Service Ontario office closure angers residents
Town urged to fight for a governmentrun Service Ontario office
About 100 residents attended a standing-room-only meeting Saturday in Belle River to voice their concern over the closure last month of the town’s Service Ontario office.
The office was privately operated and when its owner fell ill and closed the office, the town’s residents had nowhere nearby to go and renew their driver’s licences or obtain health cards.
The closest alternative locations for those in the Lakeshore are in Tecumseh or Tilbury.
Residents at the meeting, held at the St. Simon-St. Jude Hall, demanded that the service be returned in Belle River and operated with public sector employees so there would be no repeat of a privately operated Service Ontario location in town closing again.
The province has already advertised to find another private operator for the town’s Service Ontario office, located just off Notre Dame Street, said Jordan McGrail, a member of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union and organizer for its We Own It campaign, which lobbies against the outsourcing of public services in the province.
“Citizens of Belle River deserve to have these services,” she said. “They pay taxes and are owed this. We are gathering residents today so they can start lobbying and so they don’t have to travel up to an hour to get the same services.
“They are putting out applications to run this privately again and we want to stop that from happening.
“There are 34,000 residents in Lakeshore who rely on this service and they shouldn’t have to go out of town to get this whenever it closes again.”
Local MPP Taras Natyshak (NDP — Essex) attended the meeting. He criticized the government for increasingly outsourcing services that taxpayers have funded and deserve to have uninterrupted.
“This should be publicly run so such problems don’t happen,” he said.
But Natyshak said it will remain up to the residents whether they can achieve getting their Service Ontario office reopened in town and staffed uninterrupted by public sector employees.
“You have to fight for this,” he said. “Your task now is to get out there and fight for what you want.”