OVA News

The announcement that Toronto will host the 2015 Pan Am Games is good news for the construction industry in the Golden Horseshoe.

The bid involves 50 venues in 17 municipalities stretching in a broad swath across southern Ontario. The overall budget is $1.43 billion, with the federal and provincial governments promising $500 million each.
New venues proposed for construction include the Canadian Sports Institute Ontario (CSIO) at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus, the site for volleyball and fencing at the Games and a multi-purpose training site for high performance athletes afterward. These major new sport and recreation facilities, will further the momentum for the University’s high performance sport agenda.

The announcement means that for Hamilton, it will get a cash injection of about $170 million for needed sports facilities, including a long-awaited new 15,000-seat stadium that can be expanded to accommodate the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, a velodrome, and an aquatics centre at McMaster University.

Existing venues will be used for many of the events.  An upgraded Copps Coliseum in Hamilton will host the volleyball. In downtown Toronto, the Rogers Centre (the Skydome) will be the site for the opening and closing ceremonies, BMO Field will host the soccer events, and the Metro Toronto Convention Centre will be the broadcast centre. Roy Thomson Hall is to be used for weightlifting, and the Air Canada Centre for basketball.

On the eastern lakefront in downtown Toronto the athletes village will be constructed on the West Don Lands. While this community development was planned to take place over the next 15 years, it will now be accelerated to provide accommodation for 8,500 athletes in 2015.

Many people are hoping the games will boost transit expansion plans in the city. A proposed new LRT transit line extension to the University of Toronto Scarborough campus, for example, might now be built sooner than scheduled in time for 2015.

files from: CP, Stoney Creek News, Canadian Consulting Engineer