Mark Platteel

About Mark Platteel

Large infrastructure projects are Mark Platteel's world. As a Toronto partner with Gowling WLG's Infrastructure and Construction Industry Group, Platteel focuses on public-private partnerships (P3), complex financing deals, and negotiating and drafting the big construction and operations contracts a project runs on, from its earliest stage through to the end. Chambers and Partners ranks Platteel in Projects: PPP & Infrastructure, and for four years Platteel chaired the steering committee of the Canadian Infrastructure Law Forum.

Platteel knows the developer's side of the table firsthand, having spent a number of years as general counsel to ACS Infrastructure Canada before joining Gowling WLG, advising on the legal, commercial and financing parts of transit, bridge and road projects in North America. One of them was the Gordie Howe International Bridge: Platteel was lead in-house counsel for the consortium that won it, and one of the ACS lawyers who led the Bridging North America partnerships in-house. Risk transfer during P3 procurement was a pressing concern at the time, and Platteel told Canadian Lawyer that procuring authorities were trying to respond to industry feedback on it.

That in-house work was recognized more than once. Legal 500 put Platteel on its GC Powerlist 2020 for Canada, after naming the legal department Platteel led to its GC Teams Powerlist for Canada in 2019. That same year, Platteel was a finalist for the Osler Purdy Crawford Deal Making Award at the Canadian General Counsel Awards. The ACS role itself came after 10 years at another national firm, working on a wide range of debt financing deals. Across that career, Platteel's worked closely with procurement agencies, developers, contractors, lenders, project entities and advisors on infrastructure projects in Canada and throughout North America.

Off the clock, Platteel's coached a lot of community sport. That's meant serving as head coach of a girls rep team with the East York Basketball Club, and coaching house league with that club, East York Soccer Club and Beaches Community Soccer Club. In the past, Platteel also mentored Toronto students, at Central Technical School through the Law in Action within Schools (LAWS) program and at the First Nations School of Toronto through Dare to Dream.