No Time to Stall: Why Council Must Act on Congestion with Sal Iacono, President and CEO, Cadillac Fairview

As Toronto City Council prepares to debate the Board's Congestion Action Plan, business leaders are urging immediate action. In this episode, Sal Iacono, President and CEO of Cadillac Fairview and a member of the Board’s Congestion Governing Council, shares real-world examples of how gridlock is hurting business and why waiting to act is no longer an option.

Transcript

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From the Toronto Region Board of Trade, this is Toronto Talks. Toronto, let's talk about the Board's Congestion Action Plan. Here in the city, in the battle against Toronto traffic, there's no silver bullet. But business leaders have compiled an action plan. The Board of Trade calling on City Hall to implement a series of steps to get goods, services and people moving and fast. With the cost of congestion pegged at $45 billion a year across the GTHA, the Board of Trade is clear City Hall cannot afford to wait to act. Earlier this year, the board released five short to medium-term solutions to tackle the region's congestion crisis. These include making 24/7 construction the norm, leaning heavily on automated traffic enforcement, the creation of connector roads free from bike lanes, patios and on-street parking, along with the introduction of a traffic commissioner. The plan has now been formally considered by the City's Infrastructure and Environment Committee. Now, it moves on to City Council for a final vote. In anticipation of that council meeting, we're sitting down this episode with one of our Congestion Task Force's governing council members, Sal Iacono. Sal is the President and CEO of Cadillac Fairview. He sat down with the Board's Associate Vice President of Policy and Research, David Campbell. Here's their conversation. Well, Sal, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah, well, to start off, how about, could you just tell us a little bit about Cadillac Fairview? And you joined our Congestion Governing Council here at the board. What inspired you to do that? Well, let me start off with Cadillac Fairview. So Cadillac Fairview has been a long-running major commercial real estate company here in Canada for decades. Currently, we're owned 100% by Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, and we own and operate approximately 35 million square feet of both office and retail space across Canada. And as far as Ontario is concerned, over half of our retail shopping center portfolio resides in the province of Ontario, and in the GTA includes shopping centres like Toronto Eaton Centre, Sherway Gardens, Markville and Fairview Mall. On the office side of our business, the vast majority of our portfolio actually resides in downtown Toronto, where we have close to 11 million square feet of office space in Toronto. So that gives you sort of the background as to why congestion and when is important in terms of an issue for us because certainly on the office side and from the retail side of our business, anything that we can do to help in that regard is really a positive outcome for our occupants, for our shoppers, for the employees of the occupants of all of our GTA area properties. So when the opportunity came up to join the task force, I was really happy to jump on board and to participate in it because it's important. It's important for the city. It's important for Cadillac Fairview. It's important for all of Cadillac Fairview's stakeholders. Can you tell us a little bit about what are you hearing from businesses, from tenants on some of your properties in terms of their experience with congestion, how it affects them? Well, you know, I'll relate this by one, and it's an anecdote, but this is a true story. I've had a couple of inbounds over the last couple of years from leaders of major corporations in the financial industry in downtown Toronto, where they occupy space and have their own personal parking stalls and buildings which are in the financial core. And they've called me up and said, Sal, can I rent a parking stall at Toronto Eaton Centre? Because they live in North Toronto, and it's easier for them to navigate walking from their office to TEC northbound. And then from TEC being able to drive and bypass the congestion that, you know, is present between, call it Queen Street all the way to the Gardner. Now, can you imagine basically, and I would qualify both of them as sort of global leaders in their industry, for them to personally reach out on that basis? And that speaks volumes about the level of congestion where decision makers, from a personal perspective, are being impacted that way. So what does it mean? It means that it colors also their decision making potentially with regards to how am I to expand our company, our company's activities? Am I going to do that within the city of Toronto when I can't even myself get in and out easily? So you have to take, you know, you have to take your cues in life and in business from the simple things. And that's just one example of what, you know, we've been seeing. And that's aside from What we're currently living in terms of direct impact in Toronto Eaton Centre, for example, where because of the Ontario line construction, Queen Street is closed. It is literally closed from York going over to Victoria. Now, we're completely supportive of the work that's being done because that is going to add an incredibly important piece of infrastructure for the City of of Toronto and for current residents and future residents of the city with regards to the extension of this Ontario line. Having said that, it is incredibly disruptive and is causing some loss of business for our clients and certainly impacting our ability to be able to lease office space at Toronto Eaton Centre because of the sense and the perception that it's a difficult area to get of and it is a difficult area to get in and out of. So in those cases where you have to be supportive of these kinds of infrastructure programs that causes additional congestion, what can everybody do, all the different stakeholders, but especially those who are executing in those projects, to be wary of what are the extra things that we should be doing to help minimize the impacts or shorten the period of time necessary for this kind of disruption so that we can get these kinds of projects done quickly or on a faster basis in order to minimize these long-term impacts. So there's a lot of work ahead of us. To your point, the anecdotes do really matter. And that's what we heard even when we went out and we were talking to people about the congestion issue from business leaders when you have things like hockey teams not being able to get to games, you know, global stars tweeting about the level of congestion in Toronto. It really does have an effect on the perception of our city. And so it sounds like you've seen business leaders, this actually impacting decisions from business leaders, have you? Absolutely. Yeah. It has. And I would also suggest that in the current context of what's going on in our world and what's going on vis-a-vis the U.S. administration and tariffs and so on. Congestion is also not just about the impact on our daily lives, and it's incredibly important that we appreciate those impacts, but it's also incredibly important in terms of what kind of a competitive impact does it have on our ability as a city, as a province, and as a nation, because, you know, Toronto is still the economic engine of our country in terms of, you know, head offices and so on. If we are unable to resolve basic matters like congestion, well, then that impedes our ability to be able to attract global capital here. It impedes our ability, to your point, of attracting high-quality individuals from somewhere in the world to want to come and work here, for example, or to lead companies or for companies to make those decisions with their capital about expanding here and so on. Like, we need every resource and every advantage that we have available to us in order to effectively compete on a global basis. especially these times. Congestion is a part of that. It is really that important for us to be able to resolve because we need every single arrow in our quiver to be able to effectively compete. Absolutely. You mentioned earlier how, you know, building out transit is the long-term solution here and we have some ambitious projects underway with the side effect that that actually increases the problem in the short term around some congestion. That's where our report really focused, right? Was short-term solutions to really trying to have an impact. We had five different areas. I wonder if there's an area of the recommendations that came out of the governing council that particularly resonated with you. Well, I think there's three areas that I would focus on. First, just with regards to public transit, the project that I was describing in in terms of the Ontario Line Extension. There's no reason why that work shouldn't be 24/7. I know that there's additional expense, but it's the government's responsibility to consider all the other impacts that are costly to all the stakeholders, citizens, companies, everybody involved. So yes, it would cost us more to complete a seven-year project in three years. Yes, there's additional shift charges and labor cost charges working 24-7, especially in an area of downtown Toronto where there isn't a lot of residential living. It would not be a nuisance in my estimation to do that kind of work around Toronto Eaton Centre. And I use that as an example. And I'm sure that there's other examples like that. So we should focus on shortening the period of time. Everybody's in agreement. We need the projects. We're very supportive. But there has to be a different way of managing them. The other part that I think we should be focusing on, which was reported on in the report, was just policing the rules that are already in place. It's incredibly important. Oftentimes, I've seen, even down Bay Street, cars that are double parked. You know, there would be nothing wrong with first hiring some additional traffic police or, you know, traffic surveillance people in order to ensure that that doesn't happen. There would be nothing wrong with having tow trucks at the ready. We have to instill discipline and an understanding from all citizens that, yeah, it might be okay for you to think that $100 or $150 ticket is something that's acceptable to you in order to be able to do what you want to do, but there's literally hundreds and potentially thousands of cars that are being impacted by your actions that only cost you $150 because everybody has to divert around you trying to head down to the Gardner along Bay Street. And that is just one example. So there has to be a much stronger adherence to what the rules of the road are. And I think the other third area, which because I live and work downtown, certainly all of the access points going down to the Gardner, starting from, you know, call it Dundas or even Wellesley all the way down to Gardner. There certainly is work that can easily be done. There are some costs, but it can easily be done to reconfigure the access points onto the Gardner. so that you don't get the kind of congestion that distracts business leaders and, more importantly, or as importantly, all of their employees who want to come and actually work in their places of employment downtown. And the current congestion, you know, getting down to Gardner for those who live east-west of in the city, it's a deterrence. So why don't we fix that? It's fixable. Let's fix it. It's going to take a little bit of time. It's going to take some money, but the savings and time and hassle and the repair of reputation is inestimable compared to the problems that we're living through right now. Yeah. And each of those points is so achievable. I mean, we've seen the impact of traffic agents on reducing blocking the box made such a meaningful impact, just that one intervention. And as you say, there's so many other examples of that that could be implemented quite quickly. Right. So we've spoken about the role of government in solving some of these problems. Part of the impetus behind us forming the governing council at the board was to also demonstrate that business is looking to step up here. Do you see areas where you think the private sector can really play a role in helping to solve congestion? I believe so. But I would add that businesses are, they receive the service of the city, right? And by that, a city is supposed to be running smoothly, operate at a certain level of efficiency in order for everybody to be able to be successful in their businesses, to allow their employees to be successful in being able to get to and from work and so on and so forth. What businesses can do is to ensure that they are a strong partner to a city, to the province, to be able to coordinate, cooperate and ensure that they adhere to those. For example, in the business that we're in, we're also real estate developers. Would we be prepared to ensure that our projects try to avoid altogether lane closures in our projects going forward? Absolutely. By the same token, however, it also requires a level of cooperation from municipalities in helping developers to defray those extra costs, for example, in bypassing lane closures, because then it becomes a little bit less efficient within a construction site. That's okay. That would be even more okay if the period of time that it takes to get a construction permit is reduced from, you know, a number of years to half of that, right? So there's a lot of things that can be done, but it does require some give and take by all parties concerned. So let's sit down and have those discussions. It'd be great. Sal, what's something you're reading or listening to right now that you'd like to share with our listeners? Well, I'm part of the Canadian Business Council. And this is a group of business leaders in Canada that meet on a periodic basis in order to discuss some of the challenges and opportunities that we face in the country. And I can't stress enough that in terms of some of the things that we've been dealing with recently and some of the inbounds that I've been reading about how we are preparing ourselves to fight economically tariffs, as a clear example of, you know, the most recent challenge. that congestion really is a part of the conditions that we have to resolve. So there's a lot of things that we need to resolve across the country. We have to resolve inter-provincial trade barriers and we have to resolve how to properly coordinate our efforts between cities and provinces and the federal government with regards to responses. But we also have to solve this. This is basic stuff, right? Like we have to ensure that there's proper garbage pickup. We have to ensure that there's proper snow clearing in the winter. We have to ensure that congestion is resolved because this is a basic building block to being competitive for us today and going forwards. So I don't think I can stress that enough. Well, I certainly agree with you. It's a critical time, and we have to focus on what we can control. This is something we can control. So appreciate you coming here to talk to us about it today and for participating on our governing council. And thanks again for being here. Well, thank you. That's all for this episode of Toronto Talks. If you like what you hear, don't forget to tell a friend. It's still the best way to spread our message. And don't forget to keep talking, Toronto. Our voice drives meaningful change.