Jeff Burgar

If you don’t come to the meetings, you don’t have reason to complain when things don’t go the way you would like.

That’s an old story. Despite its age, it is as true today as it was yesterday, last week, last month and 10-20 years ago.

A variation of this same story is, “It’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.” The saying is just as relevant today as when the first wheels were used to grind grain and make clay pots around 5,500 years ago.

This leads us to making a few observations, and asking a few questions.

First observation is, it takes years, and often decades, of hard, constant, dedicated work to make a big difference in a community. At least, it sure does in the High Prairie region. It took two decades to get a company interested in processing poplar to build a plant in High Prairie. From the days of High Prairie mayor Fred Dumont and his council shipping trees to Europe to see if something could be done with them, through times of local governments that didn’t care, to former mayor Diana Oliver putting her nose to the grindstone, it was a long, drawn out process.

But it happened! The old, so-called “garbage wood” is now the feedstock for Tolko OSB.

There were the days of local people saying a new High Prairie Hospital would never happen, to another former mayor George Keay saying a new hospital was the only proper answer. That was another 15-year project, although Keay says more like 20 or 25 years.

And if you don’t go to the meetings, things won’t happen.

So, at the dawn of 2018, a person can look at a list of the executive members of the brand new, United Conservative Party of Alberta. For those just back from Mexico, the UCP was formed by the merger of Wildrose and the Progressive Conservatives of Alberta. Their annual meeting for our Lesser Slave Lake constituency was a few weeks ago. There are few people from the west end of the constituency on the executive. In fact, almost all names are Slave Lake residents.

Of course! They went to the meeting!

How about our own present governing party, the New Democrats? How many executive members are from the west end of our Lesser Slave Lake constituency? It’s a much smaller executive. But there are five members from the west end, only two from the east end. There is even a member from the north lakes area.

Get the picture? The west end is barely involved.

Remember, if you don’t come to meetings, you don’t get a say. When you get right down to it, just how squeaky can your group be when 95 per cent of the rest of the “squeakers” are in the population centre at the other end of the region?

Heck, even one of the directors of the UCP is the mayor of Slave Lake! One may well ask, how many of any councillors from the west end of the region even went to the meeting?

Yup! Halifax, Edmonton, Calgary, let’s go!

Slave Lake? Nah!