Mayor pulls no punches in criticizing decision.

The unified front of northern mayors that successfully lobbied for a 'made-in-the-North' medical school developed some rifts in the alliance last month after Ontario Health Minister Tony Clement named Sudbury as the primary location for its central administrative and research role.

"Thunder Bay is a huge loser and Sudbury is a huge winner," was how Thunder Bay mayor Ken Boshcoff summed up his community's response to receiving a satellite clinical education campus.

Boshcoff says the format is "dramatically different" from the two-campus medical school model unanimously supported by the northern mayors, municipal associations, medical community and chambers of commerce for the past two years.

"The unity across the North was as strong as any issue has ever been. To essentially bribe Sudbury at Thunder Bay's expense will essentially divide the North," Boshcoff says.

He suspects any residual economic spinoffs derived from the medical school will likely stay in Sudbury and that the concept itself offers little in the way of added incentives for medical students to set up practice in his city.

"We had great dreams and aspirations of what a school could do in terms of economic development, research facilities and alleviating the shortage of physicians," Boshcoff says. "The news comes at a time when we're facing huge physician shortages."

The medical school will begin admitting 55 undergraduates in 2004 with 20 of those students heading to Lakehead University to finish their two years of clinical training in 2006. The rest remain at Laurentian University in Sudbury to complete their education.

Clement cited Laurentian's large capacity, along with its larger pool of doctors available to act as instructors.

Boshcoff says under their current arrangements, medical students from Queen's and McMaster University arrive in Thunder Bay to complete their third and fourth years of clinical training. The twenty placements, he says, deliver less than the average number of students already arriving from down south.

"If you're not going to have doctors trained here, then you're back to less than a model that we have now," Boshcoff says.

Boshcoff plans to rally community leaders to prepare a concerted lobbying effort to convince the province to rework the format back to the two-campus model.

"We don't want to fight Sudbury, that's the reason we united...we're hoping they will reject this bribe."

Jim Gordon, mayor of the City of Greater Sudbury, was understandably elated with the minister's announcement, thus ending any speculation of whether the medical school would become reality and where it would end up.

The fact that Clement withheld any funding numbers, placing that responsibility in the hands of the school's planning group, grants northerners some semblance of control of what the program will look like, Gordon says.

"The biggest hurdle the medical school has is accreditation," Gordon says. "In order to be accredited, you have to have the program, and then the money will flow."

Gordon says the school's format remains true to its decentralized model as proposed by a provincial blue ribbon panel, since doctors will intern in various communities across the North.

"There is some logic to have administration in one site, but as the chairman of the (northern) mayors' coalition that led the pursuit of this medical school, our first goal is to see that the overall health-care needs of northerners were met."

He says the bottom line is that the doctor shortage will be fixed, the best and brightest young minds will stay in the North, and that the provincial government is committed to supplying both Laurentian and Lakehead universities with all of the financial and infrastructure resources required to meet their goals as institutions.

In terms of economic spinoffs, Gordon envisions pharmaceutical companies and researchers beating a path to Sudbury and both levels of senior government earmarking more money for further development of the community-based fibre optic networks.

"There's a huge medical infrastructure that forms around a medical school. It develops a much higher order of services and knowledge base, but what's particularly exciting is...in order to provide e-learning, you have to have a very high level of technological and telecommunications ability," Gordon says. "This is just the tip of the ice berg."

He expects software companies will gravitate to the North and local businesses will have a much-needed recruiting tool through better health-care services to lure potential employees to Sudbury.

"There's no doubt about it that people want good health care when they come to a community, that's a very important consideration," Gordon says. "We've got 30,000 people in Sudbury alone who don't have a family doctor."

Jack Burrows, mayor of the City of North Bay, though surprised at the ministry's concept, never harboured any aspirations that a full-fledged medical school or satellite campus would be housed in the "Blue Sky Region", but saw their position as providing an important supportive role in developing nurses and nurse practitioners.

In a joint venture, Nipissing University and Canadore College are collaborating to graduate nurses from their nursing degree program and Burrows hopes the school will make use of the specialists and staff at North Bay General Hospital.

"We know where we're coming from as far as our contribution to health care, and we're pre pared to go along with that," Burrows says.

Rather than be drawn into a political battle, Burrows would rather the two component cities settle their differences with the minister.

"At the end of the day, we had all felt (as mayors) that the Northern Ontario medical school was something we all needed badly," Burrows says.

During his discussions with his mayoral colleagues and with the ministry, he says it was generally accepted that the medical school would be equally split between the two universities and he understands. Boshcoff's anger and frustration.

Burrows remains very interested in exploring what economic development opportunities will result from the medical school.

"Both Sudbury and North Bay are very well-advanced in fibre optics and telecommunications," Burrows says, "And we're both setup very well to accommodate those types of businesses."

But the big winners, he says, will be the smaller remote communities faced with less-than-adequate health-care provisions and understaffed hospitals "which is important to any company considering sending employees to any community."