The province of Ontario has renewed the Rural Economic Development program as Rural Ontario Development. The program will go from $27 million over five years to $20 million over two years, a 46 per cent increase in available funding. While Christa Lowry, Chair of the Rural Ontario Municipal Association and Mayor of Mississippi Mills, thinks this is a significant improvement over the previous iteration of Rural Ontario Development, she also commends the province for making more types of funding available, such as funding for planning municipal projects.
“ROMA is certainly quite pleased with the changes to the new program,” said Lowry.
“There are more dollars and there are more ways that communities can work with it, with this program, to drive prosperity locally, to try to retain investment locally, to try to retain talent and workforce.”
For Lowry, the most notable change is the amount of funding available, because rural municipalities often lack the resources larger urban centres have.
“It’s a big improvement that the dollar figure has increased as much as it has. I really can’t overstate how much a larger envelope is needed and is certainly really appreciated,” said Lowry.
“There are some ways that this programme has been enhanced that I think are meaningful for rural [Ontario] communities. Not just the increase in the funding, but things like including the planning and strategy stream. These were areas that weren’t necessarily eligible before as project costs.”
This newly eligible funding for rural planning is often cost-prohibitive for smaller Ontario municipalities.
“It tends to be smaller communities in rural Ontario,” said Lowry.
“The bench strength, the size of the organization, might not allow for an in-house planning strategy to be part of what’s possible. So, having that as an eligible project cost, I think, is very, very meaningful to rural communities [across Ontario.] There are a lot of pieces to the strategy behind this new, revamped program that are really quite encouraging for rural Ontario.”
It’s hard to say what lies beyond the scope of Rural Ontario Development. But Lowry is optimistic.
“I’m speculating. I don’t know what the plans are beyond 2026, but I would hope that uptake is strong in the programme, and [the Rural Ontario Municipal Association] would certainly encourage that [funding] envelope grow,” said Lowry.
“Another aspect that’s encouraging is that there’s a higher cost-sharing ratio.”
For better or worse, rural municipalities are in competition with urban municipalities, and sometimes rural municipalities are overlooked because of a lack of resources.
“Smaller communities are often in rural Ontario and are trying to provide similar opportunities, [while] they have similar demands as our big city neighbours, but they don’t always have the resources,” said Lowry.
“They may not have the resources, they may not have the bench strength to be able to dive in and do an Economic Development Strategy or plan a Business Retention and Expansion program. If you’ve got a project that you’re wanting to tackle, you need a plan to be able to do it. Sometimes the stumbling block is not having the resources to be able to invest the time or the dollars into coming up with a plan or coming up with a strategy.”
“It could be that they’re spread thin,” Lowry continued.
“It could be that the smaller communities often have a clerk administrator who’s also the treasurer. They wear a lot of hats. If there’s just not capacity there, there’s just not the resources. This is one of the things that I’m really quite encouraged by, one of the shifts in this new program is that some of those smaller communities might be able to take advantage of and get some help in creating whatever that strategy might be. It might be a Downtown Improvement Strategy. Here, where I’m from, we’ve done BREs, which is a Business Retention and Expansion plan, and you know, that takes a lot of effort and a lot of time, and a small place might not have the resources to do that, whereas this new Rural Ontario Development Program has that as an eligible string that could be cost shared up to 50 per cent of the dollar figure.”
For more information on Rural Ontario Development, visit news.ontario.ca and search for the news release titled Ontario Protecting Workers and Jobs in Rural Communities.
