Ward 2 Council Candidate Questions Re: Community Engagement and Empowerment

Friends,

The leadership team here at Our West End sent a brief questionnaire to the Ward 2 City Council Candidates. The deadline to respond was Wednesday, October 22 and three of the candidates running for city Council responded. Below is the preamble and questions that were sent to the candidates.

Following this post, I will cut and paste each candidates response in a separate post.

Our West End thanks all of the candidates for putting their names forward and for representing our great community.

Fabio
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Dear Candidate,

Thank you for putting your name forward in the 2014 Municipal Election to serve as a City Councilor for Ward 2. The west-end is a great community and we applaud your efforts in working towards making it better.

As a neighbourhood strategy, Our West End believes strongly in community engagement and empowerment. In this view, we would like to better engage the residents of Ward 2 by providing a set of questions to our candidates to be shared with our community. We intend to share your answers with members of the Our West End Roundtable and we may further post your responses to the Our West End blog. The Our West End Roundtable is comprised of resident leaders from all of the neighbourhoods in the west-end and the blog has hundreds of subscribers, majority of whom are west-end residents. You can visit www.ourwestend.org to learn more about our initiative.

1.      As noted above, a core value of Our West End is community engagement and empowerment. Do you share this value? If so, how will you better engage and empower residents of Ward 2 to be leaders in their community?

2.      There are five parks in the Bridgeview neighbourhood that are in a vulnerable state and may well be slated for closure in the future. Our West End would like to learn more about your position on this topic. Do you feel all parks should be maintained and preserved in Ward 2? If so, what is your vision for parks in our neighbourhoods?

3.      The west-end is often perceived as an unsafe place. How do you plan on tackling this stigma?

4.      In partnership with the United Way, Our West End has been developing a neighbourhood strategy that will be released in the spring of 2015. The strategy involves extensive community consultation and will be a blueprint for community engagement and empowerment that will be implemented by resident leaders and volunteers. Would you support this initiative? If so, as a City Councilor, how do you see yourself assisting in the strategy?