TIMMINS - When the services board took a seat at the Timmins council table this week, members had a lot to say.
For nearly two hours on Tuesday, Cochrane District Services Board (CDSB) director of health Jean Carriere and Canadian Mental Health Association Cochrane-Timiskaming executive director Paul Jalbert talked to Timmins council and fielded questions about the proposed Wellness Centre of Excellence (WCE), a service hub offering mental health and addiction treatment.
Later on in the meeting, the conversation continued when there was a vote about the city supporting the Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment (HART) hub application, which is the funding the CDSB and its partners have submitted for.
RELATED: Treatment facility being 'overshadowed' by past projects, says Timmins mayor
The exact wording of the resolution voted on was "The City of Timmins does not support the HART Hub application and the location of the proposed facility and that the city would entertain proposals in the future to deal with issues facing the community."
The vote was tied 4-4, which under the city guidelines means that the vote is defeated. The councillors in favour of the resolution were John Curley, Lorne Feldman, Bill Gvozdanovic and Rock Whissell. Those against were Steve Black, Andrew Marks, Cory Robin and Mayor Michelle Boileau. Coun. Kristin Murray was not at the meeting.
Ahead of the vote, all of the council members shared their thoughts. Here is some of what they said:
Coun. Steve Black
With a decade of experience on council — both as a councillor and mayor— Black took a significant pause before voting. It's the hardest decision he says he's wrestled with to date and he's frustrated with the lack of public transparency and consultation on the project.
“I don’t want to kill this, I really don’t. In the core of my heart, trying to do something in treatment and helping people with mental health and addictions has been one of my top priorities, along with community safety,” he said, adding he's not happy making the decision with the information available at-hand.
Since the WCE launch in September, he said it's the only item friends have yelled at him about and longtime supporters have asked him to stop it, though he acknowledged not everyone feels the same way.
“That’s how divided this is and it’s how we’ve played things out the last two to six years in this field. That frustrates me because I truly believe if done right this is going to be a great step forward. It’s not going to solve our problems … but it’s a step in the right direction."
If council pulled the plug on the proposal, he's not sure that other provincial money would be available.
Mayor Michelle Boileau
As mayor, Boileau is also the chair of the CDSB. She supports the application, but would prefer a different location.
"Unfortunately I don’t believe that there is a better location at this time for this purpose, especially considering the criteria that came with a HART hub application," she said.
"This is our opportunity to go after funds for addiction and recovery treatment. I’ve heard a lot of opposition on this, I have. But I have also heard support from community members. And I’ve heard support from community members who live in Ward 1.”
The HART hub funding is for three years, and there are no guarantees from the province on what happens then.
"We might even have to look at full out closure of the services that were being provided for three years and it was mentioned around this table that that would be cruel … I believe it would be even more cruel not to offer something because the difference we can make in the lives of people in the next three years I think should not be undervalued and if in the fourth year we have to have difficult discussions about what happens to those services, then so be it,” she said.
Coun. John Curley
Overall, the veteran councillor says it's a good project, but questioned what would happen after the three-year funding runs up. He also would have liked more location options.
Curley said he's received comments and calls on the project and is concerned about the businesses who are not supportive of the project.
"Those businesses that are not in favour of something down there, they are the same businesses that we go to see to support us in various projects," he said.
Curley is one of the councillors who attended the Sept. 9 public meeting, the sole information session held to date — though more were promised — at the Ramada Inn.
“That night it set the tone again where we upset a lot businesses, business owners that were there could not get in. So they’ve raised concerns and I’ve heard that,” he said.
“It has been disappointing, but I do believe in the project … there has to be something that needs to be done. Is it the right location there, should it be part of the hospital addition added on there?”
Coun. Lorne Feldman
“As a first-time member of council, you’re told you’re going to have to make some tough decisions, but this one is a gut-wrenching one just based on the dynamic," said Feldman.
He talked about struggling between his strong desire for a treatment centre and not wanting to turn his back on CDSB's work, partners or people seeking help.
"I don’t like to turn my back on anyone. But this isn’t just about me. What goes into a decision such as this is fulfilling my duties to residents. Residents who have expressed a lot of concerns — some very reasonable, some maybe not as reasonable, maybe not as rational,” he said.
Ahead of the vote, he remained torn on what to do.
“I really find this political disagreement is turning opponents into enemies, whether it’s friends, whether it’s family members, whether it’s colleagues. This is not how it should be. We should be working in a collaborative nature to get it right," he said.
His comments were interrupted to call for a vote to allow the meeting to go past 10 p.m.
Right before the vote was called later on, he questioned where everything went wrong.
“Because there’s not a person in this community that does not support a treatment centre," he said, adding he's not casting blame.
"We’re a team. We win together, we lose together. But residents have been let down. Residents feel disrespected and when you lose that trust it’s hard to get back, but it’s not impossible to get back."
Coun. Bill Gvozdanovic
It was Gvozdanovic, the Schumacher councillor, who added the resolution to the agenda.
He talked about Pack the Mac, which was brought up by Robin, who opened the comments on the resolution. Gvozdanovic helped organize the June 2023 event, where residents called to move Living Space out of the residential area.
"To sit here and try to fool the public and tell them that if we don’t hit the jackpot with the HART hub application … that the province has no more money for us. And we have a minister here, and they have no more money. Let’s not fool the public, there’s lots of money out there for us. But what has to happen is we have to have a plan that the public buys into. We have to eventually start listening to the public," he said.
He's talked to Rock Whissell, who is the Ward 1 councillor where the proposed facility is located, and has heard that Mountjoy residents don't support the project.
“In this case I trust him and I will support him," he said.
Instead of the hub with multiple partners, he's looking for small moves. He suggests looking at a mining camp set up, where Atco trailers are used and people have their own room and bed at night.
“I’ll like a plan that makes sense and that provides some relief for these people who are either sleeping on the ground tonight or on a cot one foot off the ground,” he said.
Coun. Andrew Marks
“This is a tough decision and that’s why we’re here," said Marks, a veteran Ward 5 councillor.
He acknowledged the CDSB presentation and comments about trust and past issues. For him, the decision was about taking action as a council and making the process better.
“I can’t support this resolution because I have to support treatment for residents of our community, of our region, and that’s what I believe this treatment centre — the HART hub — will do for us. Do I trust the communication process that they’ve put forward? Not 100 per cent because we’ve seen it fail. But we can make it better, we can do that. That’s what this council can do. Yeah, it’s going to be (CDSB) and other partners’ project to move forward, but we can hold them accountable,” he said.
Marks also talked about the short turnaround time for the application to be submitted. With an early provincial election expected in the spring, he said the province has done that for their own political reasons.
“We know that it’s been a compressed timeframe, they want to go out and have great news stories to say we’ve done this to help this issue that we’ve all been crying about at the municipal level and we’ve had to deal with at the municipal level. We’ve had to be the grassroots dealing with it at the municipal level, Coun. Whissell is an example of that, absolutely, with what’s happening to you,” he said.
Coun. Cory Robin
Robin was the first to comment on the item, saying it's a tough resolution.
“I want to remind everyone of June 15, 2023, when we had Pack the Mac where thousands of people and said in one voice, ‘Do something’,” he said.
“So I’m doing something. And it may not be exactly what the community wants. It may not be exactly the shape and size that people want to see it, but it’s the option that we have and since this is a three-year application when we say we’ll look at something in the future we are literally kicking this conversation down the road to a future council. I do not believe that there’s going to be another opportunity for HART Hub funding if we don’t get this until that round is finished."
While it's not a city project, he said council has a "sway over it".
"There are some admitted problems with this location and what’s going on here and some questions need to be asked. A lot of things regarding safety, a lot of things regarding what’s going to happen to the neighbourhood. Many of those comments are very valid and there’s a lot of fear there. For me I don’t support this resolution because we need to do something in our city and we cannot afford to do it ourselves and we need the province to help us and this is their version of helping us,” he said.
Coun. Rock Whissell
“This decision for me is not hard at all," said Whissell, who as the councillor for the area the proposal is in has been subjected to a lot of public scrutiny.
Over the past week, he's visited over 15 businesses and says there is no support in the community.
"My constituents do not want this facility because they don’t trust the direction it’s going. I had the opportunity for 1,000 people to come see me to support it or to tell me that they’re in favour of it and I haven’t seen that from any of them," he said, adding himself and family members continuously receive phone calls about the facility and the direction it's going.
"I did not receive any information for two months, no emails, no transitions, no information until I sent the board an email and then within five hours and 15 minutes, to be exact, there was a website available, there was a presentation here at council and for the last two months there was no information that the residents were really receiving to make them comfortable to go forward with this project. I really believed in this project and I really wanted it to work,” he said.
“This will end my political career. I am done after two years because of this."
A full video of the discussion is below, the resolution discussion starts at around 3:31:
The province has not announced what municipalities are receiving HART hubs. It's not known when that could be coming, though the facilities are expected to be operating by March 2025.
Being led by the CDSB, Timmins council has the majority of votes on the board. Whissell was one of the members, but stepped down in September. The current members on CDSB are Black, Boileau, Curley, Feldman, Marks, Murray, and Robin.
