Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan speaks at a Canadian Club of Toronto lunch in Toronto on Tuesday, December 14, 2010.NATHAN DENETTE/The Canadian Press
The McGuinty government plans to bring the Crown corporation that manages its real-estate assets in house by merging Ontario Realty Corp. with its infrastructure arm.
Finance Minister Dwight Duncan announced last month that he plans to eliminate a dozen provincial agencies. Sources close to the government said ORC will be the first to disappear through a merger with Infrastructure Ontario.
Mr. Duncan is scheduled to hold a news conference Tuesday afternoon, where he will announce the merger, the sources said.
The austerity measure is aimed at helping the province manage through hard times and erase its record $18.7-billion deficit. Mr. Duncan has not named which entities are destined for the chopping block, but said the government can reduce the 259 entities it has direct control over by 5 per cent.
Ontario Realty Corp. manages one of the largest real-estate portfolios in Canada on behalf of the provincial government. Assets owned or leased by it consist of vacant land as well as more than 6,000 buildings, including office towers, heritage buildings, courthouses and jails.
Employees at ORC have been embroiled in controversy in recent years. Last summer, ORC's offices were raided by the Ontario Provincial Police as part of a criminal probe into "irregular" financial dealings.