A recent gathering of Ontario’s elected officials and city staffers is about learning best practices from neighbours and not needing to reinvent the wheel.
Barrie Mayor Jeff Lehman spent last weekend in Ottawa, where he participated in the 2022 Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) annual general meeting and conference, the first in-person gathering of Ontario’s 444 municipalities since 2019. This year’s event drew more than 2,000 attendees, he noted.
“There was probably some kind of an appetite to meet some of the people we work with and it had a real energy to it,” Lehman told BarrieToday, adding representatives from the provincial government, including the premier and the majority of cabinet ministers, take part in one-on-one meetings with municipal officials over the course of the weekend.
The primary focus of the conference is for municipalities across the province to come together and share best practices, Lehman said, and come away with the benefit of gaining knowledge from beyond their own borders on how to potentially address issues facing their own municipality.
It also serves as a good opportunity to push local issues in meetings with cabinet members in order to get them on the province’s radar, Lehman added.
“For me, there’s a third piece as mayor. The Ontario Big City Mayors Caucus met on Sunday afternoon and that was a three-and-a-half-hour meeting for us collectively to talk about the issues that were important to us, how we are going to go forward collaborating with each other — and with the provincial government — on how to address them," he said.
Housing, homelessness, mental health and addictions, as well as how to obtain the infrastructure to pay for those things, were all key issues discussed at that Sunday meeting, said Lehman, adding new to that list of key issues for 2022 was health care and emergency departments.
“The crisis we are seeing, particularly in smaller communities but frankly everywhere in the system where ERs are closing, hospitals are understaffed and wait-times are through the roof — that concerns all of us. All of us as mayors were pushing to see how this changes and what role we can play to help," said Lehman, who is not seeking a fourth term in the upcoming municipal election.
Typically, added Lehman, the premier uses the conference as an opportunity to announce some of the government’s next steps in moving forward with its agenda for municipalities.
“Usually, that’s a chance for them to say (they’ve) heard some of the issues that are important to mayors, towns and cities, and here’s what we are doing about it… that wasn’t there,” he said. “To be fair, on (Aug. 18) Health Minister Sylvia Jones made an announcement about the changes to the paramedics act and changes to things like para-medicine. They did, in the end, make an announcement on health care, which wasn’t too much related to municipalities… but it certainly has an impact on us.”
Walking away from the conference and the mayors' meeting, Lehman told BarrieToday he definitely came to realize quickly that Barrie is not alone in its struggle to find ways to address the big issues that are currently impacting the city.
“I know people who live in Barrie and Simcoe County are seeing some of the very visible signs of the homelessness crisis and the ongoing opioid crisis in our communities. Is that everywhere? Absolutely it is… almost all of the Ontario big cities, nearly without exception, are seeing much dramatically increased challenges when it comes to those three overlapping issues,” he said. “They are all distinct, but they certainly impact each other.”
As for any response from the province on how it intends to help, Lehman said there wasn’t one.
“(It was) crickets on addressing these issues,” he said, telling BarrieToday two months ago Ontario’s Big City Mayor’s requested an emergency meeting with Premier Doug Ford and relevant ministers to address what they are all seeing in their communities. “Surely they are aware of this. They’ve been hearing it from everyone from the business community to advocates to people in the health-care system, and we’ve not even had a response to our request… nothing.”
The radio silence has left Lehman and his fellow mayors frustrated, but they are refusing to sit around and wait
“We passed a resolution renewing that call. We are not waiting. What we’ve been doing — and I give Cam Guthrie, the mayor of Guelph, full credit on this — is he’s gone out and spoken with Canadian Mental Health Association, Ontario Chamber of Commerce, the BIAs and (is) gathering together a coalition of organizations that can work together to try and help address these issues with or without the province,” Lehman said. “We absolutely do need them to recognize what’s going on on the main streets and in the downtowns of our cities, and come to the table to help.”
With no plans to run for another term, this served as Lehman’s last AMO as a mayor, telling BarrieToday he believes the conference serves as a positive way for municipalities to effectively and efficiently learn what the best practices are in other cities.
“We go to these because it is the opportunity to take the experience that’s occurring in cities across the province and in a very short period of time, you learn more than you could in months of calling your colleagues or having city staff do research,” he said. “I think it’s really important for people in positions of leadership to learn from the best practices of other communities that are often going through exactly the same issues.
"We all tend to think we need to invent the solution, but so often, the solution is happening in the next city over or up the highway, and that’s a real value.”
