Ontario General Contractors Association (OGCA) president Clive Thurston says he has learned that the long-awaited report on the review of Ontario’s Construction Lien Act will be released on Sept. 26, just a few days ahead of a Prompt Payment Ontario (PPO) member’s meeting scheduled for Sept. 29.
In a note from the annual OGCA conference in Washington, DC, Thurston wrote: “(Bruce) Reynolds report to be released Sept. 26,” the last Monday of the month and close to five months after Reynolds and Sharon Vogel provided their extensive report to the government in early May.
Sandra Skivsky from PPO and the Canadian Masonry Centre confirmed that “Yes, we all received an email from Minister Naqvi announcing the release date.”
PPO has been agitating for the report’s prompt release.
“PPO attended this meeting in good faith, believing that representatives from the Ministry might shed some light on the release of the CLA Review Report. PPO has written a number of letters to Ministers Meilleur, Naqvi, and Chiarelli over the last few weeks with no response,” Fulton wrote.
He continued:
The message PPO got from David Phillips was that the CLA Review Report was important to Minister Naqvi, but there are a number of legislative issues that are of a greater priority. To confirm, the Ministry had no release date to announce.
PPO made it clear that there is a high level of dissatisfaction and strong sense of betrayal in the industry resulting from the Ministry’s clear lack of transparency and its reneging on the promise for a “prompt” release.
PPO will be holding a member’s meeting on Thursday, September 29, 2016. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss PPO’s strategy for moving its agenda forward. I will be attending to represent the interests of the OGMA and will keep our members informed of any pertinent developments.
Skivsky said in a note to OCR that the PPO meeting was scheduled long before that and it was to deal with whatever options were presented to us at that time. “The meeting was not a response to the delay of the report, but simply to review our strategies under the given circumstances and update our members.”
Image: The CLA Review website