Thunder Bay’s delegation has returned from the Rural Ontario Municipal Association Conference.
They met with five ministers and a total of seven ministries.
The annual conference ran Sunday through Tuesday, offering rural municipalities a chance to meet with provincial ministers to talk on issues impacting their communities.
The Thunder Bay team thought the talks went really well. Although they did not return with guarantees of new funding, additional money is possible in the future.
“The level of engagement, the conversations we had, I left these meetings in Toronto feeling incredibly confident and robust,” said Chair of the Intergovernmental Affairs Committee, Kristen Oliver. “I think we’re going to see some movement in the very near future.”
The city focused on key issues such as homelessness and addictions, the use of the former Lakehead Psychiatric Hospital (LPH) property for housing, enhancing trades education, and policing.
“So first and foremost, you know, we went back to the Minister of Infrastructure to talk about the LPH lands,” explains Oliver. “This is something that we’ve had on our docket for some time now to talk about the opportunities around the development, and what they’re planning on doing with those vacant lands.”
“Minister Surma is incredibly well knowledged on this file and I think what was different for us this time was that she recognized that there are some limitations within her ministry, so she’s been working collaboratively with the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing to talk about this property and recognizing that they have a strong role to play in how we diversify some of those properties so that we can start developing it.”
The city would like to see the building on the property torn down so multi-use housing could be built—specifically a combination of apartments homes, townhouses, etc.
She called the conversations very positive but added that there is no specific timeline for progress.
“I think we’ll likely start seeing some movement, especially when we had a discussion with Minister Calandra from the Ministry of Municipal Affairs of Housing.” said Oliver “Recognizing that these properties are valuable to the communities that they’re in and the role that they play and how those transition into the future.”
Working hand in hand with the need for more housing is the homelessness and addiction crisis.
“Northern Ontario has a substantially higher level of homeless people than other parts of the province, and what are we doing to work in a collaborative and collective way to address that situation?,” said Oliver. “I think what came out loud and clear is that Thunder Bay has developed a plan that’s completely different than any other thing that we’re seeing throughout the province and that this plan is designed to be temporary and that we’re looking at having those wrap-around supports developed at the village to deliver the support that people that living in crisis currently need.”
The team also met with the Ministry of Energy to ensure that Thunder Bay will be prepared to support a growing manufacturing sector.
“We need to recognize that there are lots of overlapping needs, and so we were often going into ministers almost saying the same message about housing, the village, supporting policing for example,” said Councillor Kasey Etreni. “We did get an opportunity to talk about increasing seats and availability to training here in the North, we did also discuss some of the District Health Unit needs.”
“Then in the area of policing, we talked about guns and gangs, of course, and getting more support for that and recognizing the support that’s already been given to our community, and then we did talk about the forensic pathology unit and the need for that recognized by the broken trust.”
The next opportunity the city will have to meet on a major scale with other cities and the province is at the Northwestern Ontario Municipal Association Conference in April.
