Headline News

County well-being plan lacks solutions, says Mono’s deputy mayor

July 3, 2025   ·   0 Comments

By JAMES MATTHEWS

Ensuring a quality life in a township is a group effort.

As such, Dufferin County has rolled out a Community Safety and Well-being Plan, a framework by which residents will be safe, healthy, connected, and have access to essential services.

Jennifer Payne is the executive director of Headwaters Communities in Action and co-chairperson of the integration table for community safety and wellbeing for the county. She walked Mono council through the plan during its June 24 meeting.

It’s a shared plan for all of the County of Dufferin that was approved by the upper-tier council in May.

“We have a very strong network of community partners who integrate and collaborate together on metrics related to community well-being,” Payne said.

The importance of working together to improve the overall quality of life for the people who call this county, its towns, and townships home has long been recognized.

The plan highlights how there are many aspects that go into making a community safe and thriving.

“The plan is strengths-based, risk-focused, and involved integrated efforts,” Payne said.

The priority areas for the safety and well-being plan are community safety (hence the name), housing and homelessness, mental health and well-being, family support, and food insecurity.

She said many issues are shared among communities.

The integration table will provide an annual report to council with an action plan for the following year. Those action plans will give an idea through outlines of things to come over the year.

Deputy Mayor Fred Nix said many details of the plan and its goal are “aspirational.”

“Not really hard, here’s what we’re going to do,” he said by way of illustration.

To address food insecurity, the plan indicates that there will be data collection, a work plan will be developed, and more meetings will be held. He said a good effort was devoted to the plan, but they still need “to hit the nail on the head.”

“Nowhere do I find in the plan to address food insecurity, do I find the real solutions,” Nix said.

He said he’s tabulated the various available social benefits and believes the total comes up short of meeting the cost of just rent for a disabled person in Orangeville. The minimum wage isn’t enough to live on.

“If I were writing a plan on how to deal with food insecurity, I’d go right to the source problem which is people don’t get enough income,” Nix said. “The main culprit here is the provincial government, although the federal government deserves some of the criticism also.”

Payne said the current plan is meant to be something of a broad look at the social issues affecting communities.

“So we can look broader than the incident response, which we know is happening day-to-day at the food banks and the people who are providing service delivery,” she said. “There is lots of action happening at the incident-response level. This is not reflecting everything that’s happening on the street.”

Readers Comments (0)