So, who won last week’s all-candidates forum in Fernie? That’s easy … Emily Brydon.
Brydon showed her facilitator chops to the crowd of well over 100 people who probably would have preferred to listen to her riff for a couple of hours rather than the politicians’ raff.
However, it truly was a night for the politicians to show their stuff. One of the downsides of last week’s forum was that no clear frontrunner emerged. Usually at these things it’s easy to narrow down your choices simply by noticing the tinfoil hats on some candidates.
That wasn’t the case this time. All the candidates were well-spoken and it was evident they had done their homework, making voters’ choices more difficult.
The only zinger launched during the forum was by mayoral candidate Kyle Hamilton. It came after fellow mayoral candidate Harshan Ramadass was asked what he would like to have done differently during his term as a city councillor.
He responded that he would have liked council to have gotten a quicker start on strategic planning to which Hamilton retorted that it was Ramadass’ fault that council didn’t get that quick start due to “lack of availability.”
Ramadass countered that he was available for strategic planning sessions but missed budget sessions.
The one thing that all candidates, mayoral and city council, agreed on was the fact infrastructure will dominate pretty much everything the new council does for the next four years. We all know and all agree that putting fixing the city’s water and sewer infrastructure will take a lot more money than the city has.
No one had a magic bullet solution. We all know that taxes are likely to increase and other items are likely to get pushed to the back burner.
But one thing that was missed in all the infrastructure, and was pointed out to me by one of the attendees, is that infrastructure is more than just pipes in the ground. There was no talk cultural and heritage infrastructure. That’s a huge part of what has drawn people to the city and it needs attention as well, which leads into the other big topic of the night … tourism.
It was touched on briefly at the forum. Not attracting more tourists, but how to deal with the downsides of tourism.
Make no mistake about it, tourism is what drives the town now. Didn’t always, but now it does. If Fernie hadn’t become a tourist town we wouldn’t have all the great restaurants we have now, nor would we have the plethora of fast food and pizza joints. We wouldn’t have a downtown filled with bike shops, art galleries, and wonderful niche retail outlets. We wouldn’t have a lot of things.
However, more and more locals are becoming annoyed with the influx of people and the rampant development it brings. Will we lose the iconic mainstreet viewscape to condos, like has been proposed for the equally iconic Catholic Church viewscape? Will we become like some resort communities down south who bus in workers because ordinary folks can’t afford to live in the communities they work in?
Will we become like tourist communities in Europe where locals are openly hostile to tourists and have taken to actually banning tourists?
Will we become, egads, another Canmore?
One of the challenges for the new council will be to figure out what kind of tourist town we become. We have lots of examples of what not to do, so let’s not do them.
Born and raised in Fernie, Bill Phillips is an award-winning journalist and columnist. He was the winner of the 2009 Best Editorial award at the British Columbia/Yukon Community Newspaper Association’s Ma Murray awards, in 2007 he won the association’s Best Columnist award. In 2004, he placed third in the Canadian Community Newspaper best columnist category and, in 2003, placed second. Read more Writer’s Block here.
