Alice Cotton is a long time Sackville resident and avid volunteer, having worked with EOS Eco Energy, the Sackville Music Festival, and the Community Food Smart program. She has diverse work experience in teaching, gardening and food preparation, and is a local entrepreneur, running the Deus Ex Machina coffee truck at the Sackville Farmers Market.
Listen to CHMA’s Meet The Candidates interview with Alice Cotton, which took place by phone on November 9, 2022.
Cotton is running for Ward 3, where residents will elect four councillors from a pool of nine candidates, including Cotton, Sahitya Pendurthi, Josh Goguen, Virgil Hammock, Bruce Phinney, Michael Tower, Allison Butcher, Charles Harvey, and Sana Mohammed. All candidates have interviews on CHMA, except for Charles Harvey who declined our request, and Sana Mohammed, who has yet to respond.
CHMA is compiling all its election coverage in one place, for your convenience. For more candidate interviews and other local elections coverage, click here.
TRANSCRIPT
CHMA: So Alice cotton, thanks for joining us. Thank you. For those who might not already know you tell us a bit about yourself.
Alice Cotton: Sure. Well, I have lived in Sackville for close to 30 years. I have raised my two sons here, they both went to Mount Allison, one is still going to Mount Allison. And I have worked at various jobs here in town and gotten to know you know, different groups of people through those those jobs and also through volunteer work that I’ve done, and board work that I’ve done, as well, I’ve been on a couple of boards for EOS Eco Energy and the Sackville Music Festival. I also volunteer for the Food Smart program, I’ve volunteered for Sappyfest. And I’ve worked in various fashions for the Sackville farmers’ markets. And right now I’m a vendor at that market, which I enjoy very much. And I really believe in the farmers’ market. I am a certified professional educator. And I have done some work at Mount Allison in the past. I also am a private teacher of French, for adults and children and and I’m a translator, so. And I also work in a professional kitchen these days. So I have lots of various experience and I know various people through that experience. And I say I really, I really enjoy Sackville, I choose to live here. And I choose to stay here and I really want to become involved more as possible. And that is why I’m running.
CHMA: Okay, yeah. Tell us a bit more about what factored into your decision to run for this new Tantramar council?
AC: Well, it’s the second time I’ve run to be on council. I came a bit close to getting on to council the last time I ran, which was the last election. And it just seemed to me that you know, maybe there’s a hope again and and there are issues that I really see as being something that I would really like to work on that I think are key to our to our region now, not just the town of Sackville, but the region. And I’m excited to get to know the various people around Sackville in the different wards that will now be included in Tantramar. And I want to know what they are facing. I want to know what their reality is. And I want to work with them and make it work together with the various issues that we have in Ward 3.
CHMA: Okay. Do you have issues that you are, you know, hoping to highlight or bring forward if you are elected?
AC: Yes. Housing, I think is a huge issue. I think that there are various ways of working with it. On it. I think that the town needs to — and by town now, I mean, the new municipality of Tantramar — needs to take a key role in figuring out this problem of the lack of housing and the lack of affordable housing. I think we need to work on giving tenants some rights, I think we need to look at what organizations like ACORN are doing, where they’re talking about a rent cap, and where they are wondering about instituting a registry, which would rate apartments and their condition. I think there needs to be a lot of work done about the housing situation, I think we need to really try to understand what we’re faced with because I think a lot of other things depend on the housing situation. We can’t expect the hospital to attract people, if there is nowhere for them to live. We can’t expect the town to thrive if there was nowhere for people to live. So I think housing is just enormous and we are intelligent. But I really think that the town needs to take a big role in figuring this thing out. That’s the main issue for me.
CHMA: Yeah, yeah. I wanted to ask actually a bit more about that the housing, it is an issue that you know, CHMA has heard about from readers and listeners. You obviously think the municipality should do something about the housing crisis. What kind of specific things do you think a municipality can do, in that regard in that in that area?
AC: Yeah, well, I mean, there are lots of people concerned about it, I think that the municipality can reach out to, for example, the Housing Hub, which is an organization now, that is starting to work in this province. And it is working towards helping groups of people who are concerned and who are trying to figure things out, helping them access funding, and put plans in place and actually get something to, to be built and to work. So we need to reach out to organizations like that we need to ask for help. And I think people like our deputy mayor knows a lot about people to reach out to, and I think that he would be very helpful in this regard as well. I have been very concerned about the housing situation. And I along with some other people started, basically a Facebook group that is, you know, talking about about the problems and wondering what can we do. And it just, it just seemed to me as I worked on it, that really, the town needs to take a leading role in figuring this problem out.
CHMA: Okay. Are there any other issues that you’re you think you’re gonna hope to highlight when, if elected,
AC: I mean, the hospital, you know, is unavoidable as a major, major issue, it is just such a jewel that we have it in our community, and yet, it has been greatly reduced, and that has got to change, we have to fight for our hospital, the town has to take a major role in that as well. And we also have to look at food and fuel costs and how these things are affecting people in our in our community. And it seems to me that the municipality has to find ways to fight for its citizens, we have to find ways to fight for the regulation of these costs that keep going up.
CHMA: We’ve heard from readers and listeners that transparency is a key issue. I’m wondering, what should the town, the new town do differently, if anything regarding openness and transparency about how they operate?
AC: Well, I’ve been I’ve been trying to talk to various people, people who are councillors right now, who are — for one of them, who was not re-presenting, not running again. And, you know, I asked this person how how does the council run? And what are these issues? How do we address this and the person told me that the province is difficult to work with when it comes to privacy laws. And it is easy just to say, this is an HR issue, and all of it is private. And this person felt that there are distinctions that can be made. And there are things that can be explained to the public and shared with the public. But it’s, it’s difficult. I mean, in a small town, when you’re trying to avoid hearsay, we’re trying to avoid destroying reputations. When something is not going to court, we don’t have a right to talk about it. But I think what we could do is explain clearly to to the public, how it operates, how the council operates, how these issues are dealt with. It would be an occasion with this large change that we’re going through, the amalgamation, to look at how it operates. And perhaps some things need to be changed. I don’t know. Dispute resolution. These are operational issues. Do these things need to be reconsidered? I mean, this is a chance to take everything into account and to rewrite some things. And to say how can we make this work more smoothly? How can we make it so that the public feels assured that things are being dealt with properly?
CHMA: Okay, let’s talk a bit about amalgamation. I have kind of a goofy question for you. I want the best and the worst. So that means something you’re excited about under a new amalgamated municipality and something you think that’s going to be a really big challenge. So sort of, you know, the best and worst of what’s coming…
AC: Let me just say that there are still a lot of unknown, right, about what’s coming. If somebody says that they know what’s going to happen, they’re not really, they can’t, they can’t be truthful in that. We don’t know everything, what’s going to happen, I’m looking forward to actually doing some good work, rebuilding relationships and networks, with an eye to sustainability. I think this is a big opportunity to reassess everything, to use what works and to throw away what doesn’t work. And I think it’s a time to reaffirm values that we believe in, I think it’s a time to fight for our values. In my case, those values would be sustainability. Thinking about damage that we may suffer from climate change, and dealing with that, trying to mitigate it, dealing with the housing issue, and the affordable housing issue. And thinking about food security. And thinking about our education system, it’s a time to take full advantage of all of the resources we have. We want at this time to make this town a place where young people and young families can come and set up and stay, we want to make this a place where people want to stay. They want to grow up here and work here and stay here. We need young families, we need immigrants, we need places for them to live, and we need to value their contribution. And I think, like I say, this is the time to fight for those values, because of this big change. Now the big challenge, on the other hand, at the same time, it’s a big challenge. The big challenge, I’m just gonna say it very briefly is to stand up to Blaine Higgs and what his government is doing to our province. We have to react to what his government is doing. And that is a big, big challenge.
CHMA: Okay, now, are you referring to local government reform or more general things? In terms of what we’re standing up to there?
AC: Yeah, yeah, that’s a good question. I think all of it. I think all of it, I think, I think it’s all connected. in some level. Some of the divisiveness that his government is encouraging has repercussions in our communities. The, you know, allowing food and fuel costs to explode, and not really helping the people suffering from that, that has repercussions in our communities. So yeah, I think it’s, it’s on the the upper level, the provincial level, but it has repercussions on our level.
CHMA: Okay. All right. Is there anything else you’d like people in in Ward 3 to know?
AC: Well, I went to accent that there are different populations in this region that we will now be calling Tantramar. And I think that some of those populations feel undervalued if not even invisible. I want to work on making them visible, and helping them contribute, I want to value their contribution, and I want to make it possible for them to contribute to our society. And I think that that is by looking at basic questions of how people are living. What are their food security and their housing security issues? What are their mental health issues? And how can we work on those things, we are really at a point in time where we can take advantage of this big change and make some big changes and work on these issues that face
CHMA: Okay. Well, many thanks for your time, Alice, best of luck in the campaign and the election.
AC: Thank you very much for for doing this interview. I really value that, that you’re doing this and I appreciate that. It will be a long form of it and excerpted forms as well. So thank you very much for doing all this work.
