THUNDER BAY - As the senior population continues to rise across the country, creating an age-friendly action plan needs to start at the community level, says one of Ontario’s longest serving mayors.
Age Friendly Thunder Bay hosted a second senior’s summit on Tuesday to gather input on action items for the development of the Age Friendly Community-Wide Action Plan.
Hazel McCallion, the former mayor of Mississauga for 36 years, was a special guest during the summit and she said every community needs its own unique plan.
“The only way you can develop a plan is to get the people involved and the community must take charge of it, not government, the community,” McCallion said. “The community is only as great as the people involved in the community.”
McCallion said people must take charge because each community is different and has its own set of unique challenges.
“You cannot apply an overall policy to all the communities,” she said. “Northern Ontario communities are quite different from the greater Toronto area.”
Thunder Bay has one of the highest percentages of seniors in the province per-capita. Age-friendly Thunder Bay is working to develop a community-wide action plan to address the needs of people over the age of 60 living in Thunder Bay.
The first senior’s summit was held in June and Age-Friendly Thunder Bay chair, Rebecca Johnson, said some of the key issues coming out of the first summit included transportation, staying at home, and health care.
“We have a long list of priorities, so how do we make that a shorter list of things that we can actually do in Thunder Bay,” Johnson said. “Some of them will take money, some of them will take volunteer work, some of them will be done by organizations, but the enthusiasm and the actual conversations in the room are very exciting today.”
McCallion believes Thunder Bay has already taken a step in the right direction by joining the Age Friendly Association that was set up the World Health Organization.
“The municipalities have finally discovered that their population is aging and programs and policies that have been established for years just doesn’t apply anymore and they have to change,” McCallion said.
Johnson agrees that Thunder Bay is moving forward when it comes to providing services to seniors, but she is not ready to sit back and rest, because more work still needs to be done.
“We are ahead of what other communities are doing with age friendly and seniors,” she said. “We can’t rest on our laurels, we can’t stop. Now that we’ve set this high level, we must continue to do and continue to implement. We know our population will be 33 per cent seniors in a few years, so what are we doing to make that community and our community better for that group of individuals?”
The input collected during the summit will be gathered into a report to be reviewed by a steering committee on how the ideas will be implemented. Johnson expects the report will be released next spring.
“I would say by June, which is senior’s month, we will be able to announce to the community how we are actually going to implement that,” she said.
McCallion, now 95-years-old, served in office until she was 93 and is still working as the Special Advisor to the University of Toronto Mississauga and Chancellor of Sheridan College. For McCallion, organizations like Age-Friendly Thunder Bay are going to perform miracles in getting people to recognize the importance of creating communities friendly towards seniors, because seniors still have a lot to contribute.
“Involvement is very important,” she said. “It’s not a case of doing everything for seniors, not at all, that can be negative to seniors. You need to make seniors realize that whatever they can do, they should be doing and not giving up. They got to think positively and be absolutely committed that they are not going to give up their independence.”
“I’m 95 and I’m still working every day,” McCallion continued. “The number of years you’ve been on this earth have nothing to do with what you can accomplish.”
