The agency managing the province’s infrastructure projects on Thursday released an update on major works on government-owned land, showing a couple of Toronto rail projects have suffered delays and two significant hospital redevelopments have gotten more expensive since last year.
Those are trends the Ford government hopes to reverse with legislation it's passed in the last few days. As Infrastructure Minister Kinga Surma said in a speech aligned with Infrastructure Ontario’s release of its market update, “We need to build faster and smarter.”
“Recently, our government proposed a suite of new measures to speed the construction of new homes and transit and other important infrastructure,” Surma added, speaking to attendees of an event hosted by the Empire Club of Canada, in Toronto.
“Our Protect Ontario by Building Faster and Smarter Act, also known as Bill 17, will enact a series of measures to speed up development processes and reduce delays and costs,” she said. “This includes steps to significantly speed up getting shovels in the ground to build major transit projects, streamline and improve the planning and delivery for transit-oriented communities.”
Bill 17 received royal assent on Thursday after Progressive Conservative MPPs in Premier Doug Ford’s government voted to fast-track its passage, and then vote it into law, earlier this week. Thursday was the last sitting day at the provincial legislature until the fall.
Law changes made by Bill 17 include broadening the transit projects the provincial government can designate as priorities, a special status that aims to enable them to get built faster. It also modifies permitting and approvals processes for transit and roadway projects, in efforts to make them simpler.
Bill 17’s passage will now allow the government to make minister’s zoning orders (MZOs) it issues conditional on builders, or municipalities, meeting certain requirements. MZOs are a regulatory tool the provincial government can issue to overrule local bylaws and planning decisions. They have most often been used in attempts to fast-track developments.
As The Trillium previously reported, Ford’s cabinet also recently signed off on granting Surma the power to issue minister’s zoning orders for transit-oriented community projects (TOCs).
IO’s market update
Infrastructure Ontario’s market update was its first since a year ago. The agency, for the first time, dedicated a section to TOCs in the government's pipeline. The Ford government has been working toward the development of over a dozen TOC projects since partway into its first mandate. Through contracting private sector builders, it envisions constructing largely multi-condo “mixed-use communities,” as its website says, near key stops along transit systems.
Infrastructure Ontario’s market update lists nine proposed TOCs, all in Toronto, that it hopes to reach agreements with builders on between now and 2027.
“MZOs will allow us to deliver more TOCs across Ontario, along the GO, subway and transit lines, adding 340,000 new homes and 75,000 new jobs,” Surma said on Thursday.
The Ford government promised in 2022 that it would facilitate the construction of 1.5 million homes in Ontario by 2031, an amount a panel it appointed said would ease housing affordability pressures. It hasn’t been close to reaching the pace needed to reach that target, so far.
Infrastructure Ontario’s market update provided a glimpse at the statuses of 28 provincial projects in pre- and active development stages.
The completion of three of the four transit and transportation projects — the Garden City Skyway Twinning, the advance tunnel of the Young North Subway Extension, and the Eglinton Crosstown West Extension — have each been delayed since the agency’s June 2024 market update.
Six of the 15 hospital and health-care-related projects also experienced some kind of delay, although many of those with later estimated completion dates were only a few months later than they were projected last spring. The estimated cost of two hospital projects have also increased.
Lakeridge Health’s Bowmanville Hospital redevelopment is now pegged at $500 million to $1 billion. It was estimated last year to cost $200 million to $499 million.
The redevelopment of North York General Hospital’s inpatient facility is now estimated to cost between $1 billion to $2 billion in total, up from between $500 million to $1 billion last year.
The market update also showed that Infrastructure Ontario now projects the Ontario Place and Ontario Science Centre redevelopments to be costlier than originally announced, which the auditor general’s report on the plans disclosed in December.
