Expanding highway infrastructure, attracting skilled trades and engaging more with Northern leaders were some of the priorities shared at a Liberal leadership debate on Thursday.

“Regardless of other initiatives we embrace to help the forestry or mining sector, if we can’t actually get the goods to market and use our transportation links effectively, then we’re always going to run into a bit of a problem,” said Steven Del Duca, who served as transportation minister in the Kathleen Wynne government.

“We need to keep expanding and four-laning the Trans-Canada Highway and keep making sure Highway 69 gets four-laned all the way down.”

Brenda Hollingsworth, an Ottawa lawyer whose nephew Owen was drafted by the Sudbury Wolves, said it is essential to have the human resources in place to extract the natural ones.

“My understanding is you are facing an acute shortage of tradespeople and skilled labourers,” she said. “This can be addressed by increasing the attractiveness of trades programs in your two community colleges in Sudbury and across the North.”

She said tuition incentives and “changes to apprenticeship programs so people can become tradespeople faster” would be worth exploring to fill the gap left by aging and retiring workers.

Don Valley East MPP Michael Coteau conceded neither he, nor any of the other leadership candidates, reside in the region, but pledged to build a strong relationship with the North if chosen to helm the party.

“We need to ensure that Northern Ontario communities and municipalities have a partner who is committed at Queen’s Park to make the right type of investment and also to ensure predictability and accountability long term,” he said.

He said he would work with a Northern Ontario Advisory Council to advance interests in the region and empower municipalities to have more input in provincial decisions.

Engaging more with leaders in Northern communities is also a priority for Kate Graham, a politics prof at Western University in London.

“What we need to see, in my view, is closer decision-making to the actual issues and communities,” she said. “We need to balance the desire for economic activity with protecting the environment, and the people in Northern Ontario would know best what that looks like.”

She said she’s committed to “building the kind of party where people in every single community have a lot more say and where decision-making is spread across Ontario, including a lot more representation from the North.”

Alvin Tedjo may not live in the region but said his three children attend the YMCA camp on John Island and his family’s “favourite time of the year is when we go up north.”

Evidence of former logging operations in the area proves, however, that resource extraction, “while good for the economy, is also temporary,” said Tedjo. “We need to make sure there are lasting positive impacts, because these companies that come in, if they’re not doing it in a sustainable way, will pack up and leave.”

The former Liberal Party candidate said our area would also benefit from his controversial plan to implement a single school system for the province.

“In a poll last month, 71 per cent of Ontarians said they wanted to merge the Catholic and non-Catholic school boards,” Tedjo said. “This has a huge impact on communities in Northern Ontario, where resources are more scarce and students are more scarce.”

Merging the boards would save $1.6 billion, he said, which could be reinvested in the classroom and spare teachers having to go on strike over class sizes and wage limits.

Mitzie Hunter, a former education minister, said the current labour unrest in the school sector speaks to the intransigence of Ontario’s leader, Premier Doug Ford.

“Our province has a bully at the helm right now,” she said. “I know the rotating strikes are affecting students of the North and every day that a student loses in our education system is a day lost in their life and their growth and their learning.”

Hunter also stressed the importance of engaging with First Nation and Francophone communities in the North, and addressing inequities in the region.

“I believe that Northern voices, and Franco-Ontarian and Indigenous voices, are very important to the Ontario Liberal Party and the conversation of renewal that we are having,” she said. “We must work to make sure Northerners do not feel alienated.”

She said the North faces unique challenges, including a disproportionate number of drug overdoses, many of them fatal.

“Here in Sudbury, every five days a Sudburian dies from the opioid crisis — this is an issue we have to address,” she said. “We also know that climate change is real, and that has a huge impact in the North.”

Hollingsworth was equally concerned about the warming emergency, stressing the need to meet emissions targets, while also pointing out Sudbury can play an important role in a greener economy.

“The people of this community have shown that a strong environmental policy can make fundamental changes — the regreening of Sudbury is truly inspirational,” she said. “At the same time, you have a real opportunity to make a huge impact in the green technology world. You are basically sitting on a battery-maker’s dream, with nickel and cobalt and copper and lithium, all conflict-free, all child-labour-free. The world needs what Northern Ontario has.”

Northern Ontario is also blessed with timber, noted Del Duca, and that renewable resources can be better utilized for both economic gain and environmental sustainability.

“As Liberals, we shouldn’t forget that we were the government that amended the building code in Ontario, so you can actually build six storeys now using wood-frame construction techniques,” he said. “That kind of wood can be harvested and processed here.”

jmoodie@postmedia.com