Women's Caucus & Green Party Caucus Highlight West Nipissing's Delegation in Toronto

Thorne-Rochon seeks to add more female mayors while Rivard focuses on Green Party issues at ROMA conference.

Two weeks ago, council sent four representatives to the three-day ROMA (Rural Ontario Municipal Association) conference in downtown Toronto. The three-day event came at a cost of $730 per attendee plus the cost of travel, meals and accommodations.

Before heading out to the conference, Mayor Kathleen Rochon indicated that one of her priorities at this event was to lobby the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services to request a second seat on the District of Nipissing Social Services Administration Board (DNSSAB).

But in her update to council last week, this topic was not addressed. Instead, Thorne-Rochon highlighted that the focus of this conference was to create a new Northern Ontario Women’s Caucus. This new group which plans to meet several times per year will be comprised of approximately a dozen female Northern Ontario mayors as well as female councillors and female senior staff.

As Thorne-Rochon shared, the main focus of this group will be to advocate for an increased women’s’ presence in local politics for Northern Ontario.

“Women as still largely underrepresented (in local politics in Northern Ontario).” - Mayor Kathleen Thorne-Rochon

The group hopes to fill an administrative position to help with the work of the group. Thorne-Rochon did not disclose how much of West Nipissing’s budget will be allocated to this cause or how many hours away from West Nipissing issues this will encompass.

Northern Female Presence in Politics

At council, Thorne-Rochon did not provide any statistics or facts to support her assertion that women are underrepresented in Northern politics or in West Nipissing in particular.

Most will obviously recall that this town has had a female mayor for 21 years now. Before Thorne-Rochon was elected in 2022, Joanne Savage presided over council for 19 years prior to retiring in 2022. As Thorne-Rochon noted there are over a dozen female mayors in Northern Ontario, including here, in French River, Timmins, Wawa and Blind River.

Northern Ontario & West Nipising’s Joanne Savage was one of the longest serving mayors in Ontario history.

Thorne-Rochon also did not indicate how advocating for such an issue helps West Nipising directly but we will see their impact once they start meeting regularly in 2024.

Rivard Meets with Green Party Leaders

While the mayor was working on new caucus, Councillor Kris Rivard was meeting with an existing one. Rivard who is the candidate for the Green Party for Temiskaming-Cochrane used the opportunity to host a mini-green party caucus retreat.

He told council that his focus of this conference was to meet with the leader of the Green Party of Ontario, Mike Schreiner as well as the only other Green MPP in the province, Aislinn Clancy who represents Kitchener in provincial parliament.

He said that these two urban MPPs from Southern Ontario wanted to meet with our rural municipality to see if they could somehow help us.

The Green Party Leader was not shy about his party’s intention at this conference. The Green Party’s main focus is to transition this country to a carbon free society. Their platform embraces carbon pricing and phasing out oil and gas which are not necessarily in the best interest of Northern Ontario which is far from ready to give up these fossil fuels.

“We need to get big oil out of our pockets and embrace the new climate economy to secure the future we deserve, with the leadership we need.” - Green Party of Ontario Platform

Considering this appears to have been a provincial campaign retreat, I reached out to Councillor Rivard to ask if the Green Party paid for part of the costs of attending this conference. At the time of publishing I had not received a response.

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