WE KNOW THE ROAD. WE’VE BEEN ON IT FOR OVER 100 YEARS. At Aecon, our road to success has been a century long. We know about seamless road and bridge construction, the importance of premium quality aggregates and proven performance value of “just the right” asphalt hot mix. Superhighways and super structures require superior expertise. WINTER 2019 AVENUES 17 LEGISLATION & REGULATION (hydrogeology for example). Sometimes the same report is reviewed by these different agencies; other times, new reports are required. This unwieldy process, which can stall within provincial ministries, municipali- ties and/or other agencies, is a large contrib- utor to the fact that some applications now take as long as 12 years to be approved. OSSGA’s recommendation is to establish a single point of responsibility, at the provincial level, for the application process, and elimi- nate multi-agency review and comment on the same reports and site plans. 2. Lack of service standards and consis- tency within ministries. In addition to the duplication of approvals between ministries, approval times within individual ministries is another source of considerable and unnec- essary delay. While the following ‘quick fix’ recommendations may seem obvious, relief in these areas would expedite applications and increase efficiencies: a)  Apply service standards within MNRF to site plan and licence amendments, similar to MECP’s service standards for ECAs. b)  Proclaim the “Permit by Rule” intro- duced in the 2017 Aggregate Resources Act, allowing for more routine approvals to be automatic upon submission. c)  Stop the bottleneck at the Regional Office by returning all minor Site Plan Amendments to the District Office for immediate processing by the district manager. d)  Enhance training and consistency between levels within MNRF to empower staff to make decisions and move applications through the process. An OSSGA committee meeting on reducing the red tape that currently plagues the industry