RETAILERS APPLAUD TODAY'S ANNOUNCEMENT OF A GO-FORWARD PLAN FOR TRANSIT IN TORONTO   

TORONTO, Oct. 16, 2019 /CNW/ - Retail Council of Canada (RCC) is delighted with today's announcement from City of Toronto and the governments of Ontario and Canada of a plan to finance to completion 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 our urban centres, to move our hundreds of thousands of Toronto-area 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 week. "Getting the three levels of government to work together to deliver three major subway and LRT expansions is like winning the transit trifecta," said Retail Council of Canada's President and CEO Diane J. Brisebois.

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]

About Retail Council of Canada

Retail is Canada's largest employer with 2.1 million Canadians working in our industry. The sector annually generates over $76 billion in wages and employee benefits. Core retail sales (excluding vehicles and gasoline) were $377 billion in 2018. Retail Council of Canada (RCC) members represent more than two thirds of retail sales in the country. RCC is a not-for-profit, industry-funded association that represents small, medium and large retail businesses in every community across the country. As the Voice of Retail™ in Canada, we proudly represent more than 45,000 storefronts in all retail formats, including department, grocery, specialty, discount, independent retailers and online merchants. www.RetailCouncil.org

SOURCE Retail Council of Canada

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