THUNDER BAY -- With a little help from the federal government, Justin Trudeau believes the city can take advantage of its geographic location.
The federal Liberal leader spent Tuesday morning meeting with a number of area community and business leaders, which included discussions about how to move the region forward.
“There has been a lot of talk about how Thunder Bay develops as a real hub connecting the east and west of the country together, as well as drawing in great resources from the North,” Trudeau said during an interview with local media at city hall.
“There is a bright future here in Thunder Bay. We just have to make sure the federal government is being an active partner in developing and unlocking that future.”
Those meetings included conversations about how to spur the Ring of Fire forward, as well as how to increase economic opportunity in Thunder Bay.
While he would not say one way or another whether he favoured federal funding towards the city’s proposed event and convention centre, Trudeau said in general the federal government needs to do more to help municipal governments fund significant projects.
Federal assistance on major projects would allow municipalities to focus their spending on other purposes.
“The reality is municipalities are delivering about 60 per cent of services to citizens on about eight per cent of tax revenue and that is simply not enough to go it alone,” Trudeau said.
He also heard about the latest in the James Street Swing Bridge dispute and said he would bring the issue back to the party’s transportation critic.
The two-day pre-election stop was Trudeau’s first in the city since earning the Liberal leadership. He sees the two Thunder Bay ridings, which had been under a Liberal monopoly between from 1993 until 2008, as a location where the party can gain ground.
The 43-year-old is preparing to head into his first election as the face of a party that has seen a continued decline in support from the electorate since Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives took office in 2006.
With Harper holding all the cards about when Canadians head to the polls, Trudeau said he has no choice but to sit back and wait while being ready for any potential surprise.
Either way, despite polls suggesting the Liberals are neck-and-neck with the Conservatives, he acknowledged his party still has to work to recover from the 2011 election where they lost Official Opposition status.
“When we have just 35 seats it’s obvious that we have an awful lot of work to continue to do to earn people’s trust,” Trudeau said.
That starts with embracing the multiculturalism of the country and making sure people of all different backgrounds feel represented.
He raised the issue of Harper selecting former Defence Minister Rob Nicholson as the replacement to John Baird on the Foreign Affairs portfolio.
“We had a recent and unfortunate example in the fact the Prime Minister has chosen to appoint a unilingual Anglophone as our Foreign Affairs Minister. I think that’s something that both lacks judgement and lacks respect for our important francophone communities across this country,” he said, before re-answering the question in French.
Among the other questions he faced was how a national inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women, something he has called for, would be structured. He was scheduled to appear before a Chiefs of Ontario hosted gathering for families of missing and murdered women later in the afternoon.
Trudeau said an inquiry, when and if it happens, would need to have a broad scope and allow families and loved ones of victims to have a say and a voice.
“It has to come with a mandate to hold the government to account and make sure we actually start to bring in the solutions we’re going to need across the country. This has gone on for more than 30 years now and we haven’t properly addressed it,” Trudeau said.
“It’s time we had both a recognition of how serious this is and an understanding that so far all the right kinds of things said by various governments haven’t ended up addressing the problem.”
Shelter House executive director Patty Hajdu, who has been acclaimed as the Liberal candidate in Thunder Bay-Superior North, provided Trudeau with a tour of the facility following the city hall meetings.
