IN ONTARIO, as in most other jurisdictions, the rule used to be that once through traffic

warranted it, the province would build a highway bypass around an urban centre.

That's what happened in Dufferin, when Highway 24 was diverted around Horning's Mills, Highway 89 skirted Violet Hill and Highway 10 was rerouted around Orangeville.

Back then, no one doubted that bypasses were the responsibility of senior levels of government, since the main beneficiaries were the long-distance travellers.

That's still the situation elsewhere in North America (and particularly in the United States, where most of the money comes from the federal government), but not, seemingly, in Ontario.

Here, although Ontario paid the full cost of the Toronto Bypass" portion of Highways 401 and

427, and later the widening of that roadway to 12 lanes, the rules keep changing in "less important" parts of the province, such as Dufferin County.

Here, successive provincial governments have gone the other way, unceremoniously dumping through highways on to the shoulders of local property taxpayers and refusing to build muchneeded highway bypasses. In fact, it took a Herculean effort to get Queen's Park to share the cost of Orangeville's new south bypass, and now we find a similar lack of enthusiasm to fund the sorely-needed Highway 10 bypass in Shelburne.

In fact, Shelburne council's plea for the bypass led to a demand that the town pay half the projected $100,000 cost of a "feasibility" study that the province still hasn't conducted.

Two things Queen's Park clearly can't be accused of are consistency and fair play.