THUNDER BAY — The New Democrat MPP for Thunder Bay-Superior North will have a full plate of issues she says she wants to press in 2026.
Northern highway safety, the planned merger of many of the province’s conservation authorities (including the Lakehead Region Conservation Authority), the still-idled Terrace Bay mill and reforming the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board are all priorities Lise Vaugeois told Newswatch are top-of-mind heading into the new year.
Driving conditions on highways across the north is an issue Vaugeois said she hears about a lot.
“I’ll say a day doesn’t go by that I (don’t) get an email about local people expressing their frustration,” she said. “And, as I have said many times, I don’t think we should be blaming the (transport truck) drivers.”
“The drivers are the people we see, right? But it’s the larger companies that are putting drivers on the road without adequate training, and that needs to stop, and it could stop.”
More rigorous inspections of driving schools, bringing testing and licensing under the auspices of the Ministry of Transportation, around-the-clock staffing of vehicle inspection stations and also returning highway maintenance to the MTO — rather than private contractors — are other steps on the highways file Vaugeois said she’s championing.
The last proposal has been on the provincial NDP’s priority list for years.
Vaugeois and her Mushkegowuk-James Bay colleague Guy Bourgouin are collecting letters from residents about highway safety through an online portal and promoting it on social media, she said, to “make an even bigger noise” about the issue, with the goal of telling the Ford government “what you’re doing is not good enough.”
Fighting the proposed amalgamation of most of the province’s conservation authorities — including the plan to combine the Lakehead Region Conservation Authority with several others south of Lake Huron — is also well on Vaugeois’s radar, she said.
She called the proposal affecting the LRCA “ridiculous.”
“I think we have a chance of winning the conservation authority issue because, our city council, academics at the university, it’s one voice of opposition on what is happening with that,” she said.
“Other conservation authorities are speaking up and saying ‘this is a really bad idea, that’s going to be expensive and undermine the well-being of our land and waters.’”
Vaugeois said another priority is dealing with the uncertain future of the Terrace Bay mill, which has been idle since early 2024 — and now with multiple reports saying that owners AV Terrace Bay won’t heat it this winter.
The former union local president at the mill has told Newswatch much of the workforce there has gone into mining and that if the mill isn’t heated, “it’s pretty well done.”
“That mill could be converted to other purposes,” Vaugeois said of the need to maintain the property. “It can either continue to be a pulp mill — hopefully a modernized pulp mill that has reduced its environmental footprint — but there are also options for biofuel.”
“There are other things that mill can be used to produce.”
Vaugeois said she’s also eager to debate a bill she tabled around reformation at the WSIB, with the aim of reintroducing principles enshrined under the Meredith Act. It effectively laid out principles where a worker was to be supported for the duration of their injury.
She said it would “return the WSIB to its original purpose — which is to support injured workers.”
The bill is set to be back before the House in the spring.
– With files from Jessah Clement
