BY CRAIG GILBERT
Members of the Rotary Clubs were the first to hear Sudbury organizations will receive close to $700,000 in federal funding for economic development, skills training and biotechnology research.
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Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development (formerly known as HRDC) Joe Volpe announced at a Rotary Club luncheon Monday about $3 million in federal money for 35 projects aimed at helping unemployed Northern Ontarians find jobs.
Volpe said every $100,000 spent could ?easily? create four or five jobs.
The Sudbury Vocational Resource Centre, Sudbury and District Big Sisters, the Older Adult Centre and Laurentian University will share about $298,700 for job creation partnerships and employment assistance services.
The SRVC will begin an employment consultant program, Big Sisters will begin a project called ?Organizations Capacity Building? and Laurentian will hire a development/placement officer.
Volpe said the federal government has a new focus on Northern Ontario and it?s time to reinvest some of the wealth the resource-rich region has created for others.
?Look at the logging sector. We are still shipping raw logs out.?
One way to do that may be through the mining cluster under development in Sudbury currently.
With new funding from FedNor also announced Monday, the Northern Centre of Biotechnology and Clinical Research (Neureka!) will be laying the
groundwork for a biotechnology cluster here as well.
Dr. Magdy Basta, Neureka! president and CEO, will use the $244,800 from FedNor he received Monday to lay the groundwork for wealth creation in the research sector.
He said plans for biotechnology research projects to take place in the second half of 2004 should be done by April now that the FedNor funding is in place.
The Neureka! funding was announced by minister of state responsible for FedNor (the federal government?s Northern Ontario economic development initiative), Joe Comuzzi.
It will be directed at the Northern Ontario Biotechnology Initiative (NOBI) which, in coming months, will create a plan aimed at accelerating biotechnology cluster development.
Since its inception five years ago, Neureka! has grown from two full-time positions using 2,000 sq. ft. to 50 employees, using 25,000 sq. ft.
Basta said if all goes well, hundreds of jobs could be created in a few years? time.
Mayor Dave Courtemanche said this is all good news for a nationally recognized city in a country considered to be number two in the world for biotechnology research.
?We are creating a research industry in our community,? he said, mentioning Neureka!, Laurentian University?s engineering department and the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. ?(Laurentian director of engineering) Greg Baiden is one of the real secrets of our community.?
Baiden said Sudbury will be involved in ?biomining? in the future, one of the research areas under the biotechnology umbrella.
Biomining is the process of separating ore from the host rock using bacteria or other biological agents.
He said there are mining companies putting ?lots of money on the table? toward this kind of research.
