Local Post-secondary Education and Healthcare Conversations
Another amazing and busy day. I was invited along with the other two parties to present and answer questions from 40 nurses from across the North. As I am not a seasoned politician it was an interesting process. We had the chance to introduce ourselves and present on behalf of ourselves and our party. Later we were asked a couple of questions about the stalled new hospital and what I interpreted was accountability. The hospital and it’s lack of progress and the impact it's delay is having on the community will no doubt be a major election issue.
Later I attended a two-hour event at GPRC which was around GPRC moving forward with degree-granting status. A process long in the works and congratulations to the Don, Carmen and the team at GPRC for getting us there. This was a community engagement process on how the community can help make it fly and what are medium and long term courses that should be offered at the GPRC campuses. I really enjoyed the conversations as I sat at a table with two high school principals and how they would love to work directly with GPRC to keep our kids here and have them establish careers here. We also were provided the opportunity to recommend what degrees GPRC should offer, with only 6 dots on the chart it was an extremely challenging exercise. With that, we needed to think of demand and job potential, space and requirements within the college and the ability to attract instructors among a handful of other things.
I have said it before, we are incredibly fortunate to have the Douglas Cardinal designed building in our city. Last year I hired an artists to recreate the college in an artistic form for posters and mugs with 10% of the sales to go to the college. The image is a close up of the theatre.