Enhancing Emergency Management in Rural Northern Ontario: Learning from COVID-19

by Bob Montgomery

Next Tuesday's virtual lecture presentation from the Gateway Centre of Excellence in Rural Health will focus on enhancing emergency management in rural northern Ontario.

The guest speaker is Amanda Mongeon and she’ll be talking about some of the research she has being doing as part of her PhD at the University of Guelph in their Rural Studies program. She works in local public health in northern Ontario so her research is looking at how some of the rural and smaller communities in northern Ontario made it through COVID and what we can learn from their experience.

Mongeon says her message isn't limited to infectious diseases, it could be climate change related emergencies or all kinds of things. “We use the phrase emergency management, which is sort of the whole field that looks at preventing emergencies from happening, how do we mitigate the risks of an emergency. We often spend a lot of time looking at how do we respond to emergencies, but maybe there's more that we can learn about those other phases, like who has a role to play in helping these small communities.”

Mongeon says one thing she has learned is that COVID showed differently for the smaller municipalities. It wasn't the same in Toronto as it was in smaller towns and when you get into northern Ontario there's sort of an added layer about how it was different. She wanted to have a chance to reflect the voices of some of the small communities in the north and things they can do in the future to help them in a way that makes sense to them. She says they found that a lot of the policies made during COVID, a lot of the direction came from Toronto and it may not have felt that it applied all that much to some of the smaller communities and that shapes their experience too.

Mongeon says if people had mental issues, or were unemployed or didn't have a good social network going into an emergency, they're likely to feel the impact of an emergency more than someone who wasn't already dealing with those issues. “So there are things we can do that maybe lessen the impact of these things. So that's a little bit of what I'm hoping to talk about next week.”

This lecture will take place on Tuesday, February 6th from 12:00pm until 1:00pm via Zoom. The link to join the lecture can be found here on the Gateway Centre of Excellence in Rural Health website.