Windsor’s mayor asked the province to build a new interchange on Highway 401
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Windsor Mayor Drew Dalkins has submitted a pitch to a provincial parliamentary committee for a new $100 million interchange to connect the Lauzon Parkway Extension to Highway 401.
Dilkins was one of several speakers at a pre-budget committee meeting in Windsor on Monday. He said the expansion would allow for a new industrial park in the Lauzon Parkway corridor and help new and existing industry access the new Gordie Howe International Bridge.
“When built, this industrial park will be Canada’s closest industrial park to the US-Canada border,” Dilkins said at a hotel in the city.
Dilkins said he expects the project, including the Lauzon Parkway extension, to take five years. He said the city will spend $100 million on expanding the parkway.
He told the committee that the project would not only benefit Windsor, but the province and the country as well.
Meanwhile, healthcare remained top of mind for many of the 21 delegations that attended the day-long consultation of the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs.
The committee is made up of MPPs from the New Democrat, PC, Liberal parties as well as independent members.
MPP Lisa Gretzky, who sits on the committee with NDP economic development critic Terence Kernaghan, criticized the plan to use private clinics to provide some services to the province. She says the province should be spending money on providing services in hospitals, not spending money going to court to defend provincial wage restraint legislation, Bill 124.
“While this government is talking about expanding private for-profit health care, saying we need to do it somehow to promote public health care, they’re actually going public. But the nurses in subsidized health care are taking them to court to suppress their wages,” Gretzky said.
He also said there are operating rooms sitting idle that should be funded.
“ERs are closing. There’s a surgical backlog that people are waiting a ridiculous amount of time for really important surgeries. And now they’re giving us the only option, allowing private, not-for-profit companies to take over our Allowing money to be made from the health care system,” Kernaghan said.
But Windsor-Tecumseh MPP Andrew Dovey says the province isn’t planning to do anything that hasn’t already been done for decades.
“Our doctors are private corporations. Our in vitro fertilization clinic: a private corporation. The clinics we’re working with are similar to Windsor Surgical Center where you have a partnership with a local hospital,” Dovey said. Said, whoever sits. on the committee.
The committee will wrap up the consulate on February 10.
