Nipissing University and Canadore College will receive more than $2.5 million in provincial funding for campus improvements.

Part of a provincewide announcement Tuesday of $200 million for Ontario’s colleges and universities, the money will be used to make facilities more energy efficient, improve campus safety and fix aging classrooms, labs and libraries.

Some $75 million will be spent in the Greater Toronto Area while the rest will be doled out to institutions across Ontario.

Nipissing will receive more than $1.4 million and Canadore will get more than $1 million.

Additional details about how the money will be spent locally are expected to be discussed today when John Milloy, the province’s minister of training, colleges and universities, joins Nipissing MPP Monique Smith for another announcement at the Education Centre.

While critics called the cash a “drop in the bucket,” Milloy said the money is just the beginning of help for the province’s aging institutions.

“This is an ongoing story. We’re going to continue to work with the sector to make sure that their needs are addressed,” Milloy said following the announcement at George Brown College in Toronto.

“This is a very, very important step — $200 million is a significant amount of money and it’s going to go a long way to improving facilities across the province.”

The cash, announced in the fall economic statement, comes after Ontario’s auditor general said universities need some

$1.6 billion to fix crumbling facilities which are nearing the end of their lifetime and have suffered after years of deferred maintenance.

David Naylor, president of the University of Toronto, said the long list of necessary repairs, which includes improvements to sewer pipes, aren’t glamorous ones, but are vital to a campus where some of the buildings are more than
100 years old.

“No one is going to get up and make a high-profile announcement about the diameter of the stack running into the sewer system,” said Naylor.

“But you get that wrong and you’ve got a rather large problem,” Naylor said. “Most of the funding here will go to things that are unobtrusive but that actually let us get on with doing work to make life better on campus that otherwise would be tough to fund.”

Paul Genest, president of the Council of Ontario Universities, pleaded the case for more money Monday before a legislative pre-budget committee. The cash announced Tuesday doesn’t come close to $1.6 billion, but it’s five times what universities normally get each year for repairs and maintenance, he said.

Conservative Jim Wilson said Tuesday’s announcement is just part of a “patchwork effort” to address the real concerns expressed by Ontario colleges and universities.