By Miranda Miller
Georgian College has asked the County of Grey for $2-million to help fund a $7-million local expansion. They're planning an addition to the Great Lakes International Marine Training & Research Centre in Owen Sound to house a Marine Emergency Duties (MED) corporate training facility.

The new facility will replace the Port Colborne centre shuttered by the federal government in 2013. Since then, mariners have had to travel to Canada's east or west coasts for their mandatory safety training.

Owen Sound is already equipped to provide marine students with mandatory safety training; at issue is training for professional mariners. New Transport Canada regulations, rolling out later this year, require they take emergency response training every five years.

It makes sense that Georgian College wants the new facility – it's expected to serve 750 students with four days of training each year.

Yet when the federal government began the process of divesting its MED facilities to provinces in 2006, who knew it would fall on a host municipality to shoulder millions of the expense of transitioning to a new location?

The St-Romuald MED facility was divested to Quebec in 2009. It came with a lump sum transfer payment of $6.3-million to facilitate continued delivery of the program.

Transport Canada has offered a one-time investment of $500,000 to fund the transfer of training equipment to Owen Sound – one quarter of the college's ask of the county. Together, the federal and provincial governments have offered just $4.2-million towards this project - $2.1-million less than the feds alone gave Quebec.

A recent report in the Sun Times pulls no punches about how Ontario feels about being left to foot the bill: "On June 30, 2013, and without any funding to replace the facility, Transport Canada closed the Marine Emergency Duty Training (MEDT) Centre in Port Colborne… This divestment will have a negative impact on the Great Lakes shipping industry as it will leave Ontario without an approved site for full mariner certification which is mandated by Transport Canada."

The federal and provincial governments aren't getting along. Let's put on our surprised faces.

Enter Owen Sound, the willing and even eager host.

Mary Lynn West-Moynes, president and CEO of Georgian College, explained the potential impact on the County of Grey to Denis Langlois: "It will mean up to 6,000 training days a year, bringing people into Grey-Bruce who will come for three to five days at a time to get re-certified and hopefully staying in hotels, eating in our restaurants and buying presents to take home for their family after they’re done the training.”

Gifts to take home to their family when they're done here. Because folks, we don't have the jobs to keep them here in Owen Sound.

For more than a decade between 1997 and 2007, Ontario placed second-last in Canada in its financial support of higher education. But is it the job of local governments – especially in struggling rural areas – to pick up the slack?

Consider, as well, that this facility is needed not to train college students, but to retrain mariners already employed, largely in Great Lakes shipping. That industry consists of over 28,000 people pumping $9.6-billion into the Ontario economy each year.
This new facility is needed because the federal and provincial governments could not work out a transfer payment to pay for the existing one.

It's needed because Transport Canada now requires that mariners retrain more often.

It's needed because the federal government closed the existing facility without ensuring a replacement was in place.
So why is the County of Grey left holding a $2-million bag?

Owen Sound mayor Deb Haswell inexplicably threw her two cents in, telling the Sun Times, “I think that investment in education is without a doubt the most important investment that anyone can make." Yes, the need to invest in education is universal and obvious. Yet as city/county councillor Arlene Wright wrote to me, "It is my committee that will deal with it and our next meeting isn't until the 17th."

Wright expects that the committee will recommend either a placeholder in the 2015 budget, or an immediate contribution out of reserves.

Before they do, let's hope they tell Georgian College to return to the provincial and federal governments to ask for fair and realistic funding to correct the quagmire they created. It's a disproportionate amount to ask of Grey County taxpayers, given the funding provided Quebec and the sheer size of the Great Lakes shipping industry, which will pitch in $1-million in donations.
Education is critical, but higher education is not a municipal responsibility. Nor is funding industry-specific corporate training – particularly in regions with very little potential economic benefit from the industry.

We're going to have to sell a lot of meals and book a lot of hotel rooms to come anywhere close to recouping $2-million in tax revenue from mariners coming for a few days to take their retraining.

Miranda Miller is an insatiably curious Owen Sound writer, mom, geek and informavore. She writes for more than a dozen publications, from local to international, about business, marketing, education and politics.