Mayor aims to create collaboration between city, industry, schools.

• Author: Wareing, Andrew
• Position: Sudbury Report

Economic development in the City of Greater Sudbury is a collaborative effort encompassing the city and a number of industry and post-secondary partners, says the city's new mayor.

Mayor David Courtemanche, 39, is a six-year veteran of council and won a tidy majority of votes on Nov. 10 on a platform of economic development and growth.

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Since taking office, Courtemanche says he has been making a point to meet with business, industry and education leaders of Sudbury to discuss the future, and he foresees a need be to more collaborative with those leaders.

"If you're going to attract and empower those business and industry individuals who are going to be in a position to make an investment in the community, we have to ask ourselves "How can we work with these people and groups in an environment of collaboration?"" he says.

"I believe there is a perception of a political agenda that gets in the way of engaging other sectors," Courtemanche says. "We have a talented and skilled workforce in the economic development department that needs to feel empowered to engage those sectors without feeling held back by that perceived political agenda. I see my role as helping to do that."

Courtemanche says the city's previous council set up a strategic plan for the community, but the work now is to implement that plan while bringing in as many people with a stake in seeing it implemented successfully as possible. It is also important to look at Sudbury's economic development in the broader context of Northern Ontario's economic growth and development.

City of Greater Sudbury general manager of economic development and planning services, Doug Nadorozny, says the new administration's emphasis on economic development will not mean new programs per se. It will, however, result in a "heightened emphasis" on economic development policy and procedure.

"We're up to the challenge of whatever the mayor and council put to us," Nadorozny says.

"It's nothing that hasn't happened in the past, but we can get a lot better at what we've been doing," adds business development manager Helen Mulc. "There's always room for improvement and we need to look at what possibilities there are out there.

"It's about a community's pride in itself and the capabilities Sudbury of the future will have," she says. One of the first moves was to shift control over the city's airport from the citizen and leisure services department to the planning and economic development...