Province Supporting Community Benefits with Approval of Five Infrastructure Projects

Ontario is ensuring that local communities benefit from infrastructure development before, during and after construction, helping to support economic growth and new job opportunities for people across the province.

The province is moving forward with five new community benefit projects, which will employ a range of options designed to bolster local communities during the development of major new public infrastructure, including employment and training opportunities, environmental protections, poverty reduction measures and small business supports.

The projects are:

• Finch West LRT, a new light rail transit line in Toronto
• West Park Healthcare Centre, a hospital providing specialized rehabilitation and complex-continuing care
• Halton Region Consolidated Courthouse, a new 21-courtroom facility
• Macdonald Block, a reconstruction of a government complex in Toronto
• Thunder Bay Correctional Complex, to replace the city's existing jail and correctional centre. 

These projects build on progress already being made on the Eglinton Crosstown LRT and are the next step toward Ontario's commitment to have all major public infrastructure projects comply with a community benefits framework by 2020.

Ontario's plan to support care, create opportunity and make life more affordable during this period of rapid economic change includes free prescription drugs for everyone under 25, and 65 or over, through the biggest expansion of medicare in a generation, free tuition for hundreds of thousands of students, a higher minimum wage and better working conditions, and free preschool child care from 2 ½ to kindergarten.

Community Benefits is an initiative in which social and economic needs of a community are more closely linked to infrastructure investments and could include workforce development, social procurement and/ or supplementary benefits identified by the community such as the creation of space for more physical public assets (e.g., child care facilities, a park), or design features to reduce noise pollution.

Source: Ontario Newsroom