Consultants & PMS

Kudos to Mayor Fedeli for lambasting the consulting firm, hired by the city of Sault Ste Marie, that did not consult. How could the firm possibly come up with the conclusion that the Soo was the ideal northern city for another branch of the Northern Medical School when they did not talk to our Mayor? Forgetting for a moment that cities only hire a consultant when they want proof for a staff-studied project, and that the firm duly came back with the desired result, they ought to have looked beyond Sudbury and Thunder Bay before adding another branch to the Med school.

Just because North Bays’ new Health Centre is a few years behind the new hospital in the Soo, does not mean we could not accommodate the interns here in the Bay. The interns could be housed comfortably in a portable, connected to the World Wide Web, with redundancy, and study robotic medicine for hours on end as they learned how to build a new medical centre on the Gormanville plateau. They could also aspire to own a luxury home on Trout Lake, encouraging them to practice here in the Bay.

Had the consultants made a proper study of all the north, not just the Soo, Doc Fedeli could have apprised them of the North Bay opportunity. Aside from the spurious result of the consultant’s study, the very fact that the Soo spent some of our FedNor money on the study is a little galling. It did however show the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development how to leverage funds for the PMS.

New Zealand has more sheep than people (stay with me, I’ll segue back to the PMS). For years, the little woolly baa-baas have been shepherded around the hills and valleys of New Zealand, turning out wool and even lamb chops for the world. However, things are changing in New Zealand. The sheep are disappearing from the hills. In their place are much bigger four-legged bovines – milk cows. Not only are the cows decidedly larger than the Merino and Dorset sheep, but they produce more waste, waste that is causing drinking water quality problems. But this is only part of the price to pay for establishing a very profitable new world-wide market.

New Zealand is now one of the leading producers of powdered milk and milk-based baby food products. The main market? Only the fastest growing populations in the world: China and India. Those countries need all the room they can get for people, not cows, so it makes economical sense to buy powdered milk products.

Segue back to North Bay. Here in our area, the Milk Marketing Board has so much milk it has to limit the amount of milk from our farmers. On some days, milk farmers actually throw milk away. Here we have a great opportunity to tap into a growing market. All we need is a Powdered Milk Study and we are on our way to becoming the Cream of the North.

With the FedNor money, we could hire a consulting team to tell investors that we have excess milk capacity in north-eastern Ontario and western Quebec; that there are numerous small farmers who would love to get a milk contract; that we have serviced land (almost free) to build a dehydrating and packaging plant; that we have an extra long runway for cargo planes that can fly tonnes of powdered milk over the polar route to China; that we have redundant internet access to assure orders and invoices are always on time; that we can make the best cave cheese in the world from the fat content skimmed off the milk – aged in a secure underground chamber; that we have all the modern amenities – university, hospital (almost) and acres of recreational land – for an enviable employee lifestyle.

Forget about the School of Medicine, Doc. Surely there must be a consulting firm in the city who can get the facts straight and give us the right PMS. Tell the consulting firm that we want to become the Powdered Milk capital of Ontario. Get them some FedNor money and get them moving. There have been enough North Bay professors visit China that we should not need a junket, just have a meeting with them on December 27. Serve milk and cookies.

Now there is a thought. Maybe we could top-up those cargo planes with some chocolate chip cookies, made right here in Ferris….