If we look back at the RFP, we didn't specifically ask for technology. We really were looking for.... Let me take a quick step back.
Waterfront Toronto's mandate is to bring economic development, private sector investment and innovation all to the waterfront, and to use that as an economic engine. We have the ability to transform the market and have effective leadership of public lands. We don't own all of it; a lot of it's owned by the city. Ten years ago we set a sustainability standard, for example, of LEED gold. People may not know much about that, but it's an international standard of sustainability that a building must meet. There's a whole process that needs to be gone through, and it's third party adjudicated. That was transformational at the time. Ten years ago people said, “You've got to be kidding me,” but we now have development partners, Tridel for example, building LEED platinum on one of our projects without even being asked to do so. That's table stakes now.
The 12 acres at Quayside are owned primarily by Waterfront Toronto. There's a very small portion that the city owns and a small portion that is owned by the private sector. We asked ourselves what we could do with that land that would be different. We have an affordability crisis in Toronto. We are dangerously close to a sustainability crisis in terms of climate change and mobility. The congestion in Toronto is unbearable. It takes me over an hour every day to get to work on the subway. We asked, “What can we do, as a public agency of all three levels of government and with this land that we own, to push the envelope again and really raise the bar on all these elements?”
We put in an RFP for a thinking partner and somebody who might have some money to help us do some research element. When we were looking for the innovation and funding partner.... It is not a development proposal. The intention in the RFP and reflected in the plan development agreement, which is the agreement we have now with Sidewalk, is to come up with these ideas and standards so we can then engage the Toronto community or the international development community to help us build out the Quayside property.
The other thing the RFP and the plan development agreement allow for is thinking at scale. If we wanted to get to carbon neutral or climate positive, what would we have to do to get there? Twelve acres probably isn't going to get you there. You need district energy systems. You need different electric grids. You need transportation systems, etc. What would it take to get to some of these very lofty objectives that Waterfront Toronto set?
The RFP and the plan development agreement allowed the successful proponent to think at scale, to think bigger, to think beyond Quayside, and to come up with some ideas—innovative funding ideas around transit, for example. We have a transit need in the waterfront. We've had one for a very long time. The city has identified it as a priority, but the city has a lot of priorities, so we were looking for innovative opportunities in order to help fund a Waterfront Toronto LRT system.
In fact, I am surprised people think there was some sort of fix in. This is what Waterfront Toronto was set up to do. We ran a process like all the other processes we've run, and we selected an innovative thinking partner, who also agreed to spend $50 million thinking about things and suggesting ideas to us.
The other thing I'd like to say about the fix being in is that we haven't even seen the proposal yet. We've seen little pieces—we've all seen what was in the paper last week—but we don't have a final proposal that brings together all the innovations, the financials, and all of that. We are going to go through an incredibly rigorous evaluation process that will include all of our government partners. Through our intergovernmental steering committee, we will spend a lot of time analyzing that proposal, so we haven't offered anything to anyone. Sidewalk doesn't have rights to land. We haven't transferred any land. Most of those lands are owned by the city. The city will have to be the decider on whether or not there are any property taxes or development charges provided to Sidewalk. All those things are yet to come and will be discussed and debated in the public forum.