The five members of the Northern Ontario Large Urban Mayors and the communities CAO’s met for a whirlwind one-day meeting at City Hall in North Bay.
The leaders from North Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, Sudbury, Thunder Bay and Timmins all have various challenges but collectively the leaders all pointed to energy prices as the biggest issue.
North Bay Mayor Al McDonald believes those high rates are chasing business out of the North and out of the province.
“We are getting to a point where we believe its becoming a crisis within the province for people wanting to pay their own hydro bill and secondly how do you attract business and industry to a province where one of their high outputs is energy cost, and they can go to the province of Quebec or Manitoba, they don’t even have to leave the country to find significant savings on energy,” stated McDonald.
Sault Ste. Marie Mayor Christian Provenzano echoes McDonald’s sentiment.
“It’s also becoming very difficult for residential rate payers to continue to afford to pay the increases so all of the mayors in this group have said they have heard that from their constituencies so we need to send that message to the provincial government that we are working as hard as we can to diversify our economies but businesses go where they have competitive energy prices and it’s really hard to compete with budding jurisdictions in other provinces who have much lower energy prices so this provincial government has to do something about the rising energy prices not only for business but also the residential rate payers,” he stated.
The five mayors plan on asking to sit down with new Provincial Energy Minister Glenn Thibeault.
“We want a delegation from NOLUM to meet with the Energy Minister as a group and to specifically canvas these issues and the negative impact they are having on our communities and to see what we can do on a going forward basis to ensure energy prices don’t keep on rising,” Provenzano explained.
Nipissing MPP Vic Fedeli sympathizes with the Northern Mayors. The former North Bay Mayor isn’t shocked that energy rates are a priority.
“That’s no surprise considering Ontario energy rates are the highest in all of North America which has made it less competitive for our businesses and have put Northern families into what they now call ‘Energy Poverty,’” Fedeli said, following a press conference at One Kids Place on Wednesday afternoon.
“It’s an uphill battle, just this pas year we saw rates go up over 8% in November, another 10% in January and then skyrocketed on the first of May.”
Energy wasn’t the only issue on the agenda as the Mayor’s also discussed growth in Northern Ontario, the state of the Ring of Fire, along with the province’s MPAC Assessment Appeal process.