In a news release this past Wednesday, it has been announced that there is now plans put in motion to begin making residents lives better in Saskatchewan.

Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Ralph Goodale and Government Relations Minister Warren Kaeding joined Minister of Infrastructure and Communities François-Philippe Champagne, and Minister Responsible for SaskBuilds Gordon Wyant to announce the signing of a bilateral agreement.

The agreement made was to provide funding to improve the style of living of Saskatchewan residents by giving more than $896 million in funding on a federal level through making investments in Canada over the next 10 years revolving around infrastructure projects. The funds will be shared between projects with the Saskatchewan government, municipalities, and other partners. With this funding, people can look forward to seeing investments in public transit, green infrastructure, recreational, cultural, and community infrastructure, as well as rural and northern communities.

The investments will include many benefits for people across Saskatchewan, some of these benefits include:

- faster commutes and travel times and easier movement of goods for businesses

- cleaner air and water;

- reduced greenhouse gas emissions;
- smarter more efficient cities;
- sustainable water management;
- enhanced public parks, recreational facilities and other spaces that make communities great places to live; and
- better transportation and digital infrastructure for people living in remote communities.

Before the signing, Wyant was looking for flexibility and talked about what he got in that regard.

"Well, I think we got some flexibility with respect to a number of the funding streams especially around the transit funding stream and so that was important to us," Wyant continued. "We've got some commitments from the federal government to continue to have those conversations about flexibility as we move forward."

Kaeding then went forward and talked about the improvements that we could see within the next year or two.

"We certainly have a significant amount of infrastructure projects that are going to be taken in across the province. Clean water, wastewater projects that maybe didn't get accepted in the last stream certainly have the opportunity to resubmit under this new stream. Green projects within the province and municipalities throughout, certainly looking at northern projects that we're going to have opportunities with, so we have a long list of infrastructure projects across the province," Kaeding continued. "So we would expect by spring we'll start seeing some projects being applied for and expecting responses back shortly after."

Kaeding went on to explain that 30 to 33 per cent will come from provincial contributions and that there would be a lot of variation depending on the streams, and the size of the community.