CORNWALL, Ontario – The first Breakfast Connections of 2017 took place at the Ramada Inn on Wednesday, Jan. 18.
Breakfast Connections is a monthly lecture series that runs from January to June and from September to December at the Ramada Inn. Local politicians are typically the first in the series every year.
This year saw the Mayors of Cornwall, South Stormont, South and North Glengarry address the audience along with local MPP Jim McDonell and the Grand Cheif of Akwesasne Abraham Benedict.
Mayor of South Dundas Evonne Delegarde was invited to attend but was not able to make it.
Each leader was given five minutes to address the crowd and the presentations were followed by 15 minutes of questions from the audience.
One question made to the panel came from Kelly Bergeron the founder of Code Heroes.
"What kinds of efforts are being made to attract tech companies to the area," she asked.
Mayor Leslie O’Shaughnessy was the one who fielded that question.
"One way is to make sure that we are welcoming to business," he said. "We’ve heard from Jim McDonell this morning that we are losing jobs all the time and that the province is facing high electricity costs. We in Cornwall have one of the lost electrical costs in the province which was attractive to our distribution centres. In cities like Ottawa and Toronto the buzzword is innovation. We are in talks with Carleton University to offer some courses at the NAV Centre here in Cornwall. Its a chicken and the egg problem. These institutions are looking for existing infrastructure. I can say that there is good new and its coming. Its not my thunder so its not for me to say, but its been two-to-three years in the making."
