Transport committee  I think it starts with your definition. Bill 6, in the Province of Ontario, is a limited definition. The City of Toronto, through section 37, is another definition. If you want to engage the bidders, you want to have a definition that accounts for all aspects of community benefi

Transport committee  My simple answer is, if you don't start somewhere, you're still nowhere.

Transport committee  I would respectfully agree. The last thing you want is an infrastructure project that requires funding from the local to the provincial and the federal levels. You have three different definitions of community benefits, and you are going to strangle the contractor going in. Over

Transport committee  Local...?

Transport committee  Yes, absolutely.

Transport committee  I happen to be in an inverse situation, where I benefit greatly from my local community. It's the other way around in our hospitality business, because we are fully dependent on our community contributing to us. Reaching out is something we do as a matter of fact. We are part of

Transport committee  It's essential that you have it. Auditing and reporting are symbiotic, and I don't think this bill should be moving forward without it. You need to keep people accountable for government money.

Transport committee  I think you can implement it at $5 million quite easily. I just want to make one comment with respect to how you dissect the benefits. LEED is a points-based system. When you construct a LEED building—and Mr. Cartwright, you'll know this—you may not be able to do an envelope a

Transport committee  I agree with Mr. Cartwright. You'll be hard pressed to find every single tender that's on point with the community, and I think you should be building in cash in lieu components where you're not able to meet that community benefit strategically. The people benefiting and the cont

Transport committee  Yes.

Transport committee  Absolutely.

Transport committee  You hope that over time, and hopefully a short period of time, you're going to shift the paradigm whereby this conversation is going to be irrelevant. You want every bidder thinking about community benefits as part of their strategic bid and the reasons they're going to get picke

Transport committee  Yes and no. Again, you would hope that over time this is a reflex, not just a burden. As for the burden in terms of creating that community benefit, I think it's incumbent on all parties not only to design the bid and the bid structure and to have the contractors bid on it, but t

Transport committee  I would categorize that on two levels. Any investment in any infrastructure in any project is of community benefit by its very nature, but the subset of that is whether the local community will benefit tangentially from that project as well. I am more concerned about the latter b

Transport committee  I guess it's a question of government priorities of the day, and your operative word was “might” instead of “will”. In successive governments, when austerity takes hold, local communities are the losers.