Sault Mayor Matthew Shoemaker hosted fellow northern Ontario mayors and CAOs at a meeting of the Northern Ontario Large Urban Mayors group - or NOLUM - at the Ronald A. Irwin Civic Centre on Friday to discuss issues of mutual interest and concern to each community.
Shoemaker - joined by Greater Sudbury Mayor Paul Lefebvre and Timmins Mayor Michelle Boileau at city hall and by North Bay Mayor Peter Chirico and Thunder Bay Mayor Ken Boshcoff via Zoom - discussed labour force development, physician recruitment, government funding for northern communities and the mental health and addictions crisis.
“In my view the issue that received the most attention is the combined issue of mental health, addictions, homelessness and affordability which are all very much intertwined,” Shoemaker told reporters.
The need for newcomers to fill a labour shortage is key to building the economies of northern communities, the mayors agreed.
To that end, NOLUM is calling for the Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot to be made a permanent program. After being lobbied by NOLUM, the federal government launched RNIP in Nov. 2019 as a five-year pilot program. The pilot has been used by companies across the north to fill job vacancies.
“We have seen results, and it is working to assist to fill the jobs that would otherwise go unfilled in our communities because of the labour shortages and the demographic challenges we are facing,” Shoemaker said.
There is consensus among the five NOLUM communities that provincial funding for safe, supervised consumption sites is needed, along with withdrawal services and affordable housing for those who have battled addictions.
“Sudbury has done its part, it’s set up a safe consumption site, Timmins has done the same and Sault Ste. Marie will be doing the same but once the capital has been put into them, we need operational dollars to make them sustainable because we cannot continue to fund them on an ongoing basis,” Shoemaker said.
The city is actively working with organizations such as Sault Area Hospital, Algoma Public Health and others to determine who will take the lead on the city’s application for a supervised consumption site and get the site up and running as soon as possible.
Help from the province and Ottawa is necessary on many fronts.
“There are always needs,” said Mayor Lefebvre of Greater Sudbury.
“We have a common voice to go to our MPPs and MPs and say ‘this is in your wheelhouse, we need help on these issues’ on addictions, on housing,” Lefebvre said.
Shoemaker said he is in conversation with Sault MPP Ross Romano regarding many issues “once or twice a week.”
So too are his fellow northern mayors with their respective MPPs, creating a united front.
“If you’re repeating the same message every time you’re encountering your MPPs or MPs you are bound, I think, to entrench the realization that these are significant needs in all our communities across the north," Shoemaker said.
Within health care, apart from the quest for better mental health services and help with addictions, the need for family physicians is growing.
As reported earlier, communities like the Sault face a crisis as more family doctors retire without enough new physicians to take their place, leaving an increasing number of patients without a primary health care provider.
“From a northern Ontario perspective, there’s been an announcement recently by the province that they’re going to increase the allocation of medical student spaces across all medical schools and we want to ensure that the Northern Ontario School of Medicine gets its share of that allocation because we saw that roughly 50 per cent of students who go to the Northern Ontario School of Medicine become practitioners in the north. We want to see that number grow to 55 per cent next year and 60 per cent the year after. We want to see more northern trained doctors serving northern communities and we want to see NOSM expand its seat count,” Shoemaker said.
“One of the biggest sources of crisis we’re facing is the availability of housing, so we can’t increase our labour force because the housing stock is not there to support a significant increase in our labour stock,” Shoemaker told SooToday after Friday's news conference.
An affordable housing task force has been launched by the City of Sault Ste. Marie with various social services agencies to address that need.
“We need to get more housing built, properly maintain the housing stock that has fallen into disrepair and determine how we can incentivize more building or the redevelopment of existing properties to intensify their use, so that is one of the things that I think right now is holding us back, and we are actively working to solve those challenges, as are most of our neighbouring communities.”
The mayor emphasized that more newcomers and family doctors are needed in the Sault to fill the labour and healthcare shortages so that companies such as Algoma Steel, Tenaris and others can expand.
“We are actively looking for a new physician recruiter because our existing physician recruiter is retiring. We are in the throes of that process and we hope to have someone who will make a significant impact on our community because it all plays into our economic well being. If you can move here, find an affordable house, find a doctor and find a job of course you’re more likely to stay. Those are, right now, the pinch points in our community in terms of accelerating our economic growth and those are where my current focus is.”
“I’m confident of the curve going up,” Shoemaker said.
“I think our current state is stable, with minor growth, and we want to see more exponential growth. I’m confident that if we can strike the right balance between affordable housing, keeping the tax rates reasonable and providing these services like physician recruitment and more housing development, an economic ecosystem where people want to build more housing, that we can get there. We can have that exponential growth.”