Staff
The Rainy River Future Development Corporation are able to get a start on their Regional Economic Diversification Project after receiving $270,750 in funding from the province’s Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation (NOHFC).
The announcement was made Thursday afternoon at the Lake of the Woods Discovery Centre in Kenora by Michael Gravelle, Minister of Northern Development and Mines and Chair of the NOHFC.
“He went into great lengths about how excited he is about the actual project,” expressed George Emes, chairman of the RRFDC board, who was in attendance during the announcement.
“He thought it was a great idea, which was really quite nice,” he added. “We got a really good report from him. He expressed that it’s good to see us doing it as a community.”
Emes indicated they applied for the funding right after the layoffs at the mill.
“They were fairly quick, the announcement was just a little later,” he noted, citing the RRFDC was aware they had received the funding, but they had to wait for the official announcement.
“The funding is to be used to research diversifying our economy,” he said about the project.
“What we’re going to do is hire some consultants to research what we can do to try to get away from the wood industry—to try to develop some other industries, even if it’s by-products of the wood,” added Emes.
“With very little paper going through the mill right now, we don’t have a lot to go on, so we have to find some other things,” he expressed.
The RRFDC is expecting to receive similar funding from FedNor for the project.
“They’ve indicated it’s coming, they just haven’t said when,” he voiced.
However, the three-part project, which also includes funds from the municipality, will get underway with the money they have currently and they will wait for funding from the federal government.
“We’re working with what we have, we’d just like to be able to go farther,” Emes remarked.
