Retailers applaud announcement of a go-forward plan for transit in Toronto
October 16, 2019
Retail Council of Canada is delighted with today’s announcement from City of Toronto and the governments of Ontario and Canada of a plan to finance the work on the Scarborough Subway, the Downtown Relief Line (“Ontario Line”) and the Eglinton West LRT, freeing up capital for the City to invest in other pressing transit projects.
Collectively, these steps will go – quite literally – a long way to improving Toronto’s and the GTHA’s transportation network. Mayor John Tory, Premier Doug Ford and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are to be congratulated for working together to develop a model for financing and running the expanding transit network that Toronto so clearly needs.
As Canada’s and Toronto’s largest private employment sector, retailers understand just how critical it is to have a well-functioning transit system in urban centres, to move our hundreds of thousands of employees between home and work and home again and to offer better transit options for the tens of millions of consumer visits made to our stores each month.
Beyond the obvious benefits for consumers and employees, the completion of the existing major transit projects and the addition of the Ontario Line will alleviate road traffic – leading to more efficient delivery of goods, both to our stores and increasingly, to homes through e-commerce.
Retail and wholesale trade employs more than 492,000[i] people in the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area and has annual sales of $95.6 billion[ii]
For more information, please contact Karl Littler, Retail Council of Canada’s Senior Vice President Public Affairs at klittler@retailcouncil.org or at (416) 467-3783.
[i] Statistics Canada Table: 14-10-0098-01
[ii] Statistics Canada Table: 20-10-0008-01
