Christian Gammon-Roy
Tribune
Members of West Nipissing council attended the Rural Ontario Municipal Association (ROMA) conference once again this year, after being selected for a record 6 delegations. The conference, which was held on January 18 to 20 in Toronto, allows rural municipalities to bring up issues and requests directly to provincial ministers. West Nipissing mayor Kathleen Thorne Rochon went over the municipality’s asks, many notably similar to the ones presented during the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) conference back in August of 2025. However, the mayor explains that continued pressure on the province helps to highlight the urgency of these municipal priorities.
“We had requested 5 [delegations], then Hydro One put out a notice that they were accepting delegations, and we had some issues that we wanted to discuss with them,” describes the mayor, crediting town staff for preparing the materials to convince ministry officials to grant them an audience. “With Hydro One, we spoke about some issues with West Nipissing Power Generation, and the fact that there had been a prolonged disruption of service due to malfunctions on their equipment last spring,” the mayor describes, referring to the failure that occurred at the Crystal Falls transformer yard from February to June last year. Thorne Rochon calls the incident “very poorly timed” as it occurred during the highest production periods of the year for this station, resulting in lost revenue that the town would like to recoup.
The delegation to the Ministry of Health brought up the importance of recruiting francophone health care providers in the north. “We had identified that there’s a program called the Practice-Ready Assessment for physicians from abroad who want to work in our system. That exam is only currently available in English. So, one of our asks is to ensure that the Practice-Ready Assessment is available in French because there are doctors who practice primarily in French, who may have a hard time passing the exam in English,” the mayor states. With so many primarily francophone communities in the north, she made the argument that “if you gave me a French-speaking doctor, who only had limited proficiency in English, they would still function really well within our communities.” Furthermore, the ask comes at a timely moment, when primarily francophone healthcare professionals are leaving Quebec due to dissatisfaction with recent provincial legislation, while the Ontario government is actively attempting to recruit them.
