Friday, October 17, 2014
At the Good Jobs Summit, Community Benefit Agreements were one of the proposed ways of creating good jobs. But what does a Community Benefit Agreement really mean?
You may have heard a lot about them lately: Olivia Chow has made them the central plank of her youth employment platform, Premier Kathleen Wynne has been celebrating them, and the term was bounced around at the Unifor-led Good Jobs Summit. But what is a Community Benefit Agreement?
Community Benefit Agreements (or CBA’s) are contracts which leverage a development project to meet a broader range of policy objectives such as equity, poverty reduction, environmental sustainability and local economic development.
In their most common form, CBA’s are tacked on to publicly funded infrastructure projects to ensure that the communities affected by the development receive more social and economic value from the project.
