Kincardine Council is providing financial help to a doctor who is starting up a practice in town again after being absent for a few years.
Council has approved a Return to Service Agreement with Dr. Michael Emond who has decided to start practising at the medical clinic again after leaving six years ago to pursue further education.
Most recently, he has been working at the medical clinic Bruce Power operates for its employees.
Emond will serve at the Orphan Clinic— the branch of the medical centre that serves the six to seven thousand local patients who don’t have a regular family doctor.
Emond’s agreement with the clinic will last seven years, and the municipality will be providing him with 20 thousand dollars for each of the first four years to help him establish the practice.
Not all council members however are supportive of the idea.
A recorded vote was taken, and Councillors Guy Anderson, Gordon Campbell, and Randy Roppel voted against.
Anderson says he’s never supported incentives to doctors because they should not be a municipal responsibility.
He says he has no problem with council offering support to medical students, but thinks it is foolish for municipalities to offer financial incentives to doctors who have already been practising for years.
Council has also approved an incentive package with a medical student named Steven Poirier.
Mayor Larry Kraemer supports the incentive plan for Dr. Emond and says with thousands of orphan patients, existing doctors stretched to the limit, and money already invested in expanding the medical clinic, he questions if voting against the plan is really a good idea.
Kraemer says a no vote would be badly received by Kincardine’s doctors and Bruce Power, which is currently in the process of developing a way of helping doctor recruitment in Kincardine and Saugeen Shores.
Council has also approved a plan to secure long-term borrowing at a rate of 4.41 percent over 10 years for the expansion of the medical clinic.
Anderson says they need to get the financing as cheap as they can and he thinks the rate could have been a little cheaper, but it likely would have been at a floating rate, instead of a fixed one.