CALEB NICKERSON
CAMPBELL’S BAY Oct. 18, 2018
Pontiac Warden Jane Toller is looking for a fellow volunteer to take the lead on the Piscine Pontiac Pool committee.
“I am going to ask one of the members of our committee if they would become the president,” she said in a phone call to The Equity on Oct. 18. “I will still put a lot of energy into this, because I think it’s a very important project, but I don’t need to be called the president.”
“When we write the applications to the federal and provincial government, it’s not from me, it’s from the whole group, it’s from the people of the Pontiac, it’s from everybody,” she continued. “I think that from within our group there would be somebody that would be happy to have that title.”

The announcement came after the pool was brought up in a media scrum following the council of mayors meeting on Oct. 17.
There, she responded to The Equity’s editorial on Oct. 3, which questioned the optics of an elected warden and local business owner heading up a non-profit committee that would be seeking federal funding.
“No, I am very aware of conflict of interest. I’ve never once thought about the pool to help my business,” she said. “I have a manager [at the Spruceholme] … I’m not there. I’m not on the phone with them, they’re doing very well at managing themselves. The fact that the swimming pool would be in the same town, I can only see the benefit to the Pontiac, I would never think of the benefit to myself.”
On Oct. 17, she was non-committal about seeking a new president for the committee, but said in the followup phone call that she had given the idea some thought and reconsidered her position.
At the meeting, she also responded to criticism of the project’s location in Fort Coulonge, raised in a public letter by Campbell’s Bay councillor Jean-Pierre Landry. She said that there had been much work and research put into previous iterations of the project, which were based in Campbell’s Bay.
“This is why it’s been hardest for people in Campbell’s Bay, they had a plan in 2010 that it was going to be built in Campbell’s Bay,” Toller said. “[Landry] feels very passionately about all those studies and now he feels that [they’re] being wasted.”
She said she would be attending the next Campbell’s Bay council meeting to discuss the project further with local officials.
Toller spearheaded the newest drive for a pool when she asked for support in principal from MRC council in June 2017, prior to being elected warden. All 18 mayors agreed explicitly in their resolution that the project would be based in Fort Coulonge.
“How is it that 18 mayors unanimously supported that?” she said during the scrum on Oct. 17. “Nobody questioned the location. I don’t understand why it’s being questioned now … We have bought the land and it’s not helpful to our chances of getting federal and provincial funding if we have, what might be conceived as negativism.”
Toller said that the support petition for the project, launched earlier this year, has garnered approximately 2,500 signatures from all across the region.
She said that she will still lend her expertise to the committee, which is waiting to apply for government funding.
“With the election and the new provincial party in power, it has a bit of an impact on timing of when these funds will be available,” she explained.