With the great changes happening in the fossil fuel industry, Sarnia's mayor says it's time the community has a discussion and debate about the future of the sector.
At Monday's council meeting, Mike Bradley will ask staff to prepare a report in the new year on holding a community summit in the first quarter in 2022.
He said we need to be proactive.
"We can either lead the changes coming or we can just react to them," said Bradley. "I prefer we lead as a community but we need to come together and have that discussion so that there's support there. That's what happened during the past few summits that we had, going back to 2004, we built a community base that said 'yeah this is where we want to go and this is what we want to do'. That makes it a lot easier to lead knowing the community support is there."
Bradley says the City of Sarnia would lead the summit with partnerships with the County of Lambton, First Nations, Western Sarnia-Lambton Research Park, Lambton College, Bioindustrial Innovation Canada (BIC), Sarnia Lambton Economic Partnership (SLEP) and other groups.
He says the last summit, held in 2004 at Lambton College, was a huge success.