I grew up in High Prairie and have lived here for most of my life. We welcomed our first baby to our family last year, and it is cause to reflect on what the future holds. While I do love my town, when I think of communities that I’d feel great about raising a family in, High Prairie just isn’t my first choice. But there is plenty of potential to unlock, I’m running for council because I want to see change. 

​

The Municipal government act defines the duties of councilors and of the municipality. It’s of my opinion that our current government is not fulfilling those duties. A combination of large egos, chips on shoulders, and what I can only see as a laziness, has combined to create a council that is simply not functional in the performance of their duties. I cannot believe the time wasted on drama and meaningless arguments when we have so many critical issues that are not being properly addressed.

​

I think a large portion of the community agrees with me about needing change, given that we have nearly twice as many candidates running today than we did in the 2021 election. (18 up from 10!) I’m really impressed and proud that we have people in our community that are willing to stand up and fight for the change that we all want to see.

A few of the changes I feel are needed: 

A Duty to Provide Good Government. 

To me, a core component of that is honest and open leadership. The existing council makes far too many decisions without clear communication. That’s not how local government is supposed to work. People deserve to know what’s going on, and why decisions are made. At a minimum, that means written reports that can easily be reviewed, instead of verbal reports that require sifting through hours of video footage. It also means “council recaps” that go into more detail than the meeting minutes, and posting them to the website, Facebook, and anywhere else where people get their information, inviting the community to share their feedback on upcoming decisions.

​

Also, High Prairie is a small town, everyone knows everyone, and rumors spread quick. We know council is hearing these same rumors and there is zero reason for council to avoid putting out a statement, good or bad, to put the rumor mills to rest. Personally, I am more than happy to share bad news, everyone deserves to hear it. The hospital land for example, that was nearly a year long fight asking the council to tell the community what happened. That year long fight shouldn’t have been needed. Council should have released a statement on day one.

 

A Duty to Work Collaboratively with our Neighbours.

Which we do well with when it comes to the county office… but not with other communities. We need to be making a stronger effort to include our neighbours in our decision process. We should be inviting Chiefs and leaders from surrounding communities to council meetings to pool resources, share ideas, and discuss ways we can help each other.  People are quick to forget, but a large reason we have the new hospital is because of this collaboration, Peavine donated that land. 

​

High Prairie only has a population of 2500 people, but we are an economic hub for 9000+ people, if we want to continue to be that economic hub, Sucker Creek, Driftpile, East Prairie, Gift Lake, Whitefish, Peavine, Swan River, Kapawe’no, McLennan, Falher, and everyone else, all deserve to have their input heard, and our resources pooled. We have so much trust to rebuild after the Treaty 8 debacle, and I don’t see us making much progress today.
 

Fiscal Responsibility.

We need to start managing our town’s finances wisely and with full transparency. That means budgets that are clear, detailed, and driven by long term value, not short term optics.

​

In 2025, the town budgeted to spend $1.54 million more than it will bring in, that’s a budget shortfall that shouldn’t be ignored. Fancy government accounting says you’re not allowed to call it a deficit, but common sense says that when you spend more than you bring in, it’s a deficit. Don't get me wrong, some spending is justified, we need running water and smooth roads... but at the same time, two brand-new parks were opened this year, an election year, with council currently voting to explore a third, and in the weeks leading up to this election Council is voting on increasing compensation for town staff. You can’t help but wonder why these feel good projects all happened leading up to an election instead of spreading them all out over previous years when we had budget surpluses. I think for many of us, it sort of feels like council trying to buy votes with taxpayer money.

​

The community wants to hear about smart spending. But when High Prairie releases the budget, they release the minimum required to comply with provincial law. 1.07m budgeted for supplies and materials. 369k for business and training. 608k for professional services, 182k to "other"... You don't see just how poor of a job the town does until you compare us to other communities. Other communities break down those line items, they show what services and programs that money pays for,  and they include statistics and information about staff levels and activities. Department heads present their portion of the budget to council, instead of the CAO. 

​

I also want to bring up the museum. The town put out a survey, the options were to spend a lot or spend a lot more. Speaking to residents, you know what many say they want? To spend nothing, but the town didn’t give voters that option, it was a biased survey structured to come to one conclusion: spend. I think that had residents been given the option, the popular vote could have been to close the museum, move exhibits to the library, and/or the sport palace, and/or the Grouard museum. Visitor counts, excluding field trips, are next to 0. It probably does not make sense to spend 6 figures to maintain that. And the visitor centre, I see no reason the visitor center can’t be the town office.  It's hard to argue a need to maintain a seperate building. I don't know what the solution to this particular problem is, but I do know that if you’re going to ask residents about how they want their town ran, (which we should do more of) these surveys need to be unbiased, offering people the ability to vote on all options, not just the options council prefers.

​

Foster Economic Growth.

We all know our history, previous councils years ago blocked the development of new business and stunted growth in High Prairie. We’ve since made some positive steps forward, council removing themselves from the development approval process, but we still have further to go.

 

It has only been in the past couple months that council has really started to take an active role in encouraging new development in High Prairie, and we need to be doing much more of that. Even today I’m hearing from home builders who don’t want to build homes in High Prairie because development costs are still too high. One of many things we should be doing is offering incentives, anything that convinces someone to open a business, build a home, or build an apartment building in town, whatever that inventive looks like (as long as it's profitable for the town), it’s a small upfront investment and it means we get to collect taxes and utility fees for the next 50 years. It’s a net benefit in the long term.

​

And the same incentives can be offered to existing businesses that want to clean up their property or expand. I spoke to one business owner recently who said he would never renovate his building because he doesn’t want is property tax to go up. Well what if we locked in his assessment for 5 years. He continues to pay todays tax rate, which the town would have collected anyway, and on year 6 the town gets to collect more taxes than they would have otherwise. It doesn't cost the town a penny. It’s a win win.

 

Would you rather collect $500/y from an empty lot, or invest a little bit into some form of incentive to encourage growth, and collect $5000/y from an apartment complex. This is how we pay for the rising cost of services. 

Programs like these will also help clean up the community. That means we’ll drive more tourism spending and we will do a better job of retaining people that have moved to the community. Doctors, teachers, RCMP, the skilled trades workers Tolko is moving in....  we want these people to want to live here.

​

To laminate how disconnected our current council is from the business community, I want to tell a story about a council meeting I attended last summer. Avid energy was looking at moving to town, and I’m sitting in the gallery next to one of the bosses and he’s waiting to say his piece to council. Instead of hearing from the guy who wants to invest millions of dollars into the community, council decided it was more important to argue about whether the town should spend $30 to buy the mayor a ticket to rodeo. Think about the optics of that. A company wants to come to town; they deserve our attention over a $30 squabble. Arguments like these are part of the reason our community has so many problems. The chair of that meeting should have limited the debate to a couple minutes, put it to a vote, and drove attention to an important topic worthy of the councils and town staffs’ time. Or at minimum, if the $30 really was that important, shifted that debate to the bottom of the agenda, to move the million dollar topic up front. 

​

I’m going to finish this topic by saying that many of you know me from POPS Home Hardware. Now I’m talking about ways help businesses. I want to be very clear that my business will not be eligible for any sort of program. It’s a conflict of interest and the Municipal Government Act does not allow it. The goal here, is to drive economic growth in the rest of the community. Business owners haven’t had a voice on council this past decade, I think that business owners in town deserve a voice on council, and I’m the best equipped candidate to offer that voice.

​

I will also say, some of my best years were the Peavey Mart years. I talked a bit above about how High Prairie is  a hub community. When someone in Driftpile says “Hey I have to go to town, should I go to High Prairie or Slave Lake?”... when there are two hardware stores in town they feel more confident they are going to be able to find what they need in High Prairie, and they drive to High Prairie instead of Slave Lake. The more businesses and services we are able to offer, the more of those people we attract. I know many want to say "stick it to the big businesses" but every business in High Prairie is a small business, and helping business is another win-win because it means you have more places in town to shop, there's more competition keeping prices in check, and business owners in town see more shoppers.

 

To Develop and Maintain Safe Communities.

We need to address crime and vagrancy. High Prairie RCMP reported a 54% increase of break and enters in 2024 compared to 2023. Possession of stolen property is up 56%. High Prairie has the 7th highest crime severity in all Alberta. Everyone in town knows about the bandits sneaking through back alleys and checking car doors.

​

Now towns have very little pull in this category, policing and prosecution are primarily provincial and federal, but there are some things we can do to help that are within our power.

​

Debated solutions sort of have two sides, and I strongly believe we need a combination.

 

On one side, you’ve got the folks yelling "to lock them up". There are certainly some people in town that deserve it, particularly the drug dealers fueling our problem. We hear about the overflowing court system, but the Edmonton jail is at 35% capacity. There is no excuse for not utilizing that space to assist High Prairie. We need to be more vocal about that with the province, and the province owes it to us to help get our crime levels in check. 
 

On the other side of the scale, you have rehab. We all know the guy that went around town a few weeks ago, smashing windows and kicking car doors. 50k in estimated damage. Nuts. RCMP picks him up, lets him go. The next day he flags down Ron… Batman… asks Ron for help, hops in the truck, and off they go looking for help. RCMP won’t do anything, the town won’t do anything. At this point Ron had spend an hour with the guy, listening to his story. He said he wanted to confess, turn himself in, get some help getting clean. He heard about the Mustard Seed in Grande Prairie, he wanted to go, he just didn’t have a ride and they didn’t have space for him. And he’s not the only one in High Prairie that wants help to clean up their life a bit, but the services to get these people help just don’t exist in the volume we need.

​

Now the existing council is also working on a few ideas, I like that Brian has been working with the RCMP to develop a new shift schedule that offers a close to 24 hour police presence.

​

Brian also had a meeting with the crown prosecutor, who suggested that people affected by the crime fill out impact statements to influence sentencing. This is a largely broken system and waste of time. Impact statements are only opened after the individual has been found guilty. The shortfall is that the crown is choosing not to prosecute at all, so impact statements aren't being read. Everyone probably remembers the string of break-ins out at Winagami. The same individuals also broke into the garage at St. Paul's Church. Several people affected filled out impact statements, and when the day in court came, the crown dropped the charges because the Priest was not present. The kicker is they didn't subpoena the Priest, he had no idea there was a court date or that he had to attend... and because these individuals weren't convicted, all of those impact statements were never read. I'm not a lawyer, but from my view there was pile of evidence and the crown fumbled it. That shouldn't be happening in a community with this much crime. 

​

Speaking to the RCMP, it seems a part of the issue is the province shifting the decision to charge from the RCMP to the crown. It has put us in this position where the crown is only charging and prosecuting the "easy" cases. 

​

Going Forward 

In July 2010, the town spent tens of thousands of dollars to hire a consultant to create a sustainability plan for High Prairie. I have a copy on my shelf. I also have a copy of a municipal inspection report from 2012 that the town paid for. The town has paid for several more of these reports over the past 15 years, most recently a report from Deloitte that largely reiterates what is already being said. 

​

When I reached out to the town to ask for copies of all these reports, they couldn't provide me with anything, and they didn't know most of these documents existed. The CAO asked me to scan and email them to him. It makes you think, the town spent money on these reports, just for it to be lost? All of the ideas myself and the other candidates are pitching are not new ideas, the issues we are all talking about today are the same issues we were experiencing and talking about fifteen years ago. They've just lacked action. 

​

I’d encourage everyone to reach out to our CAO for the copies I forwarded him. Read them, and ask yourself why, of the proposed solutions, so little has been implemented, and think about that before voting the incumbents, James, Donna, and Therese, back in for another term. We have a wonderful pool of fresh minds to vote for, it's time to give a new group a shot.

 

If anyone has any questions, feedback, or wants to chat, I invite you to stop by POPS and have a coffee anytime. Door is always open.

​

​