The Warden for Bruce County says that several productive conversations were had during this year’s ROMA conference.
ROMA, which stands for the Rural Ontario Municipal Association, hosts politicians to help facilitate dialogue with representatives from the province.
Bruce County Warden Chris Peabody, who is also the Mayor of the Municipality of Brockton, says that important topics for him included keeping local emergency rooms open, advocating for local long-term care homes, and paving the way for skills training.
Peabody says that effective meetings were had, as he was able to attend 14 of the 18 events he was committed to attend.
That includes a meeting with provincial Health Minister Sylvia Jones, whom he met along with West Grey Mayor Kevin Eccles and Arran-Elderslie Mayor Steve Hammell.
“We were presenting a concern about the ongoing closures of the emergency rooms, especially in Durham and Chesley. We are asking the minister to continue funding for educational programs, such as the RN program up in Owen Sound, which gives students a great chance to an education, a degree, subsidized by the government if you’re going to be an RN. We think that’s a great program,” he says. “We want the money to keep flowing… And we also asked the minister to put up a taskforce with our local MPP Rick Byers to look into attraction and retention issues among our small rural hospitals.”
He says that relying on agency nurses to cover open nursing shifts is fine for the short term, but it should not be a permanent solution.
“I think the educational component and the investments that have been made, there’s a long-term tradeoff to training a nurse or PSW. I think the government is committed to that, so I’m pleased with that. On the topic of keeping the ERs open, the short-term fix would be agency nurses in the ERs, so I’d like to see the agency nurse piece addressed, as it is creating a morale problem in the healthcare system when the agency nurses make maybe double the wage of a regular nurse. I don’t think that’s sustainable. I don’t think I’ve really seen any movement from the government on that component.”
He also met with Ontario’s Minister of Labour, Immigration, Training, and Skills Development to advocate for funding for a construction trades training facility in his own municipality.
“We met to lobby for a proposed training centre. We’re looking to help a group get some money out of a skills development fund for trades. We’re looking to help bring a construction trades training centre to Walkerton. And there’s a proposal out there, and we had a very successful meeting with the minister. And there will be an announcement on which groups will get that money in March. It’s a $225 million fund, so I felt that our advocacy on behalf of the private sector group that’s doing this was very good, and we had a good audience with the minister.”
Peabody says that when it comes to conferences such as ROMA, sometimes the results of delegations can be a mixed result.
During his ROMA experience, Peabody says that he was trying to convince the parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Energy to expand access to natural gas in rural Ontario, particularly in Bruce County.
Brockton has had projects delayed over the past year because of rules from the Ontario Energy Board, but Peabody says he wasn’t able to get very far with that discussion because of the OEB process that still needs to be followed for red tape to be cleared.
However, Peabody says that he did get somewhere with a question he posed to 26 provincial cabinet ministers during a question-and-answer period.
His question was regarding the recent implementation of an investigations unit that is meant specifically to investigate frontline workers in long-term care facilities, which is also able to bring criminal charges against those workers – which costs $72 million.
“[I] questioned why spending $72 million on an investigations unit is [considered] money well spent. It should be spent on our frontline workers who give direct care to our residents, not a police force dedicated specifically against our long-term care workers.”
His question resulted in a meeting with a large number of staff from the province and long-term care.
“I was pleasantly surprised my question did get me a lot of attention and to the front of the line, and I felt they definitely heard my concerns about that. And I told them that along with all the municipal homes, all the county mayors are going to work on lobbying against this because it’s money that is misdirected. I was definitely pleasantly surprised that my initial question got me an audience with six senior staff members from the ministry and four political staffers.”
