December 2, 2004
Construct Canada Annual Exposition
Keynote Address by David Caplan
Minister of Public Infrastructure Renewal
Check against delivery.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Ken, for that introduction.
I am thrilled with the opportunity to share with you some of the plans and initiatives that the McGuinty government is pursuing and how it fits in its vision for Ontario.
It struck me as I prepared my remarks for today that we have a lot in common. If nothing else, we share a common interest in public infrastructure. You want to build it, and I want to get it built.
Beyond that, we also share an orientation toward the future, and a taste for strategic planning. Both are an important component of your work. And both are absolutely essential to mine.
American historian Will Durant observed once that the future doesn’t just happen. It is created.
What I want to discuss with you today is the future we hope to create for the people of Ontario – a future of prosperity, with access to new jobs, affordable places to live, easy ways to get around and green spaces to enjoy. Strategic planning will help us get there.
Let me begin with what we know.
We know that we have a sizeable challenge ahead of us.
We know that within the next 30 years, Ontario will be home to more than four million more people – the lion’s share of whom will be in the Greater Golden Horseshoe.
That’s good news. People want to move to this province because we have a robust economy, promising employment opportunities, safe, clean and diverse communities, and a quality of life that is second to none.
But the sheer size of this influx has enormous implications for the kind of future we want to create and the kind of public infrastructure investments we will need to achieve it.
If we get it right, we will save a lot of money. It is estimated that we need to spend $100 billion on essential improvements to our infrastructure; but we can save billions of that by making existing infrastructure more effective.
Much of Ontario’s current infrastructure is aging, so we must repair what we have to serve our current needs and at the same time, build more for the millions we know are coming. And we recognize that we need more investment and a more strategic approach to financing and building our infrastructure.
For example, one of the province’s particular priorities is to ensure a legacy of clean, reliable and safe drinking water and efficient wastewater treatment.
We know that a significant capital investment –one in the multi-billions of dollars range – will be required over an extended period to bring distribution and treatment systems into a state of good repair and to allow for expansion.
With nearly 1,200 municipal water and wastewater treatment plants and untold tens of kilometres of pipe carrying water to and wastewater from Ontario homes and businesses, it’s massive.
It is also old and getting older – some of the pipe has been in the ground for more than a century. Like all things out of sight, this pipe has been all too easy to put out of mind…as long as nothing goes wrong.
Unfortunately, that’s what previous governments have done – ignored the problem. Now we’re faced with a massive fix and finding ways to do it so consumers aren’t faced with unaffordable rates for water and wastewater treatment.
We know that the time to lay the foundations for upgrading our public infrastructure is now. I’m talking about our water and wastewater treatment facilities, our roads and transportation systems, our hospitals and schools.
Clearly, the very first thing we need is the kind of strategic planning I mentioned a few moments ago.
We can’t walk backward into the future. We need a map to a future we hope to create. We need a plan to deliver the infrastructure that Ontarians deserve and to accommodate the growth we know is coming. We need to link our spending with our planning.
The McGuinty government is laying down that groundwork. Building on an array of policies and programs, we are developing a blueprint to guide our infrastructure investments, and to coordinate growth and capital planning.
This past summer we initiated the first part of our growth planning strategy. I presented a discussion paper called Places to Grow. Better Choices. Brighter Future for public comment.
We are focusing on this region first because it is one of the fastest-growing in North America. It is where most of our future growth will settle – almost four million people and about two million jobs. As a result, it also faces the most critical of growth pressures.
The paper, as many of you may know, lays out the McGuinty government’s vision for how and where the Greater Golden Horseshoe should grow.
It identifies strategies on how to use our existing urban lands and infrastructure more efficiently, how to build in a more sustainable and compact form and how to protect our natural resources.
We consulted extensively with stakeholders and the public. We met with municipalities, businesses and organizations. Hundreds of people attended public meetings and sent us their written submissions.
The consensus was that the old business-as-usual way to building infrastructure and planning for growth is a dead end.
In late October, I introduced the Places to Grow Act. If passed, this legislation would allow the Ontario government to proceed with a growth plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe as the first in a series of potential plans for other parts of the province.
At the same time my colleague John Gerretsen, Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, introduced the proposed Greenbelt Act. This legislation would protect a band of 1.8 million acres of land running through the Golden Horseshoe from Niagara to Rice Lake near Peterborough. It identifies the areas that would be protected from urban sprawl – areas where growth would be restricted or should not occur.
These two pieces of legislation would dovetail to provide a blueprint for development and growth.
The proposed Places to Grow legislation applies to the entire province and would allow the government to designate specific geographic areas for the purpose of developing growth plans. Each growth plan would focus on where and how growth should occur.
It outlines the approach we would take – in partnership with municipalities – to developing growth plans. It also defines the role of the Ministry of Public Infrastructure Renewal in developing and amending plans.
Planning for future growth, making sure we are putting infrastructure in place now for future needs, seems rational – what some wag has called good, stable thinking... But, let me tell you, it’s a radical departure from past practices.
Let me talk a bit more now about the proposed strategies in the Places to Grow discussion paper and how they can help create better choices for a brighter future.
First, the paper identifies priority and emerging urban centres that could absorb much of our new population and job growth – and benefit from it.
We’re not proposing this arbitrarily. There are the areas within the Greater Golden Horseshoe –Toronto, Hamilton, Barrie and Waterloo, for example – with existing infrastructure that can be built upon and the capacity to absorb more growth.
We’re proposing to help those areas absorb the growth sensibly in a number of ways:
- By encouraging compact development in their existing borders, using existing infrastructure, where possible,
- By supporting these centres as residential and employment anchors,
- By keeping communities competitive and attractive with preserved employment lands. And also providing fiscal tools to redevelop brownfields and greyfields, such as tax increment financing.
We also want people of modest means – the people who will work in the region’s new industries – to become homeowners. The federal-provincial Affordable Housing Program will be helpful here.
Some people worry that this whole approach means packing the suburbs with high-rise apartments, when people really want to live in single-family dwellings.
That’s a misconception. Toronto boasts many areas of single and semi-detached houses that support public transit because they are compactly built.
There are neighbourhoods that offer choices to their residents, featuring a balanced mix of business, service and residential uses, well served by existing infrastructure.
That’s what we want to see more of. And a great many Ontarians tell us they want to see it too.
A community that is well served by transit and has a mix of residential, commercial and retail uses, is what I would call a healthy community.
People living there will get to work in a reasonable time and be home early enough to have supper with the kids.
They will have more choices in the types of housing they can access and the different modes they can use to get around. They will have green spaces for their families to play in.
We recognize that some areas are experiencing a more rapid pace of growth than others and that there will need to be some urban expansion outside of current boundaries over the next decades. But our first priority is to promote more efficient growth patterns and maximize the use of our existing land supply.
Our overall purpose is to enhance public services across Ontario. And by instituting a better way of financing and building public infrastructure and planning for growth, we will help deliver the real, positive change that will make Ontario strong, healthy and prosperous.
That is why we are currently working on a long-term infrastructure plan that will prioritize our capital investments.
In the spring, we will unveil the first five years of our strategic infrastructure plan outlining our immediate and future public infrastructure needs. It will also be the basis for consultations with stakeholders to guide the development of our 10-year plan for release later next year.
In the meantime, we have introduced tools that will assist municipalities in achieving their infrastructure needs:
- To guide the way we will approach financing and procurement of our public infrastructure we have developed a framework, called Building a Better Tomorrow.
Through a principled approach, it will guide the way we engage the private sector, where appropriate, in building and renewing vital public assets and optimizing public-private collaboration. It’s the first time Ontario has done this.
- We are leveraging infrastructure investments by engaging our federal and municipal partners for more direct and effective results through programs like the Canada-Ontario Municipal Rural Infrastructure Fund (COMRIF), which was announced last month.
This tri-level partnership will stimulate up to $900-million in infrastructure investments for our small urban and rural municipalities.
- Also through the Ontario Strategic Infrastructure Financing Authority (OSIFA) we are providing another financing tool to help municipalities improve their public infrastructure.
Through this pooled financing concept municipalities are able to borrow for infrastructure investments at lower rates and on better terms.
- We are providing new sources of financing for municipalities – for example, by sharing a portion of the gas tax – to encourage investment into priority areas like public transit.
- We are making direct capital investments in key areas like public transit and transportation systems to ensure that infrastructure will be in place to meet our growth planning goals.
- Finally, this government has placed a particular priority on water/wastewater infrastructure. We want to ensure that water anywhere in Ontario will be safe and clean for future generations.
This past summer we appointed an independent panel of experts.
Their task is to provide recommendations on how to improve our water/wastewater infrastructure and how to deliver water/wastewater services more efficiently.
Currently they are consulting with key stakeholders and we look forward to their report later this winter.
This government is firmly committed to two principles when it comes to our water and wastewater infrastructure:
- First, we will implement all recommendations of the Walkerton Inquiry. To achieve our goals, we must never forget the tragic events that unfolded in this town in 2000 due to inadequate water treatment.
- And second, we will ensure public ownership of water and wastewater treatment systems is preserved.
So you can see, for the first time in Ontario, we are bringing together diverse infrastructure strands – from urban intensification to water and wastewater to affordable housing – and weaving them into a coordinated plan for our future.
One area of particular focus for this government is transportation. We know that we need to tackle the gridlock on our roads and get goods to market more efficiently.
Where public transit is concerned, we want to fund major upgrades for the TTC in Toronto and GO transit throughout the area.
Further afield, we are proposing enhanced transit, such as better GO service to the north, new GO tracks along the Lakeshore, and entirely new GO services in other corridors as population warrants.
These investments will allow GO to increase ridership beyond the current 44 million per year so that GO will soon be able to support frequent, all-day rail service. One day, that will give people outside Toronto the option to retire their cars – and we may be surprised how many will choose to do so.
We also need to ensure a Strategic Goods Movement network to get our goods to market. You will see improvements to the 400-series highways, as well as the QEW and Don Valley Parkway.
In the coming years we will invest:
- $1 billion in partnership with local governments and the federal government for GO Transit expansion,
- Nearly $700 million in 78 municipal transit systems through the provincial gas tax allocation,
- $1 billion, from the three levels of government, to expand the TTC,
- And about $1 billion a year for highway construction and maintenance.
Today, I’ve painted with broad brush-strokes, the plans and initiatives that will deliver an Ontario that is competitive and innovative. It’s a future that the McGuinty government believes Ontarians want and deserve.
Ladies and gentlemen, what we are proposing is eminently sensible. It may mean that some developers will have to do business differently. But in the booming Ontario that we are preparing to welcome, there will be enough work for everybody.
Those of us who are still here in 2030 will be living in a 24-carat Greater Golden Horseshoe – an economic powerhouse that will continue to be known around the world.
And we will all share pride in the part we have played in building it.
Thank you for your attention.
