FedNor grants lowest in North Bay: King

The North Bay and District Chamber of Commerce wants to figure out why North Bay and Nipissing appear not to be receiving as much FedNor grant money as other Northern Ontario communities.

Chamber director Mark King raised the issue at Thursday night's board of directors meeting, and the matter will be looked at by a chamber committee.

King said he looked at FedNor funding announcements between January 2002 and mid-December 2004 and saw a pattern he didn’t like.

The federal ridings Thunder Bay-Superior, Sudbury, Algoma-Manitoulin, Timmins, Timiskaming-Cochrane (now North Bay-Timiskaming), Kenora-Rainy River, Parry Sound-Muskoka and Sault Ste. Marie all derived more funds from FedNor than North Bay and Nipissing, King said.

“It actually took me a day to get over it.”

The funding discrepancies “are pretty substantial numbers,” King added.

“North Bay and the Nipissing riding received $4.6 million while Thunder Bay-Superior received $14.3 million, so $10 million more in funding went that way.”

What really bothered King, though, is that communities including Blind River, Espanola, Englehart and Sudbury, along with the Northeastern Ontario Cancer Centre, all received a “large amount” of money for their medical services, “and not one entry indicates anything with respect to North Bay or Mattawa.”

If FedNor money is just sitting there, King said, “Why are we not getting our fair share?”

Should that be the case, King said, “there’s something wrong within our community with respect to how we carry out our endeavours in order to get funding, and, whether we like it or not, it certainly adds to the bottom line to every business in this area.”