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Province's response to ice storm was excellent

YorkRegion.com
January 14, 2014
By Kathleen Wynne, Premier of Ontario

Life is never short of opportunities to learn and grow on an individual and a collective level. Following the ice storm in southern Ontario, my colleagues and I worked with municipal governments to provide co-ordinated emergency response resources.

There will be a review of these responses to determine what worked well and what could have been improved. Overall, I believe the response was excellent. I want to thank and congratulate the professionals from Ontario and other provinces who reconnected lines, cleared ice, removed felled trees and branches and kept people safe from downed live wires, as well as those who set up warming centres and expanded our available health care outreach. The individual citizens who led response efforts in their communities and helped neighbours, friends and families are all heroes of the moment.

It would, however, be a mistake to believe there is nothing that could have been done better, faster or more effectively.

I will wait for the formal evaluation to weigh in on those specifics. But I want to share with you my thinking during our response, and why we made the efforts we did.

During the power outage I made it a priority to visit different communities affected by the storm so I could get a first-hand sense of what they were experiencing. My own house was without power for most of three days but we have a working fireplace and could still cook on our gas stove. My elderly parents had to leave their home on the second day of the storm but were able to stay with my sister. I knew that many people were in much worse situations.

One of the things I heard consistently, especially towards the end of the power outage, was that people were worried about having enough food — especially those who live on a very low income and were concerned that lost food could not be replaced. I told them we would try and find a way to help, and this was the genesis of the plan to provide grocery gift cards.

Emergency Management Ontario reached out to all affected municipalities and York Region expressed a strong willingness to work to distribute the cards to families and individuals in need. Thanks to the generosity of the private sector, $18,300 worth of grocery gift cards was distributed to 205 affected families and individuals in York Region.

It was a remarkably successful collaboration between government and the private sector.

Anyone who has been following this story knows there were many eager critics of the logistics. But here is a lesson I refuse to take from this initiative: I do not believe it is better to do nothing than to try to help. Without this initiative, 205 families and individuals in York Region would not have received help. I wish, of course, that we could have provided assistance to everyone. And I hope that over the days to come, individuals will receive the support they need from other programs and community supports that are already in place.

To my critics, political and otherwise, who were silent as we worked to provide a co-ordinated recovery and who offered no suggestions as to how to help those in need, I can say only this: I ran for political office to help people. It is my primary and overwhelming motivation.

In the months to come we will be tackling many very challenging issues — ensuring retirement security for Ontarians, the crying need for better transportation systems in the GTHA and beyond, inadequate services for the disabled and their families and the fact that the people who look after the frail and elderly in their homes are not valued enough by their government or society.

There are no easy solutions to any of these issues and the party leaders who claim these challenges can be solved without taking political risk — that they have easy, painless, cheap solutions — are not telling the truth. These are complex challenges that need intelligent, long-term solutions.

I’ll continue to take smart risks in order to make things better. I will not be constrained by the possibility that I will be criticized or that my political career may take a hit. I’m not in office to play it safe — I’m in office to do my best to help.