The city has taken another step toward being Ring of Fire ready.
The massive chromite in Northern Ontario is expected to bring an economic boom to the area. In an effort to be ready for that boom, the city has prepared a Mining Readiness Strategy. But the strategy is meaningless if it doesn’t have provincial support.
Getting that provincial support was one of the city’s main goals as local delegates swarmed Ottawa this week for the Association of Municipalities Ontario conference. City councillors Joe Virdiramo, Ken Boshcoff, Brian McKinnon, Mayor Keith Hobbs and City Manager Tim Commisso attended the four-day conference, which started Sunday, to advocate for the city to provincial ministers.
Boshcoff is now calling the trip a success as it appears the city now has commitment from ministers that should help move the city’s mining strategy forward. Specifically, ministers were appointing administrators to oversee the development of the mining strategy.
“One of our goals was finding out who the point person for the minister of the mine readiness study was,” Boshcoff said.
“Each department assigns a senior public servant so we get answers quicker and they expedite what’s happening. The fact that so many departments made their commitments right away and others will be appointing someone in the near future is a great check list that we have that done.”
The strategy developed by the city focuses on specific areas such as creating a workforce, ensuring a mine has enough power and that Thunder Bay can handle the potential thousands of new residents.
It’s also meant to prepare the city for the proposed Ring of Fire development.
He added that it’s the first time that something like this has happened.
“It was very, very positive, more than in many years,” he said.
“On many of the fronts we received very quick responses and commitments on some things and on others we have established lines of communication that’s going to help the city.”
The city delegates also advocated for ReGenMed and dealt with shortfalls with ambulance services.
Boshcoff said it was a broad meeting with the ministers but giant strides were made in each issue their brought up.
City officials also asked for an update on the Thunder Bay Generating Station switching from coal to natural gas to conform with the province’s long-term energy plan to get Ontario off of coal by the end of 2014.
But the conversion hit a snag when Ontario Power Authority and Ontario Power Generation had a dispute over a power purchase agreement.
Boshcoff said despite this dispute, they were assured that the conversion of the plant would continue and that it would meet its intended goal.
Councillors also spoke about the proposed event centre at the conference but Boschoff would only say that the city’s review on which location it should be located at would be released sometime in September.
