Northern mayors have two resolutions on the floor at this week’s Saskatchewan Urban Municipalities Association Convention in Regina.
One resolution calls for mandatory training for people running for municipal office and the other for back-up generators in every northern community
Air Ronge Mayor Gordon Stomp, who has lived in northern Saskatchewan for decades, says when the power goes out it creates a hopeless situation.
In northern Saskatchewan there is only one power line in and when it is disrupted there is no way of rerouting power to quickly restore service.
Stomp says this creates a dangerous and costly situation.
“I have been in the north since 1967 and I have seen some pretty awful times that power outages have caused our communities – no power, no heat for four days in -30 weather and stuff like that,” he says.
In what some might see as a controversial resolution, La Loche Mayor Georgina Jolibois wants to make it mandatory for people seeking municipal office to undergo some form of municipal administrative training.
Jolibois says it is about protecting the public interest and ensuring qualified leaders rather than violating anyone’s rights.
“In terms of unconstitutional, we never even thought about that,” she says. “We are just looking at our capacity and we want to expand and we want to train our people to run for office to represent our communities and to work on behalf of our communities,” she says.
SUMA President Debra Button will be watching this particular resolution with interest.
“Stay tuned, we will see how that one flies, I am not sure if that one will pass or not but it is an interesting debate,” she says.
Nearly 1,000 delegates from all over Saskatchewan are attending this year’s SUMA convention.
The convention wraps up on Wednesday with a bear pit session where delegates can ask provincial government ministers questions in an open format.