TORONTO, ON. – Please see the following speech from Ted Hsu, MPP Kingston and the Islands and Liberal Critic for Energy, Agriculture, Rural Affairs, Natural Resources, Mining & Forestry.
Good morning,
It’s been great to join everybody here again this year. Thank you for the many conversations I’ve had over the last few days. Congratulations on another very successful ROMA conference.
I’m Ted Hsu, MPP for Kingston and the Islands and Ontario Liberal rural affairs critic. I’m helping to build a new Ontario Liberal party, different from before, but one which remembers its rural roots. I want to build an Ontario Liberal Party which can look rural Ontario in the eye and say, You Have Our Attention Every Day.
Here’s an annoying example of an issue that got a lot of attention only after Toronto experienced it. Many communities, including my home community of Kingston, went through a rocky rollout to the new, provincially mandated, Extended Producer Responsibility recycling system. We encountered the headaches of missed collections, the elimination of curbside pickup for non-residential recycling, a new system for obtaining new blue boxes and so on. But it wasn’t until Toronto began its painful transition this January that the mainstream media covered the issue, and the Premier reacted.
Here’s an example of something that risks the loss of local voices and local knowledge. The government plans to amalgamate the 36 conservation authorities, currently organized around watersheds, into seven, all directed by a new, centralized “Ontario Provincial Conservation Agency”. Now, some reforms may be good, but one of the chief worries of the many small communities across the province that oppose the plan is that, in the name of efficient governance of the larger regions, not every community will get a representative, and then local influence will be diluted. It’ll be harder for small communities to hold a distant, central agency accountable.
Rural Ontario should not be taken for granted.
I want to tell you about Wolfe Island. Wolfe Island is part of Frontenac Islands Township, the rural municipality in my riding of Kingston and the Islands. It’s connected to the mainland by a ferry service which, in recent years, has become unreliable. What has happened as a result?
● The medical clinic closed.
● Contractors avoid working there.
● Tourism jobs have been wiped out.
● Young families are moving away.
● Last September, Marysville public school on the island had two students registered.
● The median age of residents is going up.Wolfe Island is in decline. Rural communities across Ontario are at risk of decline because Queen’s Park is forgetting about them.
Here are some examples:
● The healthcare desert. Rural emergency room closures, shortages of primary care and mental health care, trying to raise money for hospital equipment without the big donors you can find in the big cities.
● Queen’s Park downloaded Infrastructure maintenance and service costs to rural municipalities and then forgot about them. Rural municipal budgets are under great pressure. The cost of maintaining thousands of kilometres of rural roads and aging bridges is massive. Meanwhile, the provincial government uploads the costs of the Don Valley Parkway and the Gardiner Expressway. Are you getting a raw deal from the government at Queen’s Park?
● The digital divide. Governments make promises, but internet dead zones persist. Here’s how I would explain it to people who live in cities. When you take Via Rail, they promise wifi. You log on. It’s great in the station, but in between, you lose coverage, and you have to stop working until it comes back. High-speed internet is essential to the survival of a diversified and resilient rural economy.
● Shortages of electricians, plumbers, mechanics, and other technicians and skilled trades are worse in rural areas. On Wolfe Island, it’s the risk of being stranded for hours during one of the regular ferry outages that puts off contractors. The saying in rural Ontario goes, it’s not the kilometres, it’s the hours. Time is money when you are running a business. Projects are often delayed due to a lack of people where they are needed, not a lack of good plans.
● The loss of prime agricultural land to suburban sprawl. Once Ontario loses its best soil, it’s gone forever. The business of farming has to be profitable, especially near urban areas. Farming needs to be an attractive option to the next generation. It’s the economic backbone for so many small communities.Rural communities feed, power, and supply the province. They provide building materials, recreation and environmental services, often with less funding, fewer doctors, aging infrastructure, and smaller tax bases.
Over the Christmas holidays, the Wolfe Island ferry service suffered a severe stoppage of several days in a row. The lives of many were disrupted as people, food, fuel, essential supplies, and farm products were prevented from crossing.
But Wolfe Islanders pulled together. They made some decisions, and they acted.
A pedestrian service was arranged with a donation of a private boat before MTO set up their own pedestrian service. People arranged to get baby formula to the island and to pick up FedEx packages for each other from the delivery truck that dropped them off on the Kingston side. Family and friends opened up their homes for the stranded. They even organized an impromptu Christmas party to lift everybody’s spirits.
The lesson I take from all of this is to have respect for rural municipal leadership. Let’s give rural Ontario our Attention Every Day and partner with them to solve local problems.
The municipality of Tweed is faced with an impossible task of maintaining its infrastructure (like many others in this room, probably). They’re a community of 6000 people who manage 57 bridges. Their asset management plan shows they are millions of dollars behind. Tweed asked for help, but they took the lead too, and made the very tough decisions to let five old bridges go, and to use a lot of their own money to start fixing the rest of the infrastructure. This is rural municipal leadership, which needs to be respected and must be supported by a willing provincial partner. The province has to be there to share the costs.
As Ontario Liberal critic for rural affairs, my office is open to every one of you to talk about how the province can help, respecting your leadership, as you tackle problems in your communities. It will take time to earn your trust, but I want the Ontario Liberal Party to do just that, and be able to say to rural Ontario: You Have Our Attention Every Day.