COMMUNITY PARIS COUNCILLOR LUKAS OAKLEY:

Ward 2 Paris Councillor Lukas Oakley breaks down all the details from the county’s recent experience at the Association of Municipalities Ontario (AMO) 2024 Conference. It’s an annual opportunity for Councillors and County representatives to speak with Government Ministers to lobby on behalf of initiatives and projects in Brant County. The Paris Independent will share Councillor Oakley’s narrative on the conference over two editions. This week’s recap focuses on the county’s delegations to Ministers and overall SCOR delegation highlights. Last week Lukas shared information on the county’s delegations to ministers, as well as highlights from SCOR delegations. If you missed last week’s edition, you can find it here

Concurrent Session Highlights

The conference had a variety of concurrent informational sessions, breakfasts, and lunches on a wide variety of topics; from long term financial plans to the future of energy in Ontario to how to meaningfully improve youth civic engagement. The first session I attended on Monday morning was a breakfast panel with the three AMO Youth Fellows: Henry Khamonde, Elizabeth Simpson-Hills, and Thomas Walling. They had a very informative panel on how we are failing to provide a space for youth to engage in our political system and provided some very interesting ideas on how to meaningfully provide that space: perhaps the County needs to consider re-implementing a “Youth Council” They discussed how political extremism is on the rise and political engagement is falling. The increasingly vitriolic nature of political engagement was a highlight that continued through the rest of the conference, with many politicians and staff being the victims of harassment, threats of violence and more, from both their peers and the public. All three panelists described one of the barriers to engaging more youth in politics is this now inherent lack of safety in the space.

The next two sessions I was able to attend on the following day were on how to meaningfully impact homelessness locally, and innovating in the affordable housing sector, two intrinsically tied topics Speakers highlighted the importance of working with upper-levels of government to end the hyper-financialization of housing, as we have a steady drain of affordable rentals from the rental stock. This drain comes both from federal and provincial subsidies (often on fixed term agreements) ending at a faster rate than we create new subsidized units, and non-subsidized units that are at below market rates due to their current long time tenants shooting up to market rents when their current tenants leave for one reason or another. Speakers highlighted the importance of new support from upper-levels of government to increase growth in the non-market sector of housing, and that housing growth needs to be tied to population growth.

Finally, on the last day of the event, Steve Paikin hosted two different expert panels, a housing panel with Jag Sharma, Mike Moffat, Neil Rodgers, and Lisa Helps, and an Infrastructure panel with Lisa Laronde, Drew Fagan, and Ehren Cory (which were recorded and will be broadcast on TVO at a later date… I’d recommend watching both!). The main takeaway from both panels were that the financial relationship between Ontario municipalities and the province has not changed in the 125 years that AMO has operated.

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