Mayor pulls no punches in criticizing decision.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: Thunder Bay mayor Ken Boshcoff

The unified front of northern mayors that successfully lobbied for a 'made-in-the-North' medical school developed some rifts in the alliance last month after Ontario Health Minister Tony Clement named Sudbury as the primary location for its central administrative and research role.

"Thunder Bay is a huge loser and Sudbury is a huge winner," was how Thunder Bay mayor Ken Boshcoff summed up his community's response to receiving a satellite clinical education campus.

Boshcoff says the format is "dramatically different" from the two-campus medical school model unanimously supported by the northern mayors, municipal associations, medical community and chambers of commerce for the past two years.

"The unity across the North was as strong as any issue has ever been. To essentially bribe Sudbury at Thunder Bay's expense will essentially divide the North," Boshcoff says.

He suspects any residual economic spinoffs derived from the medical school will likely stay in Sudbury and that the concept itself offers little in the way of added incentives for medical students to set up practice in his city.

"We had great dreams and aspirations of what a school could do in terms of economic development, research facilities and alleviating the shortage of physicians," Boshcoff says. "The news comes at a time when we're facing huge physician shortages."

The medical school will begin admitting 55 undergraduates in 2004 with 20 of those students heading to Lakehead University to finish their two years of clinical training in 2006. The rest remain at Laurentian University in Sudbury to complete their education.

Clement cited Laurentian's large capacity, along with its larger pool of doctors available to act as instructors.

Boshcoff says under their current arrangements, medical students from Queen's and McMaster University arrive in Thunder Bay to complete their third and fourth years of clinical training. The twenty placements, he says, deliver less than the average number of students already arriving from down south.

"If you're not going to have doctors trained here, then you're back to less than a model that we have now," Boshcoff says.

Boshcoff plans to rally community leaders to prepare a concerted lobbying effort to convince the province to rework the format back to the two-campus model.

"We don't want to fight Sudbury, that's the reason we united...we're hoping they will reject this bribe."

Jim Gordon, mayor of the City of Greater Sudbury, was understandably...