{"id":13551,"date":"2016-03-02T17:56:17","date_gmt":"2016-03-02T22:56:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=13551"},"modified":"2016-03-02T17:56:17","modified_gmt":"2016-03-02T22:56:17","slug":"dawe-and-regional-mayors-promote-york-to-trudeau","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/dawe-and-regional-mayors-promote-york-to-trudeau\/","title":{"rendered":"Dawe and Regional mayors promote York to Trudeau"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bags of money.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what Mayor Geoff Dawe quipped when asked what he and Justin Trudeau discussed when the latter made a whistle-stop tour of Aurora last June, including a campaign stop at the Aurora Public Library.<\/p>\n

In all seriousness, Mayor Dawe said at the time he was struck by the Liberal leader\u2019s \u201ccharisma\u201d, and last week he was glad to see not much has changed as he joined his fellow mayors from the Region of York for a meeting with the new Prime Minister to discuss issues important to the area.<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t say whether \u201cbags of money\u201d were an issue on the table, but it wouldn\u2019t have gone amiss in addressing some of the issues they did present to the Prime Minister.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had four priority points,\u201d says Mayor Dawe. \u201cTransportation is on everybody\u2019s minds, along with affordable housing, although our need is not as great as Toronto\u2019s, and I think most people would recognize that. We are still underserved in the area of affordable housing, so that is certainly something we wish to address at the Region. Infrastructure, particularly infrastructure related to water and wastewater was another.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it comes to transportation, there will be some significant issues that will need to be considered by all levels of government, particularly when Aurora is part of the first stage in Ontario\u2019s all-day two-way GO Train service and Rapid Express Rail.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe tone of the meeting was very receptive,\u201d says Mayor Dawe, noting he felt the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Environment were \u201cactually interested in working with municipalities.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey understand that municipalities are the substantial element of the population in Canada, there is an awareness of some of the imbalances in terms of infrastructure loading on the municipalities as well as the tax revenue that we get. From my perspective, and that of my colleagues, there is a definite perception that they want to work with municipalities and see how we fit this together.\u201d<\/p>\n

From Mayor Dawe\u2019s perspective, the biggest opportunity to come out of meetings like these is to \u201cengage\u201d senior members of government in the issues that matter at the local level. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t take the risk that they will know who you are,\u201d he says. \u201cYou have to get out there and make sure they know who you are. Like any other good relationship, you have to remind them why you\u2019re so special.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome people in public life are substantially different from what they are in private life and my impression of the Prime Minister is he is very similar. He is very comfortable with people and I find him to be a very charismatic person, quite frankly. I guess in that case the apple did not fall far from the tree.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

York Region’s mayors travelled to Ottawa last week for meetings, including one with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":13518,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/2016-03-03-05.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-3wz","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-03 23:17:59","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13551\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}