Members of the Western Ontario Wardens Caucus had a virtual meeting with nine provincial ministers and their staff on the last day of last week's Association of Municipalities conference.
Huron County Warden and Western Warden's Chair Jim Ginn said they talked about a number of things around the financial impact COVID-19 has had on municipalities.
"We talked about the need for broadband high-speed internet, economic development. Included in that was child care, early childhood educators, things like social housing in rural communities and the need for that and food security for now and for the future," said Ginn.
Ginn said when they make presentations to ministers, they're not expecting immediate answers.
He said the ministers and staff will have to take the request back with them and do some research and in most cases, the municipalities have already done a significant amount of work and provincial staff will look for any existing programs that the municipalities could access to solve their problem, or at least help a little.
"We've done a fair bit of work on them and then they'll look and see if there's any existing programs that they could access funds that would solve our problem or help us out, at least. And the other part of it is looking at strategies, going forward and they take our input and look at it and see if it's suitable to put into their policies," added Ginn.
Ginn added one issue the province is already actively looking into is long term care homes, as a result of the problems that were exposed by COVID-19.
