Hampton slams decisions on COMRIF $ distribution

Howard Hampton
MPP

Recently, the McGuinty government at Queen’s Park and the Harper Conservatives in Ottawa released with much fanfare and with dozens of press releases long-awaited COMRIF funding announcements.
COMRIF is short for Canada-Ontario Municipal Rural Infrastructure Fund. The fund, a partnership between the province, the federal government and individual municipalities, sees each of those three levels of government pay one-third the cost of selected infrastructure projects.
In my years of service as an MPP, I have never seen a set of announcements that has been so blatantly biased against, unfair and harmful to Northern Ontario.
These are strong words. Why do I feel the North has been completely ripped-off under this program?
I’ll put it into perspective. The vast geography of Northern Ontario, covering the vast majority of Ontario’s landmass lying north of the French River, with a population of 750,000 people received less funding than did municipalities in Oxford County (near London) with a population of less than 100,000 people. In fact Oxford County municipalities received a total of $1.3 million dollars more than all recipient municipalities north of the French River.
This program is available to all municipalities with a population of less than 250,000 people. So a handful of large cities like Toronto, Ottawa and Hamilton are ineligible under this program. Mid-sized cities like Kitchener, Windsor, Barrie and Pickering are eligible for funding under this rural infrastructure fund. In Southern Ontario the population of eligible municipalities is about 5,340,000. Per capita, the south got $20.09 per person in eligible municipalities, whereas the north got $13.43 per person.
In this round of announcements the total accumulated provincial funding going to the North is just over $10.5 million of the nearly $118 million announced. So over 91% of the funding went to municipalities south of the French River into Southern Ontario.
At a time when the North is suffering primarily because of the McGuinty government’s electricity policies, it is infuriating to see the North once again being taken for granted.