“We just feel like we’d be better represented together as a rural area,” Hastings County Warden Rick Phillips says.
He explains that the Provincial government proposed putting the County with the Durham region health unit. The idea was also floated for the County and others to join the Ottawa health unit. Phillips says both Durham and Ottawa are “much too big for our rural area.”
“The idea was that all the Eastern Ontario counties would put forward a proposal to have their own health within the counties in Eastern Ontario,” Phillips says.
The proposed Eastern Ontario Health Unit would have just over 1 million people, Phillips says.
He says EOWC has forwarded this proposal to Bay of Quinte MPP Todd Smith and Hastings-Lennox and Addington Daryl Kramp. “They’re well aware of our concerns,” he says.
At the special meeting of council the EOWC held earlier this month, the proposal was supported and a resolution was attached, but it still needs to be sent off to the Province for review before a decision gets made.
With files from Phil McCabe