Shuniah township leader and council discuss long-term care, local business, education with NDP leader

By Rick Garrick

SHUNIAH— Shuniah Mayor Wendy Landry, Shuniah councillors and business people recently met with Ontario New Democratic Party leader Andrea Horwath on Nov. 10 to discuss long-term care challenges and other issues.

“The meeting went really well — Andrea was receptive to all of the challenges that we were talking about,” says Landry, a Red Rock Indian Band citizen. “How do we keep our families close instead of moving them far away to our bigger cities? How do we keep our elderly close? How do we keep everybody close? So that’s the challenges we have in these smaller communities.”

Landry says the municipality would require funding to help build a seniors complex or apartment buildings for seniors who need long-term care.

“You grow up in these small communities outside of the big cities and you don’t necessarily want to move to the big city,” Landry says. “You want to stay in your small town and in order to do that, we’d have to have partnerships with government.”

Landry says they also spoke with Horwath about keeping their schools open and highway signage needs to direct traffic to local businesses that were bypassed by the new four-lane Hwy. 11-17.

“How do they get good signage so that they know they can still go to our businesses and still get to the highway pretty quickly,” Landry says. “We often feel like we are forgotten to the larger part of the province down in southern Ontario, so I think it’s important to showcase our businesses and our small communities that are in the northwest and help them understand how we differ from the rest of the province and the needs we have in this area.”

Landry says they also talked about getting more Indigenous people involved in politics.

“I’m the first First Nations women to be elected as a mayor in the province of Ontario,” Landry says. “We need to add more numbers to that. The mayor of Hornepaye, Cheryl Fort, she’s the second First Nations woman to be elected in the province.”

Horwath says it was “really important” to visit Landry and the councillors and business people in Shuniah, which is located northeast of Thunder Bay.

“I was happy to hear from Mayor Landry that in fact, Shuniah is doing well,” Horwath says. “The population is actually growing here which is really great — we know for many years that wasn’t the case in many northern communities. But as communities attract new residents, for example, we need to make sure that the services that help support those residents are available. So of course, today we were talking about seniors care particularly, but earlier we were talking about the education system, making sure the schools are able to stay here, making sure the municipal services are affordable and don’t create a tax burden on people, for example, seniors as well who are living on pensions or people whose wages aren’t increasing.”

Horwath also laid out the NDP’s plan to help seniors age in place in the community they know and love during her meeting in Shuniah.

“Older adults here in Shuniah, and in towns all over Ontario, deserve so much better than being sent to the nearest big city when their needs increase,” Horwath says. “We need to see small communities like Shuniah for example be able to build small long-term care facilities or have them built in their community so people have a place to age in the place that they love.”

The NDP’s plan features a home-like model for long-term care with accommodations for 10 or fewer seniors.