BY CRAIG GILBERT
The Northern Ontario Heritage Fund, depleted and misguided, is going to be topped up by fiscal year 2005 and returned to its original mandate, according to Minister of Northern Development and Mines Rick Bartolucci.
Bartolucci, who was re-elected to his third term as MPP for Sudbury in October, campaigned in part on an overhaul of the NOHFC, which he said had become a slush fund for capital and other projects.
The Conservatives, he said, altered the fund to exclude the private sector and allowed it to become lax in the areas of job creation and economic development.
The NOHFC, he said, was originally mandated to act as an economic diversification tool and foster private sector job creation, and to that mandate it will return.
Bartolucci has directed MNDM staff to accomplish that and to make recommendations on how the fund can be spent more wisely.
The $60 million fund, he said, was depleted during the year leading up to the election by the now-opposition Tories.
A five-year plan ending in fiscal 2004-05 to top up the fund will be honoured by Premier Dalton McGuinty, Bartolucci said.
It currently sits at $5 million, and the minister is not impressed with the results that spending have yielded.
?I?ve looked at past applications to the NOHF, and I?m not pleased with the number of jobs that the approvals have created over the course of the long term,? he said. ?I want that changed.?
Sault Ste. Marie is already feeling the effects of that desire for change at MNDM.
Earlier in the month officials broke ground at the site of a new $6.5 million e-commerce/call centre expected to create 600 jobs.
?While we work to reorient the NOHFC, we will ensure the fund stays in business,? Bartolucci said. ?It is, and will remain, an important part of our four-year plan for positive change in the North.?
Bartolucci also campaigned on the out-migration of young people across Northern Ontario during eight years of Tory rule.
He said the province has seen 1.3 million new jobs, and if they had been distributed evenly, Northern Ontario would have seen 79,000 of those.
The region, as it stands, only received about 13,000 new jobs.
?Maybe a part of the NOHF should have a youth internship component attached to it.?
Apprenticeships and intern programs will give northern youth the on-the-job experience they need, he said.
For his part, Bartolucci has said he will work to reopen the doors of the MNDM office in Sudbury. Government jobs that moved from Northern Ontario to points south have been a large part of the overall job and population losses the region has experienced, he said.
?I am working quite aggressively to ensure the political office of the Minister of Northern Development and Mines is a staffed office,? he said earlier this year. ?You know, over the last eight or nine years this has not been a working office. We are working at ensuring stakeholders in Northern
Ontario will be able to have their issues debated, discussed and deliberated in Northern Ontario.?
