NOMA 2026 opens with focus on road safety, industry support
Representatives from municipalities across the region descended on Thunder Bay on Wednesday for the Northwestern Ontario Municipal Association’s (NOMA) annual conference in Thunder Bay.
With the economic uncertainty of trade wars and oil shortages and a dangerous year for winter roads on the minds of many in the northwest, the conference has centred “resilience” as the theme of 2026.
“It’s about us northerners being resilient,” says NOMA president and Mayor of Marathon Rick Dumas. “We’ve lived through all of the experiences you can imagine.”
Dumas sees echoes of the 2008 recession and its aftermath in the current experience of northern communities.
“We’re recycling that whole process now, looking at how we reinvent ourselves with the forestry sector, the mineral sector, and of course the highway sector,” he explains.
Highway safety was ever-present in conversations and speeches of the event, as only a day earlier provincial parties across the political spectrum in Ontario unanimously passed an NDP motion to recognize Highways 11 and 17 as routes of national importance.
Ontario’s governing Progressive Conservative (PC) party made northern roads a key focus in a speech given by Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria, who touted the province’s $650 million budget for northern road improvements.
The minister drew attention to efforts to speed up the “twinning” of the 11-17, which has advanced at a glacial pace for decades.
“We put in legislation now and work towards minimizing environmental assessments, working with communities across Northern Ontario to accelerate it,” says Sarkaria.
The Ontario PC’s have recently put out the call to the federal government to partner on the twinning of northern roads.
“It’s a huge project, and everybody’s going to be at the same table because at the end of the day, everybody wants the same thing: the best possible highways across the north for everybody to use,” says Minister of Northern Economic Development and Growth George Pirie, who attended the event alongside Minister Sarkaria.
Rick Dumas believes completing the twinning of the highway is simply a matter of money and will.
He points to the American administration of president Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950’s, who facilitated the construction of the interstate highway system across the United States in just a decade.
“If they can do it, we can do it,” says Dumas.
Representatives of the provincial opposition’s New Democratic Party (NDP) were also present at the event.
Ontario NDP leader Marit Stiles used her speaking time to appeal to the municipal leaders in the room to work with her party, arguing that the PC’s were failing to deliver, despite the occasional success at working across party lines with the opposition.
“Municipalities are overwhelmed, they’re overburdened, and they shouldn’t have to be hiring Bay Street lobbyists or turning themselves inside out to convince the government that they matter,” says Stiles.
Stiles suggests that municipalities are feeling a financial crunch due to provincial tax cuts.
“When Doug Ford says ‘I’ve never raised a single tax,’ well, he’s lying because he’s just downloaded that onto towns,” says the ONDP leader. “Communities who’ve had to raise taxes because his government isn’t at the table.”
NOMA’s 2026 conference is slated to continue on Thursday and Friday.
