ALMAGUIN – Area council members may be flooded with relief as a contentious water bill gets washed away from the books at Queen’s Park.
The private member’s bill that had North Bay mayor Vic Fedeli, amongst others from Almaguin and other rural areas, set to “suit up and start lobbying,” has stopped dead at second reading, according to Minister of Inter-Governmental Affairs, Government House Leader and Nipissing MPP Monique Smith.
“It’s not going anywhere. It’s going to die on the order paper,” said Smith. “We are proroguing on Thursday.”
According to Smith, only four private members bills that were passed in a resolution last June, will be carried over to the new term of legislature after the three days of prorogation. The water bill put forward by Don Valley East MPP David Caplan is not one of them.
“There was never any intention of us moving forward with it,” she said. “It’s not a government bill.”
Fedeli told the News, in an interview last week, that the bill would take control of water and sewer infrastructure management away from municipalities and put them into the hands of a centralized board.
He said the bill had been discussed with the larger rural centres including Sudbury, Timmins and Thunder Bay and was to be put on their agenda again.
This is may no longer be necessary.
The proposal would have seen rural municipal water systems amalgamated with those of larger centres. It had been proposed and abandoned in 2005 and was returned by Caplan in December in the form of Bill 237.
Says Smith of the fate of the bill, “It just disappears.”