Are we Third World or world-class?

When I chaired the Regional Cancer Care Ontario Northeast Council, Dr. David Walde, dedicated oncologist from Sault Ste. Marie, successfully lobbied for the construction of a radiation bunker in his community. He argued that Sault patients did not want to travel to Sudbury for treatment.

Although the medicine and the machinery was excellent, the hugs and handshakes of family and friends was deficient due to distance. He was right. In fact, when we lobbied for the construction of our Regional Cancer Centre in Sudbury, we used similar statements saying we didn't want our family and friends to be sent to Toronto for treatment. With funding from the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund, we established chemotherapy clinics in over 20 communities in Northern Ontario. The synergy created by standing in solidarity helped secure funding for the radiation bunker. It gave me the insight that proved if we work together, we improve the quality of life in the North.

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Rather than being protectors of turf and serfs to parochial political masters who often seek adulation and acknowledgment for funding announcements, we need to establish a pan-Northern regional governing body. This would not be an advocacy association such as FONOM (Federation of Northern Ontario Municipalities), which speaks regionally with a local dialect.

It would not be a government developmental agency with its centralist bureaucrats and political masters living in Ottawa and Toronto, or a frustrated separatist movement to create a new province with the nuisance bear as its official symbol.

It would be a regional government with an elected chair and council comprised of representation from mayors, reeves and First Nations chiefs.

This Northern Council would develop and implement policies regarding health, education, infrastructure, economic development and community social development.

From studded tires to travel grants, from technology to trade, this Northern governance structure would find "made in the North" solutions for our issues.

Its most important mandate would be to create wealth within Northern Ontario. We need leadership that will reverse the realities of deteriorating municipal infrastructure, increasing levels of poverty and poor health, escalating energy costs and an ever-depleting resource-based economy.

We have not attracted immigrants while our young people have out-migrated creating an even larger aging population base. Our property taxes continue to increase, but we lack the capital to maintain and expand our communities.

Michael Atkins, president of Laurentian Publishing at the FONOM Conference in Parry Sound this year posed a solution.

"We need what Toronto is about to get," he said. "In the same way Toronto must have a revised City of Toronto Act, we need a Region of Northern Ontario Act. This new act should contain provisions to allow us to manage much more of our important business. It must allow us to tax resource industries, to fund our unique educational requirements, to refocus our efforts on to the creation of value-added products, to investigate and act on our own energy needs, to set up our own immigration department, and to completely re-orient the funding of these new responsibilities through income and sales taxes--not property taxes. This would require the province to withdraw from certain funding arrangement and give up tax points to the North."

I agree. And in addition, I would demand that all redundancies in program delivery be eliminated. These resources would be allocated to the new regional governance group. Imagine if all the federal monies with FedNor and Human Resource Development Canada; provincial monies from the Ministry of Northern Development and Mines, including the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund, and all the economic municipal development offices including tourism were put in one fund.

The savings would be the elimination of triplicate expenses of staff, supplies and space who assess and evaluate funding requests. Furthermore, the best of the best could be recruited to deliver the programs.

The first step to the emancipation of our economy and being masters of our own destiny would be to convene a summit of smart, passionate and visionary taxpayers who know it's a camp not a cottage. The purpose of the meeting would be to write a Northern Manifesto regarding areas and structure of governance. It would provide a critical mass of influence to lobby for such an opportunity from Ottawa and Toronto. It would develop an implementation strategy and an evaluative component on its progress.

Is is possible? Yes. Is it probable? No. Although Northern mayors coming together is a step in the right direction, many will dismiss this idea. But then they're likely the same people who thought we couldn't build a medical school in Northern Ontario, or an underground laboratory known as the Neutrino Observatory and that all cancer treatment had to be delivered in Toronto.

Gerry Lougheed Jr. is a 'Northern Ontario Business' man, co-chair of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine and governor at Laurentian University.