Waterfront Toronto releases 2016-17 Annual Report

Waterfront Toronto is pleased to announce the release of its 2016/17 Annual Report, which was approved by the Board of Directors at the June 13 meeting. This document reports back on the financial results for the year, the corporation’s achievements of the previous year and how we performed in meeting our deliverables in our 2016-17’s Corporate Plan. The Annual Report is a companion document to the year-end financial statements.  Like our recent 2017-18 Corporate Plan, the Annual Report has been reformatted and reimagined to more clearly communicate Waterfront Toronto’s activities and to be a more transparent and accessible document.

Here is a message from our President and CEO, William Fleissig, with more information on the 2016/17 Annual Report.

For Waterfront Toronto, the fiscal year that ended on March 31, 2017 marked a turning point for the organization. After more than a decade of hard and unceasing work on waterfront revitalization – starting from empty post-industrial brownfields to building critical infrastructure and new neighbourhoods – we are now embarking on the next phase of the waterfront’s revitalization. This new phase represents taking our original mandate from 2001 and incorporating the updated context of present-day Toronto: its current conditions, the real estate market, what has been produced to date and emerging challenges. This was undertaken through a year-long strategic visioning process that involved the entire Waterfront Toronto staff and key Board members exploring how our mandate applies to a fast-growing city that faces an affordable housing shortage, a need for critical transit infrastructure, additional open space, a changing employment market, constrained government funding and a world increasingly impacted by climate change.

We explored how to prioritize the projects and initiatives (page 6) that directly address these challenges and ensure that Waterfront Toronto is positioned to execute on these critical initiatives. As a part of this process, we created a clear purpose and set of values that can help guide our decision-making as we start this next stage of waterfront revitalization. We call our strategy Waterfront Toronto +, and you can learn more on page 11.

The projects that we have prioritized are both transformative and precedent-setting. One of them, Quayside, combines an ambitious model using a collaborative partnership model to explore new ways to make the waterfront a test bed for sustainable and inclusive city-building for the 21st Century.

As we look ahead, we also welcome 10 new members to our Board of Directors and recognize those who have served this organization with distinction over the past years. Our new Directors have been selected by our government partners for their experience and knowledge of the key topics and issues that will be the focus of our efforts going forward.

Like the 2017/18 Corporate Plan, this report is a new approach to better communicate what Waterfront Toronto has accomplished in the last year and how we performed against approved budgets and targets – both for projects and corporate deliverables. We believe it is easier to digest and better communicates how we have performed in a transparent and accountable way.

You can find the published 2016/17 Annual Report in our document library under Annual Reports.

President & CEO
William Fleissig