West Nipissing Mayor Kathleen Thorne Rochon (second row, left) was among several mayors and councillors from across Canada at a recent national addiction summit in Lethbridge, Alberta. 
West Nipissing Mayor Kathleen Thorne Rochon (right) had an informative conversation with Keynote speaker, Senator and pediatrician Dr. Sharon Burey (left) at the Canadian Centre of Substance Abuse and Addiction Summit. 
Mayor Kathleen Thorne Rochon (5th from left) represented West Nipissing at the Canadian Centre of Substance Abuse and Addiction Summit in Alberta. She is shown with (l. to r.) Irma Small Legs, ladies’ traditional dancer, Tracie Rabbit, traditional dancer and Sr. Miss Piikani dancer, Blaine Hyggen, Mayor of the host city of Lethbridge (Alberta), Dwayne Dalayne, professional chicken dancer, and Julius Bloomfield, representative of the City of Penticton.
Isabel Mosseler
Tribune
West Nipissing Mayor Kathleen Thorne Rochon and Lynne Perreault, manager of the local Alliance Centre for addictions and mental health services, say they benefited from useful information and exchanges at the Canadian Centre of Substance Abuse and Addiction Summit, held in Lethbridge, Alberta from April 13–16. The summit gathered municipal leaders and community service providers from across Canada to share strategies and strengthen collaborations on addiction prevention and response. The local duo’s participation was supported by a micro-grant from the North Bay Parry Sound District Health Unit, which provided $1,000 to each delegate to offset travel expenses, acknowledging the value of local representation.
“Our involvement with the Planet Youth Program, which uses an upstream prevention model to reduce youth substance use through strong community building, was a key part of our reason for attending,” said Mayor Rochon as she reported on the summit at the May 20 WN Council meeting. “We came prepared with local statistics from partners like DNSSAB, West Nipissing General Hospital, and the paramedic services. This helped us represent the reality on the ground in West Nipissing.” The summit featured a mix of presentations and collaborative working sessions, focusing on practical municipal-level interventions in areas such as upstream prevention, education and awareness, data monitoring, and community safety. Notably, participants also examined municipal alcohol policies and recommendations from Health Canada for safer alcohol use in public spaces.
Perreault also reported that the conference was a fruitful exchange, “It was a tremendous opportunity, and I was quite honoured to be invited along with the mayor. It was a wonderful thing to be able to learn from all the other participants as far as how services are offered in their home communities as compared to ours (…) In my humble opinion, in a lot of ways we are ahead of the game. We have a plethora of services available to our community under the same roof, which reduces the number of hoops, for example, that individuals have to jump through to access the services that they need. I think that our Planet Youth Committee is doing fantastic work. That’s work that’s really going to advance service provision and how the community is going to address and collaborate when it comes to youth and substance use and abuse and misuse.”
Perreault says the key to local success is collaboration. “The format of services that we offer at the West Nipissing General Hospital’s Alliance Centre offers a continuum of care under the same roof. All our services from crisis intervention ranging all the way through to psychiatric consultation are done in the same space with a team that collaborates together, to provide services utilizing a client centred approach. And I think that’s different than many places because in many other communities or municipalities, you have to go to different agencies to receive different services and that in itself can be quite discouraging at times when you’re not sure where to start.”
Despite a winning formula, she stresses that West Nipissing is not exceptional in its challenges. “The problems that we see here in West Nipissing are not unlike the problems that are seen across Canada in a way. That is not comforting, but we know that we’re not different. It’s not higher per capita, for example. Other provinces and other municipalities see the same problems,” Perreault points out.
A highlight of the conference for Mayor Rochon was an over-dinner discussion with Sharon Burey, a Canadian senator and a pediatrician that specializes in behaviour learning, emotional challenges and mental illness among adolescents and youth. “It was a privilege to lunch with Senator Burey and Mayor Michelle Boileau of Timmins,” Rochon shared. “We had in-depth conversations about upstream prevention and how municipal efforts can support long-term community health.” She emphasized the dual value of attending with a frontline service provider like Perreault. “Lynne (Perreault) was also a great resource for me because she’s acutely aware of the situation within our community, but also the resources that are available, and I think she brought some information and ideas to bring home for her clinic and for the community at large as well.”
