct surface transit connection, the nearest 501 Queen streetcar stop is a 15-minute walk away. More puzzling still is the absence of rapid transit, despite the steady stream of GO trains cutting through the heart of the site, reaching Union Station in just five minutes, yet never stopping to serve the area.
The announcement of Ontario Line 3 in 2019 by the Province of Ontario set to end the longstanding isolation of this prime urban parcel. An effective revitalization of what would come to be known as East Harbour was a clear influence on the routing of the line. Forgoing long standing intensions to have the Queen subway - then known as the Relief Line - follow Queen Street into Riverside, Ontario Line 3 will instead veer sharply south to serve Corktown and the Lever Brothers/East Harbour site, now owned by Cadillac Fairview following their purchase of the site from First Gulf in 2019. As a result of this realignment, Toronto's newest subway will shuttle riders from East Harbour to Queen station in under 10 minutes, a trip that currently takes 40 minutes on transit.
Despite this, the future of East Harbour as a neighbourhood remains uncertain. Initial plans to see the area redeveloped into a district reminiscent of London's Canary Wharf office node have given way to an increasingly residential oriented vision. A Minister's Zoning Order from Ford's government in 2022 sped this transition along, as Cadillac-Fairview grew increasingly wary of building large quantities of new office space following the decrease in demand for office space post-COVID.
The two GO lines stopping at East Harbour, Lakeshore East and Stouffville, were set to be transformed into high frequency regional rail lines, operating more similarly to a surface subway than the commuter oriented service seen today. Widescale electrification, new stations across Toronto and frequencies of up to every 7.5 minutes were promised to the public for years. However, recent news of Metrolinx's termination of their contract with ONxpress has thrown the extent of GO expansion into uncertainty.
Regardless of the precise frequencies running on opening day, the introduction of a 'shoulder station' in Toronto's east end, mirroring the role Exhibition Station plays in the west end, will undoubtably spark a wave of change in the long sleepy Riverside neighbourhood. Development applications have already seen an uptick in density and height on nearby arterials, and local neighbourhood streets have even experienced an infusion of missing middle housing. As East Harbour station takes shape, it promises not only to transform the way people move across the area, but also to profoundly reshape the very fabric of the communities next to it.
UrbanToronto will continue to follow progress on this project, but in the meantime, you can learn more about it from our Database files, linked below. If you'd like, you can join in on the conversations in the associated Project Forum threads or leave a comment in the space provided on this page.
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