The first municipal conference that I ever attended was the Rural Ontario Municipal Association conference back in January 2023. While I’ve tried to attend different conferences every year of this term, it seemed to be appropriate to start the last year of the term off with another trip to ROMA. It was a little nostalgic for that reason, and not least because last time I was there I had carpooled with my friend Byron Faretis. We argued all the way home, I don’t even remember about what, but that was typical of our friendship. I remember he was referring to specific page numbers of multi-hundred page reports we had both read, while navigating the 401 out of Toronto. We could always rely on Byron to have read every page of every report, and zeroed in on details. I missed having him there.
I did really enjoy the company of my fellow Brightonians though; Mayor Ostrander took us out for dinner on the first night of the conference, and we also joined our fellow Northumberlanders for dinner the following night at a County dinner. I also had the pleasure of spending time with several colleagues from Prince Edward County, and of course meeting people from across the province. I’m not generally into networking (believe it or not, I lean hard introvert), but there is something particularly wonderful about seeing that the challenges we face here are not only the same as municipalities face everywhere, but that in some cases we are doing very well by comparison, and in some cases we can learn much from others.
Sessions
I attended several sessions to learn about key issues and solutions. You can see the slideshows for those presentations here.
- Shifting Citizenry, Shifting Services: What Council Must Plan for Now was the first, and perhaps the best, session of the conference. We discussed the changing needs of municipal residents, and the growing demand for municipal services in rural areas; but more importantly, we talked about and practiced the skill of weighing competing priorities not as either-ors, but as both-ands, tensions that we must navigate. The presenters offered us a conceptual framework for making decisions that goes beyond just listing pros and cons, instead dealing with it at a level that makes us challenge our own assumptions and process the emotions of change. I hope to use this framework and skillset at future strategic planning sessions.
- Strengthening Rural Vitality through Arts & Culture was an interesting session about the economic impacts of the arts, highlighting municipalities that have invested in arts and culture and see tremendous benefits for their communities and economies. The Quinte Arts Council was one of the presenters. I have been very pleased to see the Brighton Arts & Culture Council continue to grow its presence in Brighton over the past few years, and love to see their gallery on Main Street; I hope we can continue to develop local cultural initiatives here.
- Best Practices from Rural Community Safety and Well-Being Plans was an excellent and very practical session. I recently joined the committee for Northumberland’s Community Safety and Well-Being Plan, which is past due for renewal, making this session extremely timely. I’ve already brought some of those insights to the committee, and we’re beginning to make some real progress.
Plenaries and “the Bear Pit”
Municipal conferences also feature opportunities to hear from, and speak to, provincial and sometimes federal politicians. I’ll be honest, I don’t care for this element of the conferences. The provincial politicians usually perform some variation on the classic “stump speech” as if this were a room full of potential voters rather than critical partners for the success of Ontario; it’s often more than a little condescending, and a waste of time that we could be spending on learning something new. The Premier talked about “Chinese spy cars” and Crown Royal, mostly the same material we hear from him on the news.
One session that usually draws interest is the Ministers’ Forum, or as they call it, “the Bear Pit.” Provincial cabinet ministers line up on the stage, and delegates line up at the mic to ask them questions. Because there are a few thousand people in the room, both the questions and the answers are performative: there are always a few “gotcha” questions, and the answers are usually just a repetition of campaign promises and “our record on this issue is clear.” We usually learn very little. This year I asked a question, having to line up two days in a row to get a chance to ask. I wanted to know: how does the province allocate funding to issues that cross jurisdictional divides, like homelessness? We know that we end up spending more on issues like these and getting worse results because we’re not counting the whole cost: the cumulative costs of healthcare, policing, and other things associated with homelessness are paid at the local and county levels are not counted in the social services budget; and they exceed the cost of just housing people. I did not get a clear answer, but I did get a sense that my logic was understood, so hopefully we’ll see something new from the province on this in the future.
So on the whole, it was an excellent conference. The benefits from camaraderie, informative sessions, and opening our minds to new ideas and perspectives always make these conferences worth attending. Thank you for sending us!