My Priorities if Re-elected

Taking Care of The Place Where We Work, Live and Play

As we take time to appreciate the beauty and value of Muskoka’s freshwater—from quiet mornings in our many parks to afternoons spent paddling, swimming, or exploring local shorelines—this season reminds us how closely our community is connected to healthy lakes and rivers which includes the land, forests, and wetlands within the Muskoka watershed.

Across the region, work continues among landowners, municipalities and the District of Muskoka, First Nations and community partners to protect and restore our freshwater ecosystems, to ensure these treasured places remain healthy and resilient for generations to come. Maintaining vegetative buffers along our shorelines, creeks, and rivers is an important part of this work. Clean, abundant freshwater is essential to agriculture, electric power generation, municipal water systems, and wastewater treatment. Our industries—and, by extension, our local economy—depend on it for the health and well-being of our community. We drink these waters, and we swim, canoe, and fish in them. They are the lifelines of our economy and sustains a remarkable diversity of native wildlife which needs to be protected. 

Protecting the environment begins with understanding it. Information gathering and monitoring provide the foundation for informed action. This includes water-quality sampling through programs such as Love Your Lake, as well as community science initiatives such as ASHMuskoka, which works to restore calcium to the soil for healthier forests, and SALTYMuskoka, which supports healthier lakes. These initiatives, together with the work of the Muskoka Watershed Council’s Muskoka Integrated Watershed Management, help build the knowledge needed to identify targeted actions that will most effectively and efficiently protect and strengthen the resilience of our freshwater systems and to help mitigate flooding. We need to support the important work they do.

Freshwater protection depends on collaboration. Municipalities, landowners, Indigenous communities, the Cottage and Lake Associations, environmental organizations, environmental advocacy groups, year-round and part-time residents along with the Provincial Government—all have important roles to play. Effective protection must extend beyond our municipal boundary to encompass entire watersheds and the communities, ecosystems, and people within them.

By working together and making decisions grounded in knowledge, we can protect Muskoka’s freshwater for the generations that will inherit these remarkable lakes, rivers, wetlands, forests and shorelines.

Building Community Capacity

Alternate Level of Care (ALC) describes on the most part, older adult patients who occupy hospital beds but no longer require the intensity of hospital-based services. Many of these patients could safely receive the necessary monitoring, therapy, and support in other settings.

Our community needs to create more capacity for people who require medical and supportive care, but ALC beds do not necessarily need to be in hospitals. Many would prefer to recover at home after a hospital stay when adequate in-home supports are available. 

Older adults generally do not want institutional care. They prefer to remain in their homes and neighbourhoods and receive services from community-based non-profit organizations.

Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities with Social Support Programs offer an excellent model for delivering these supports. They can bring Ontario Health atHome and local community organizations together to provide wraparound services where people live. 

We need to expand direct-funded home care. The Family-Managed Home Care Program allows some families to hire and manage their own providers, but access for older adults is currently limited to extraordinary circumstances. Direct funding exists for people with developmental disabilities for which my late sister was able to benefit from this arrangement here in her home in Muskoka.

Other provinces allow family caregivers to receive financial support when they leave employment to care for a spouse or parent(s) at home.

We need to strengthen our public health and mental health systems so everyone can access the care they need, where and when they need it—including more community-based alternatives to hospital and institutional care.

Approximately 40% of Bracebridge residents are unattached to primary care. Because of this, our emergency department at the hospital and paramedic services are overburdened. Work is presently underway for training opportunities for more Health Care Providers here in Muskoka to help address present health care shortages.

Housing

We need good quality, environmentally sustainable and deeply affordable housing solutions that will continue to create a vibrant and a healthy community. The Town has a practical roadmap to building a livable and affordable community where everyone has a great place to live.



Bracebridge has demonstrated clear intent to modernize its planning and housing systems by implementing Additional Residential Unit permissions to allow up to three units per lot, transitioned to a fully digital permitting process and redevelopment on municipally owned lands aimed at creating a mixed-use community hub with attainable rental units by a three-way partnership with the District of Muskoka and a non-profit organization.

To streamline the approval process to build new homes, Bracebridge could adopt a Housing Design Catalogue with pre-approved design templates with tailored and standardized designs. It could include accessory dwelling units, townhouses, rowhouses and multiplexes to help build more homes faster.

We have the expertise here in Muskoka on how to build energy efficient pre-fab and panelled structures. In Muskoka there is a Passive Home and Seed building system factory that operates a 7,000-square-foot prefabrication facility manufacturing wall, floor and roof panels for houses and multi-residential buildings. Its existing facility and equipment can produce panels for up to ten 50-unit apartment buildings a year. We need to use our local builders and encourage our young people into the skilled trades to address the housing shortage. 

Community Builders is a social enterprise contractor working to solve the affordable housing crisis and the skilled labour shortage and they are here in Bracebridge. It funds and supports on-site job training and skills development. 

The people, the expertise, equipment and manufacturing capacity are here. Let’s support local and buy Canadian to build more homes people can afford.

The Town should continue to donate municipally owned land and offer incentives for developers, the District of Muskoka and not-for profit housing groups to collaborate and work together to build energy efficient affordable units in the way of tiny homes, affordable rental units, bungalows with wheelchair accessible living spaces and other innovative approaches to housing especially for our ageing population. Establishing a clear priority process with defined timelines would help accelerate affordable and purpose-built owned or rental housing delivery for Bracebridge.

Municipal Responsibilities

• Listening and responding to your ideas, concerns or queries
• Roads, streets and infrastructure
• Snow removal and sidewalks
• Parks and Trails
• Bracebridge Sportsplex
• Muskoka Lumber Community Centre, Arena and Coulsen Family Bracebridge Library 
• Public Art
• Accessibility
• Woodchester Villa and Artifact Collection
• Local Planning and Zoning
• Local By-Law Enforcement
• Fire Services
• Community Events and Local Programs 
• Bracebridge Transit
• Public Beaches, Boat Launches and Docks
• Re-development of the Carnegie Library Building into a Business Hub
• Municipal Property Taxes
• A thorough review of annual Town of Bracebridge Budget and Business Plans