Good morning, Greater Sudbury! Here are a few stories to start your day on this Wednesday morning.
We spent a night visiting encampments with outreach workers
New year, new faces, same story. For the last two years, Sudbury.com has spent a shift with the Go-Give Project, Sudbury’s only night-time outreach group. We headed out again Oct. 23. While Sudbury.com is headquartered downtown, and makes an effort to understand the issues at play in the homelessness crisis, the whole of Sudbury can change at night, revealing new people and populations. On Oct. 23, instead of visiting those in the streets of downtown Sudbury, at least a portion of the night with the Go-Give Project involved hiking into the city’s nooks and crannies, visiting encampments. For the outreach workers, these regular visits to hidden encampments are an inefficient way of delivering services, and also potentially unsafe. This outreach work occurs seven nights a week in the city, from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m.
Bill comes due as city police table budget to hire 26 more staff
Greater Sudbury Police Service appears poised to hire an additional 26 staff members by the end of 2025. This boost in staff includes 16 hires proposed for 2024 and an additional 10 in 2025, contributing toward the respective years’ budget increases of 10.66 per cent and 6.92 per cent. (The GSPS board is currently in budget deliberations for both the 2024 and 2025 budgets, with the city having recently adopted multi-year budgeting). Although no final decisions have been made, none of the five members who make up the police board expressed any objections to the proposed new hires during their Oct. 30 meeting. The only debate regarding the new positions was whether to delay some of the 2024 hires to either July or the following year to save some money.
Doors suddenly close at Temiskaming's Thornloe Cheese
Award-winning Thornloe Cheese, an iconic Highway 11 agri-food institution, has permanently closed. Gay Lea Foods, its Mississauga parent company, announced the closure on Oct. 30. Patrons to its storefront were advised of the closure with a sign on the door. Calls and messages into Gay Lea Foods and its regional point of contact, marketing manager Pam Hamel, were not immediately returned to Northern Ontario Business this afternoon. Gay Lea acquired the award-winning 30-employee Temiskaming cheesemaker from Gencor in December 2019. The popular cheese factory and storefront is located 17 kilometres north of New Liskeard, near the village of Thornloe. In a statement on social media, Timiskaming-Cochrane MPP John Vanthof, the NDP’s Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs critic, said the announcement comes as a “shock to the community.”
Laurentian students voting on future of universal bus pass
Students at Laurentian University are voting this week on whether to continue a universal student bus pass service that paid out roughly $1.1 million to City of Greater Sudbury coffers in the previous school year. The “U-Pass” service was started in 2006, and is automatically added to the fees for every student at Laurentian. Back in 2006, students paid $135 each per year for the service. With the passage of 17 years, the same service now costs $225 per student for the 2023-24 school year, up from $218 per student in the previous school year. That price is a significant discount to the more than $600 students would be paying for the same service if they bought GOVA Transit passes directly from the city, said a SGA representative. Students are able to opt out of the U-Pass service, but only under strict circumstances.
Pursuit: Win or lose, Andrea Larsen is a CrossFit legend
Within the sphere that is the CrossFit community, finding athletes of all ages who are driven by competition is not all that difficult. That constant pursuit of personal bests is woven into the very fabric of these folks. Andrea Larsen, however, is not that person. Yet it is the soft-spoken retired educator who will make her way to Tempe, Arizona, from Dec. 7 -10, site of the Legends Championship competition after the native of Ottawa (born in Sarnia, but raised in the nation’s capital) qualified in the 60-64 RX category. “I never wanted to compete,” Larsen said. “Even now, I didn’t think this would happen like this.”
Family, friends remember Sault mass shooting victim
Every morning for the past week since their daughter was killed in her Tancred Street home, Brian and Suzanne Sweeney have woke up crying. But the couple promises, with the help of Angie’s friends and with the support of the public, they will push governments to change laws, to take intimate partner violence seriously and prevent a tragedy like this from happening ever again. On Sunday, SooToday sat down with Brian and Suzanne, as well as Angie’s long-time friends Renee Buczel and Lindsay Stewart, to share their plans to address the intimate partner violence crisis affecting communities across Canada and to remember the 41-year-old mother who they say died a hero. Angie was the first of four gunshot victims killed late in the evening on Oct. 23 by Bobbie Hallaert, a longtime boyfriend she had recently broken up with. After she died in her Tancred Street, the gunman drove to another house on Second Line East, where he killed three children, injured a second woman, and then turned the gun on himself. “I was a puddle for days and like Brian said, we both wake up every morning crying," said Suzanne. "We’re never going to see her face again. It’s not fair. It’s just not fair. They need to change something."
