The provincial government could be facing an uphill battle to get its $28.5-billion GTA transit plan built on schedule, for the simple reason that contractors may not be able to handle the workload. During a panel discussion at the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships’ annual conference in Toronto on Nov. 19, Infrastructure Ontario president Ehren Cory was asked whether the industry had the capacity to build the transit projects as planned.“How confident are we that the staging will allow the market to adjust to the capacity required? I would say: medium,” he told the industry audience at the session entitled “Delivering Ontario’s $28.5-Billion Transit Plan.”Cory said the provincial government was staging construction in a way that will let private firms decide which projects they want to pursue and make long-term plans. “All of that’s good. I think where, when we look down the pipe, where it becomes more problematic, is when you layer on not just our program, which is big in itself, not just the transit program we’re doing together … There are some significant health-care projects also coming in the same timeframe, then there’s nuclear refurbishment going on in our market. And then there’s the private-sector activity, which you only have to look around Toronto to see,” he said, referring to the city’s ongoing development boom.“So I say ‘medium’ because I think our staging does a very effective job in helping lay out the runway for our projects ... But we only control a part of that, and when we look at how hot the market is, we do have concerns, certainly. “Regardless of our staging, when you add up all that’s going on in the market, we see real challenges ... in the early ’20s, in the next few years,” he added. In response to the Star’s questions Friday, a spokesperson for IO said Cory “wanted to provide addition ...
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