Chamber offers online forum to inform votersCarol Christian
Today staff
The Fort McMurray Chamber of Commerce has a message for the electorate: get out and vote.
With the municipal election only four days away, the chamber is reminding people about the importance of casting a ballot as well as providing information they need to get out and vote. That includes offering the 'talking stick' at mycommunitymyvoice.com where people can learn more about the candidates as well as hear and read their answers to questions put to them by a citizen panel.
"We at the chamber encourage everyone to get out and vote, but we caution you not to vote for a promise made on your doorstep," said Jon Tupper, chamber president. "Learn about the candidates, research the people that have put their name forward, and above all else, remember you elect a team, and each team member gets one vote around the council table including the mayor."
In the last municipal election three years ago, only 17% of eligible voters voted. Tupper stressed residents can and must do better as the future of the region depends on it. He pointed out that the municipal government is the level of government closest to people, impacting them the most, meaning they have a vested interest in getting out and voting. "We live in an open and free democracy, and it's everybody's choice to vote or not, however we strongly encourage people to exercise their democratic right. "We have one of the fastest growing regions not just in Alberta or Canada, but in the world, and there's a number of issues that we face right now and a number of issues that we will face over the next three years that we don't even know about yet."
That's why, he added, it's more important than ever to talk about plans and principles than it is about promises. Selecting the right people to govern the region based on the principle will allow this region to progress in a way that will result in an ongoing engagement between citizens and the region.
One of the outcomes of the My Community, My Voice project was asking people if they voted in elections and if not, why, explained Tupper. "They told us, overwhelmingly, that they didn't know about the issues, they didn't know about the candidates so we created the My Community My Voice group to inform the citizens to give them the information they asked us to have in order to make their decision."
Tupper said interested residents can go to the web-site, and, for example, watch the mayoral debates and watch interviews with the candidates and even read a question and answer session in text form.
"We encourage people to go and do that so when they come to vote on Monday they're making an informed decision," he added. The polls are open 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday. Residents can find their polling station at www.woodbuffalo.ab.ca.
Media release (Wednesday, December 2nd)
Fort McMurray- The Fort McMurray Chamber of Commerce sponsored community engagement initiative My Community My Voice, has reached a significant level of engagement by the citizens of the region.
“Since the launch of this initiative on October 28, 2009, we have heard from over 1,000 residents through the completion of our on-line and street level questionnaire,” said Kim Farwell, initiative spokesperson.
“The level of support for this initiative is an obvious sign that people who live in our community are passionate about where they live and concerned about the future growth for our region” added Farwell. “That is why this initiative, My Community My Voice, wants to hear from as many of our friends, neighbors and co-workers, to learn what you wish for to build a stronger place where we all call home.”
Ms. Farwell also commented “Thank you to the 1,000 concerned residents who took a few minutes to complete the questionnaire, and there is still time to hear from the rest of our community members.”
The My Community My Voice questionnaire is available to all citizens of the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo. The questionnaire will be available until December 31, 2009 through the website listed below.
A street level questionnaire is also being distributed by volunteers through Girls Inc. of Fort McMurray. All data collected through this community engagement initiative will be shared with citizens and stakeholders within the community as well as all levels of government.
Visit our website at www.mycommunitymyvoice.com.
The future of our community starts with the power of your voice.
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For more information, contact:
Ms. Kim Farwell, (780) 743-3100 (780) 743-3100
For a printer friendly .pdf version of this new release, click here.
Would you like to provide a comment? Click here and provide your name and phone number in the e-mail. Comments will be posted following review.
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News story
Don't turn up the heat on the West By making Western provinces pay for adventures in global warming policy we will be playing with ConfederationRex Murphy, Globe and Mail
Friday, Oct. 30, 2009
An article on The Globe's front page carrying the headline “Canada can meet its climate goals, but the West will write the cheques” raises, among many others, two very interesting points. The article is about a study, conducted by two ardent environmental advocacy groups – the Pembina Institute and the David Suzuki Foundation – and was sponsored by the Toronto Dominion Bank.
The headline has the virtue of capturing the first point I want to underline. In our new green-genuflecting age any substantial, purely Canadian effort to curb greenhouse gases – any policy, economic or otherwise – will have a massive and negative impact on Alberta and Saskatchewan.
If there are taxes on oil development, if we introduce carbon penalties on industry, if there is a deliberate brake put on the oil sands, or an effort to shut them down altogether – this latter not an unthinkable proposition in certain quarters – whatever is done will, sooner or later, take revenues and jobs, take enterprise, out of Alberta in particular. For purely projected and speculative benefits to the world's climate a century hence – and, despite the unctuous insistence of many to the contrary, speculative they remain – people are seriously considering policies that will penalize the West for its success as an energy producer now.
This is reckless. The oil industry of some Western provinces has been Canada's dynamo these past few years. It has been our major shield during this recession. It has given the dignity of jobs to tens of thousands of Canadians. It is all that. But if “Central” Canada, as the political and economic axis of Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal is still known in some quarters out West, now – under the impetus of the green craze – is seen to be setting limits, placing penalties, or bleeding disproportionate taxes, particularly in Alberta's case, it will churn a backlash that will make regional hostilities set loose by the national energy program a few decades ago seem like warm-ups for a yoga class.
It will shape a whirlwind of political discontent, set the West against East, and far from incidentally have deep repercussions in the many other provinces that have their citizens working in one capacity or another in the oil patch. The fury over the national energy program may be spent, but its memory – pardon the word – is green. That fury, I reiterate, will be as nothing compared with the political fury of a second attempt to “stall the West.” Should some global warming action plan attempt to put the oil sands and Western energy development at significant disadvantage, or draw taxes out of the economies of the Western provinces to pay for adventures in global warming policy, we will be playing with Confederation.
That is a prediction it takes no computer modelling to make. If Alberta in particular, and the Western provinces more generally, come to be portrayed as villains in the global warming morality play, more than the climate a century hence is at stake.
Secondly, I would urge a caution to all people working in the oil sands in particular. The TD study – farmed out to the economic specialists of the David Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina Institute – should be seen as a loud, low shot across the bow. The oil sands project, already castigated by every green-blooded organization on the planet, featured in a full-blown National Geographic hit-job some months back, is going to be the great emblem of a world “toxifying” itself, and paving the way for global warming Armageddon. It is now boilerplate in news stories as the “dirtiest project on the planet.” It photographs vividly – as National Geographic's glossy toss-off demonstrates – because of its scale and makes for wonderful anti-energy posters. The oil sands are a target.
Environmentalists are very good at what they do. They play the news media better than Glenn Gould doing a Bach prelude. They know how to sell their point of view, how to build a villain, how to shortcut an argument. Big Green – and there is a Big Green as much as there is a Big Oil – knows the game. Find a symbol. Find one project that, superficially, can stand for all others. The oil sands, despite the hundreds or thousands of less scrupulous and governed energy projects all over the world, despite China's spectacular use of coal, or the accelerated developments all over the Third World, will be the emblem of choice for the eco-warriors. The media-smart apostles of Al Gore, the Sierra Club and hundreds of other NGOs and eco-lobbies will turn the oil sands into the blight of our time.
It's only a number of weeks ago, remember, that the great crisis in the auto industry called forth billions to rescue the great manufacturing base of Central Canada. The West will note the contradiction. Spend billions to save an industry that runs on petroleum – it's here in Ontario – hit the source industry to “save the planet” – that's in the West.
Pursue this course and things will get warm. And I'm not talking about the climate.
Rex Murphy is a commentator with The National and host of CBC Radio's Cross-Country Checkup.
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News story
Chamber launches quiz to get to bottom of community needs
CAROL CHRISTIAN, Ft. McMurray Today
October 29, 2009
Do you want to affect change or be affected by change?
If you want to affect change in town and enhance the quality of life, get involved.
That was the message yesterday as the My Community My Voice initiative was launched by the Chamber of Commerce. The first step of this venture is a community engagement initiative questionnaire coupled with the launch of the initiative's dedicated website — www.mycommunitymyvoice.com — officially up and running last night.
Though the program is a chamber-sponsored initiative, Kim Farwell, who sits on the chamber's board of directors, said it "belongs to all of us as the community. ... we're kicking off a dialogue with all of you about the future of this community, what we need and how we're going to improve our quality of life."
The first step in this dialogue is the questionnaire, available online. And to ensure it gets to everyone, "we're also going to take it to the street," Farwell said. "We're going to go door to door. We're going to be in the malls. We're going to be talking to the businesses.
"What we're asking for is the opening up of a conversation with our community so that we can understand what it is we need to make Fort McMurray and Wood Buffalo a place we truly want to work and live, have our children live and our future here."
Girls Inc. will be assisting "on the floor" taking the questionnaire through all sectors of the community.
The anonymous questionnaire is comprised of six sections, covering provincial and regional government, voting behaviour, private sector services, quality of life, future intentions and demographic information. The questions — numbering 27 in total — cover such topics as the region's low voter turnout by asking if the respondents voted in the last election and why not. A list of four possible answers are provided alongside the option to provide another reason.
Questions were determined with chamber member and sponsor input as well as other "expert advice."
She described the questions as quick and simple, and quite straightforward in providing the accurate information being sought.
Farwell admitted there is some expectation the information gleaned from the survey will help address the region's poor voter turnout — one of the worst in the country at under 30%.
The chamber expects to have all the information gathered by the spring. The information is to be shared back with the community — with the assistance of Keyano College — through local media and the website. The information will also be shared with various agencies in the community and all levels of government to help create the changes that need to happen to make this the community everyone wants it to be.
After sharing of information, some changes will happen quickly because there will be some easy-to-accomplish goals an association can work on.
"Where we need to build things — we understand we need more commercial space — that isn't going to happen in a short time frame because we're waiting on the creation of Parsons Creek and Saline Creek to create more space in the community," she said. "How we create those new communities within Wood Buffalo is going to be directed to some extent by what we're learning out of the questionnaire."
It's possible some results won't be visible for 10 years.
"Some of it, I'm hoping we see the results by the summer," Farwell said.
"This is just the beginning of the conversation. This is not a survey. It's a questionnaire. … This is where we're going to start to understand all of the different perspectives and the interests and the issues we have in the community…
"As the information comes back in, it's going to tell us very clearly where the opportunities are, find our low hanging fruit, and go out there and deliver this information to the organizations that can make a difference, including our governments at the municipal, provincial and federal levels, who have all asked at different times, 'What should we be doing?'
"And the answers aren't there, compiled, and set up and delivered to these groups. That's what we're intending to do."
A growing recognition that changes needs to happen is how Farwell described the timing of this initiative. Though several similar initiatives have been conducted over the years, there hasn't been any notable positive results that have come back to residents and explained how their input helped change the community.
"To keep the community engaged we need to bring the community in, bring all of you in, get your information then keep telling you what's happening and update you along the way and say these are the partners we're bringing in; this is how we are progressing this information through."
The community has changed a lot over recent years, evolving from a small, industrial based community to a cosmopolitan, culturally diverse community with younger demographics with varied interests and looking for different recreation choices. As such, Farwell pointed out it raises questions about how to address those changing needs and interests, and how to provide different services for a changing mix of people.
"The goal is to fill those gaps but to do it in a manner that meets our needs and our needs in the right priorities so we need to figure out what those are."
Farwell said this initiative will be successful where others haven't because "this is a full community engagement. It's not just any special group of people, and we're going to be continuing to pass the information back and continuing to engage people in the changes and the work that is on the go."
"We're going to engage the right people in the community to make the changes we see we need to make."
The long-term commitment of at least 10 years is one reason this will be successful, she said. Another reason is because this is a community initiative, the community will be accountable for making it happen.
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News story
Fort McMurray Chamber of Commerce Undertakes New Approach to Community Engagement
BY BECKY ROWE for Connect
October 30 to November 5, 2009
editorial@macmedia.ca
Fort McMurray’s problems are legendary. The community’s positives are often overlooked in favour of focusing on the negative aspects of life in Wood Buffalo: gridlocked traffic, high cost of housing, the lack of activities and resources. It’s easy enough to complain, but so often it seems like the community’s voice falls on deaf ears. The Chamber of Commerce seeks to change this in a new community engagement initiative they’re calling “My Community, My Voice.”
Kim Farwell is a member of the Chamber of Commerce and the spokesperson for the new initiative. She says that, while community engagement has happened in Fort McMurray in the past, there was often a lack of follow-up which resulted in frustration.
“We’ve had lots of initiatives, but I don’t know if we’ve really engaged the community,” she says. “We’ve had people put their ideas into a hat, but there’s been no plan to do anything about them. We haven’t been engaging everyone, we haven’t been understanding all the sectors of the community and how to make a difference.”
The region has undergone explosive growth and almost constant change in the past several years, changing almost overnight from a moderately-sized community with a small-town attitude to the bustling city of more than 100,000 people that exists today. The ups and downs of the global economic situation have hit Fort McMurray hard, which is why Farwell says that now is the ideal time to find out from the community what the issues are.
“We recognize that Fort McMurray and the whole region of Wood Buffalo has changed and is changing. The demographic has changed – we see baby boomers retiring and more young people coming in. Our outlying communities, which are largely Aboriginal-based, are trying to find a balance between tradition and capitalizing on growth. We’ve become a very cosmopolitan and multicultural community, with some people very well-off and some who aren’t, and we haven’t tapped into the breadth of that,” she says.
The focus of the initiative is to find out what the biggest quality-of-life issues are, from the people who live and work in Fort McMurray. Farwell says the Chamber’s plan is to engage people on all levels and with a variety of tools, from the use of social media like Facebook and mymcmurray.com to approaching people on the streets.
“We see it as a conversation that we’ll have with the community, where we’re actively seeking out the information we’re looking for. We want to find out what people’s real feelings are on the quality of life here in Wood Buffalo, and whether their needs are being met. That’s step one,” Farwell explains.
Step two involves getting the word out. After the information is gathered, Farwell says the project focuses on reporting back to the community on what has been discovered in order to effect real change. “Of course I’d like to hear that everyone’s needs are being met, but that’s not what I suspect we’re going to find,” Farwell says. “We need to read back the information and transmit it to the people who can make changes.”
Farwell says this step is where other initiatives have fallen short in the past. “It so often happens that we say what we want, but then we back away. We don’t follow up, we don’t hold the people in charge accountable, and then we complain that nothing happened,” she says.
Many of the well-known issues affecting Fort McMurray will be discussed, Farwell says. “I suspect we’re going to hear from younger people that there’s not enough to do. I suspect we’re going to hear that we need more support for women, like women’s shelters. We’ll hear that it’s too expensive, that there’s a lack of commercial space, and not just from business owners but from people who want more unique shopping available,” she says.
But the Chamber hopes to uncover other issues from sectors of the society whose voices aren’t always heard. “We know what some of the issues are, but what if we miss some? If you asked me if snow removal in the city was a problem, I’d say no, because I’ve learned to adapt, I’ve got a four-wheel drive vehicle. But if I’d just moved here from southern Alberta in a small car, and trading it in for a fourwheel drive vehicle wasn’t an option, snow removal might be a real concern,” she says.
The hope is that, with increased community engagement, a stronger sense of community will emerge. “We know Fort McMurray has a reputation for being a commuter town, but we do have a lot of people who live here and call this place home. Quality of life is important to the whole community and we all need to take a role in improving it.”
Voter turnout in elections, particularly municipal elections, has always been a problem in Fort McMurray, something many critics say points to the lack of sense of community. The Chamber hopes to use increased voter turnout as a benchmark for the success of the initiative.
“If you’re not involved, you have no influence and no ownership,” she says. “The only way we’re going to change anything is by getting involved.”
For more information on “My Community, My Voice,” visit the Chamber’s website at www.fortmcmurraychamber. ca. The project [also has its own website, mycommunitymyvoice.com.]
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Media Release
Citizens and stakeholders seek positive community growth
For immediate release: 11:00 a.m., Wednesday October 28, 2009
Fort McMurray- The Fort McMurray Chamber of Commerce is sponsoring a community engagement initiative to assess the satisfaction of Wood Buffalo residents with their quality-of-life and to see how we, the citizens, can collectively improve it.
“We constantly hear from people in our community who say they have been talking about the same things over and over but no one seems to be listening,” said Kim Farwell, initiative spokesperson.
“Chamber members are not just businesses,” added Ms Farwell. “We are employers, community volunteers, charity sponsors, and your friends and neighbours – and we want to hear from you, our friends and neighbors, to learn what you wish for the home we share.”
Wood Buffalo has weathered explosive growth over the past decade. The scarcity of land and high cost of living has inhibited the launch of new businesses – retail outlets, health and beauty services, restaurants, and other small businesses – to keep pace with population growth.
The release of two large land parcels will present the opportunity to create much needed residential neighborhoods, commercial and light industrial properties.
Building a sustainable community requires people to share their ideas for the future. We encourage all citizens to link arms and map out a better future for our children, and our children’s children. We are reaching out, on the street, in your mailbox, on the web. You will hear from us as we move along and probably hear some familiar stories and requests for change that you have shared with friends and neighbors over the years. But we need to hear every voice we can.
Starting with an on-line questionnaire and street level consultations with the citizens of Wood Buffalo, informed participation will vastly improve community development.
All data collected through this community engagement initiative will be shared with citizens and stakeholders within the community as well as all levels of Government.
Visit our website at www.mycommunitymyvoice.com.
The future of our community starts with the power of your voice.
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For more information, contact:
Ms. Kim Farwell, (780) 743-3100 (780) 743-3100
For a printer friendly .pdf version of this new release, click here.
Would you like to provide a comment? Click here and provide your name and phone number in the e-mail. Comments will be posted following review.
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Government of Alberta's "Radke report" and growth funding
In 2007, the Government of Alberta accepted a report called Investing in Our Future, better known as the "Radke report," that was intended to provide a realistic growth forecast for the Wood Buffalo region and to identify current and anticipated gaps in core provincial government services as a consequence of rapid growth. The report is available in its entirety by clicking here.
Since then, the Province has committed $2.25 billion to projects in Wood Buffalo, including the new bridge over the Athabasca, transportation improvements, three new schools, etc.
Project | Amount |
| New Athabasca bridge | $ 155 million |
| New high school (Catholic school division), Fort McMurray | 55.8 million |
| Ecole McTavis (public school division), Fort McMurray | 49 million |
| Anzac School | 18.3 million |
| Highway 63 twinning and upgrade projects | 600 million |
| Keyano Sport and Wellness Centre | 33.4 million |
| Cost-of-living-allowance for public sector employees | 33.2 million |
| Affordable housing, Wood Buffalo Housing and Development Corporation | 54 million |
| Health funding increase including three new clinics | 206.4 million |
| Water treatment plant upgrade | 103 million |
| Highway 881 widening and paving | 118 million |
| Phase 1 new RCMP detachment, Timberlea site | 52 million |
| Radke report response: includes Thickwood and Confederation interchanges, long-term care facility, lower townsite water collection upgrade, regional landfill development, temporary holding cells, child care centre construction and hospital expansion | 420 million |
| Community Development Plan for North Parsons Creek | 95 million |
| South cellblock and new RCMP station | 10 million |
| Archie Simpson Arena, Fort Chipewyan | 1 million |
| North Parsons Creek and Saline Creek Plateau off-site infrastructure | 241 million |
TOTAL | $ 2,246.8 million |
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My Community, My Voice is interested in whether or not people know about the provincial investment and whether or not they think it is sufficient. Take our questionnaire to share your opinion by clicking here.
Stay tuned for more information about the My Community, My Voice community engagement initiative, which will be posted right here.
The growth of our community starts with the power of your voice...and your vote!
Media Release
Community members voice concerns for future growth
For immediate release: 6:00 a.m., Wednesday December 2, 2009 