ATIKOKAN – Meetings with Ontario’s energy minister and health minister went well, Atikokan’s mayor said Wednesday after the adjournment of 2025’s Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) conference.
But mostly, Mayor Rob Ferguson said while waiting in Ottawa for a flight to take him back to Northwestern Ontario, the annual gathering of 2,500 or so officials isn’t about getting things for one’s municipality right away.
Instead, it’s about relationship building.
Ferguson, having just been to his third AMO conference, said “you don’t go to AMO to get something; you go to AMO to make connections so the next time you go maybe you can get something.
“It is a lot of relationship building. That’s the great thing about being there. The ministers are walking around and we’ve been around long enough that, you know, we have some face recognition and we can have those hallway discussions which seem to go a lot better than the delegations (private meetings).
“Some municipalities and some groups judge their success by how many delegations they get. But we’re more open to talking about the important ones and then having those discussions in the hallways and things like that where you get a lot of traction, too.
“There’s a lot less pressure on the ministers when you talk about things (casually) instead of in a big boardroom with their people and just kind of have those one-on-ones and make a path going forward on a lot of things. So that’s really successful.”
Ferguson said he and town chief administrative officer Jason Young met with Energy and Mines Minister Stephen Lecce and Hydro One officials to discuss Atikokan’s place in the region’s supply of electricity.
“They’re looking for more generation, and now that we have the Waasigan Transmission Line coming Atikokan is in a good spot to generate more electricity because there will be a path to get it out,” Ferguson said.
“We were kind of bottled in Atikokan and we couldn’t get the electricity out, but once the Waasigan line is running we’ll have a lot more opportunity to produce some excess electricity and then share it with the rest of the province.”
As a board member in the Northwestern Health Unit, Ferguson took part in a meeting with Health Minister Sylvia Jones.
Jones seems to have a good understanding of the importance of public health and the challenges faced by the regional health unit in delivering services to a vast district, he said.
The 2025 AMO conference took place Aug. 17-20 in Ottawa.
