The Warden of Essex County is calling the province's plan to invest $315-million for high-speed internet in rural communities and a major step forward.
Gary McNamara says the announcement was a pleasant surprise as the Western Ontario Wardens' Caucus has been asking for a financial boost to improve and expand internet for several years.
He says access to high-speed internet is a problem in many Windsor-Essex communities.
"It just reinforced how important it is that every citizen in the Province of Ontario should have access to high-speed broadband," says McNamara. "Even in my own community and parts of the county, a lot of our students are dependent on going to Tim Hortons to download their homework."
He says this will be a big help to the many farming operations that have gone high tech.
"These are highly innovative centres and when you look at how crops are grown and planted and so forth, the sophistication of the equipment, the computerization of farming, they need that high-speed broadband."
McNamara says this will help create jobs at the local level as well.
"We're actually seeing a lot of the private sector moving right now. We're got Bell and MNSi and as a matter of fact I had a meeting with Cogeco who are looking at branching out into the rural areas. So they know that there's a huge contribution coming from the upper levels of government."
The province expects the funding boost to generate up to $1-billion in total investments over the next five years resulting in new connections for up to 220,000 rural homes and businesses.