Queen Elizabeth Way
controlled-access highway in Ontario
The Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW) is a 400-series highway in the Canadian province of Ontario linking Toronto with Fort Erie in the Niagara Peninsula. The highway begins at the Canada–United States border on the Peace Bridge and travels 139.1 kilometres (86.4 mi) around the western end of Lake Ontario, ending at Highway 427 near the western border of Toronto. The freeway continues as the Gardiner Expressway into downtown Toronto. The QEW is one of Ontario's busiest highways, with an average of close to 250,000 vehicles per day on some sections.
Major highway junctions are at Highway 420 in Niagara Falls, Highway 405 in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Highway 406 in St. Catharines, the Red Hill Valley Parkway in Hamilton, Highway 403 and Highway 407 in Burlington, Highway 403 at the Oakville–Mississauga boundary, and Highway 427 in Etobicoke. Within the Regional Municipality of Halton the QEW is signed concurrently with Highway 403. The speed limit is 100 kilometres per hour (62 mph) throughout most of its length, with the exception being between Hamilton and St. Catharines where the posted limit was raised to 110 km/h (68 mph) on September 26, 2019 as part of the government's plan to raise the speed limits across the province.
The history of the QEW dates back to 1931, when work began to widen the Middle Road in a similar fashion to the nearby Dundas Highway and Lakeshore Road as a relief project during the Great Depression.
“Queen Elizabeth Way” enters the record as controlled-access highway in Ontario. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Queen, Elizabeth and controlled-access can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1133822. VIAF identifies the subject as 315527139. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2019 and 1931.
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This entry incorporates text from “Queen Elizabeth Way” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.