Municipal election season is upon us. Barring any pandemic tragedies, on May 10 Sackville will be heading to the polls to cast votes for the next group of people to sit around the town council table, even if it is a virtual one for the time being. In an effort to help inform you about who your candidates are, CHMA news plans to speak with all 12 council and two mayoralty candidates in the coming weeks.
This time we speak with council candidate Alice Cotton:
You can find more information on Alice Cotton’s campaign on Facebook.
Check out all of CHMA’s local elections coverage here.
TRANSCRIPT:
CHMA: Thanks for joining us. Let’s start off. Tell me a bit about yourself.
ALICE COTTON: Sure, well, I’ve lived in Sackville for 28 years. I’ve raised my two sons here. I do all my shopping in Sackville. And when I remarried, I convinced my new husband to move here.
Some more about myself, I’ve taught French language and literature courses at Mount Allison. Then I got an education degree and moved on to help adults improve or maintain their levels of French competency.
I’ve had a variety of jobs actually, because I like to learn new things. For year and a half, I worked for a local arborist. And I gained a new appreciation for trees and the hard work that’s involved in managing them and educating people about their value. I also worked for our MLA, Megan Mitton, as her constituency coordinator when she was first elected, and I learned a lot about provincial and municipal affairs. It seems that they overlap in many spots.
I worked part time for Kookie Kutter last summer before they moved to their new location. I’ve also served as the Sackville Farmers Market manager when the manager needed to be absent. And I also work in some local seniors gardens to help them keep their gardens going.
I have some volunteer experience as well. I started volunteering when my kids were taking music lessons, and became a board member of the Sackville Music Festival. And I’ve helped make that festival happen for the past 10 years. And I’ve also been involved with EOS Eco-Energy since 2015. I’ve been on their board as secretary and co-chair, and it’s something that’s that I really believe in. They work towards adaptation to climate change, and they try to help people live sustainably.
I’m also a member of the Sackville Commons, another organization I believe in. I’ve volunteered for some of their programs like the Food Smart boxes. And thanks to the Commons, I started a business with my husband here during the pandemic, becoming a vendor at the Sackville Farmers Market, which is another organization which is really close to my heart.
CHMA: Now you haven’t run for council before or had previous involvement in council?
AC: No, this is my first time and I have to admit, I’m kind of scared. But I feel that I have values that resonate with those of citizens here. And I really want to help with the work of running the town. I think I have a fair amount of experience in a variety of jobs. And I have some firmly held convictions about what our town can accomplish in terms of protecting the vulnerable people in our society, and in terms of protecting our environment. I want to promote real transparency and collaboration with my fellow townspeople. This town has a wealth of experience and innovative ideas, and I want to call upon that to inform my decisions and actions as a councillor.
CHMA: What made you decide to run this time? Was there a particular issue or anything that stood out or you just felt that it was it was time?
AC: Well, I mentioned transparency. There are some issues that that I feel are very important, some things that Sackville has started to work on, but I think they need to continue working on them.
Having worked with EOS Eco-Energy, the environment and climate change are very big topics for me. I really want to promote environmentally sustainable and socially responsible business in this town. I think there are people here who have suffered during the pandemic. But I think we have a chance to improve things for everybody by enacting, for example, living wages, and helping local entrepreneurs who need help—and needed help recently—by trying to make the playing field more fair.
We have a lot of different organizations here at our disposal. We have schools, nonprofits, the arts, recreation, we have the university, things like the Rotary Club, we have all kinds of things here at our disposal. And I think we need to work together to find solutions to things that this town is facing. I think we have to think in the long term. Because if we agree that there is a climate emergency, we must reconsider the value, for example, of locally sourced food because it supports our farmers. We need to think about green jobs which are sustainable and support local initiatives.
This is a time of great fragility as we’ve seen with a pandemic but also a time of great promise. I think we need to be nimble and we need to work with the wealth of resources all around us.
So that’s that’s my take on business and tying in the environment, and climate change and social responsibility.
Moving on from that, I’d like to say that there are a couple of institutions or services in our town, which we need to fight really hard to preserve: the hospital and the farmers market. They’re both crucial to our quality of life. And without them Sackville would not be half as good a place as it is.
Townspeople have funded many of the pieces of equipment at the hospital over the years, and they are justifiably proud of what they’ve accomplished. I say that I will fight to maintain the hospital and to restore the leadership because people have said there’s there’s some leadership lacking there. But we need that leadership to keep the hospital. It’s one of our jewels.
The farmers market, on the other hand, makes Sackville an oasis of food choice. We’re very lucky to have healthy food, which has a small footprint and a large impact on our community’s health. We have been able to count on the vendors to keep it going for some decades now. And I think they deserve a permanent structure that they can count on. And hopefully that’s in the works.
Another aspect that I would like to talk about… Sackville has a lot of natural aspects that it could enlarge upon. We have a Waterfowl Park, the Great Trail across the highway, the retention pond, dikes which can be accessed quite easily, and a lake. Would it not be possible to connect all these and promote healthy lifestyles and also active transportation with, for example, bike lanes on our larger roads? The town of Amherst has a physical activity strategy with the object of becoming most healthy active community in Nova Scotia. They’re right next door to us. Moncton is creating an active transportation network. People are looking for ways to be active. We have lots of young families in town who are looking to do things with their kids. We have middle aged people, we have older people, everybody’s looking to become more active. I think the pandemic brought that out in a lot of people as well. And we have the means here to provide an interconnected network of different landscapes.
We could create a pedway—it’s been talked about for years—across the highway to link the park with the Great Trail. We could have a bike lane on the road that goes to Silver Lake, that would be perfect to make bicycling there safer. That’s a big point that I’d like to work on.
And then finally, a last issue I’ve thought about—there are other issues, but this is a big one—transparency and communication with the public. I think that the council and the staff have been asked repeatedly about how they can improve how they communicate with the public. And I know they’ve been working on it. But these are some questions I think that need to be asked: Should there be a communications officer? Should documents be made available in a timely fashion so people can formulate informed questions? How do councillors go about taking the pulse of public opinion? How can the public communicate their concerns effectively? And how exactly do councillors define accountability to the voters?
I think there needs to be some serious thinking and discussion about these questions, and probably changes in procedure. So those are my some of the big things that I’ve been thinking about that I’d like to highlight.
CHMA: All right, you have a pretty full roster there, that’s great. What are your favourite and least favourite things about Sackville right now?
AC: Well, I want to make a point starting off here that I came here to teach French language and literature at the university. I had contractual positions there. I’ve had lots of jobs over the years, and I’ve chosen to stay in Sackville because of its great combination of cultural activities and the nature that’s around us. I discovered it’s a good place to raise kids. It’s been refreshing for me to get involved with lots of different initiatives. And I’ve learned new things while I’ve been here. I’ve been able to feel involved and I’ve met a wide variety of people being here. So I just wanted to make that point starting off.
I love all of the cultural activities that you can find in one small place. I remember once a few years ago when the Bordertown festival was new. I was just brimming with joy at being able to go to a concert that was held inside the Vogue Theater of Ray Legere and some of our local musicians. It was just fantastic. And then that evening there was a blues concert… and there were just so many things. There was something else on the go that day as well. It was just all in this small space, that you could go to several cultural activities.
We have theater, music of all kinds, art, dance, food, festivals. We have two fabulous museums which highlight our shipbuilding and carriage making history. We’re surrounded by great natural environments. The dikes, the Bay of Fundy are close at hand. Dorchester cape, all of the bird migrations like the semipalmated sandpipers. Ski trails, beautiful farmland, forests and marshes. I mean, it’s an incredible mixture of things.
I love all of the professional people I’ve met over the years, the artists and musicians, farmers, mechanics, tree planters, carpenters, harness makers, machinists, chefs, journalists… I mean, there are so many interesting people here.
CHMA: So the favourites list is long.
AC: Long, yeah. I can’t say I have a favourite sorry. I have a hard time with questions like that. I always find a way to go on and on about it. It’s a combination, is what it is. It is a crossroads. There’s many things.
I will say, though, that there is one thing that I find regrettable. The occasions when divisions crop up over contentious issues, and there is talk of true locals and people from away, as though where a person is from has really any bearing on their capacity to have an informed opinion and valuable input. Sure, local knowledge is extremely valuable. I think I’ve said that by talking about all of the things I love here. But people who have chosen to move here are engaged with Sackville, and their points of view are just as valuable.
I’d really like to insist that Sackville is a crossroads of diverse kinds of knowledge and backgrounds, and they could nourish each other. They do nourish each other. And especially at this time, when we need to work together, we need to concentrate on all of these different strengths that we pull from all of these different kinds of knowledge and background that we have.
CHMA: Thanks so much, Alice. Is there anything else you would like people in Sackville to know about you?
AC: Well, I hope I didn’t sound overly prepared. I did work hard on this presentation. So I do try to work hard and understand what’s going on. And I would like to think, but I would like also to know, that everybody can improve. I want to be someone who can listen, and I’m open to hearing what people want council to do. So yeah… there you go.
CHMA: Thanks very much, Alice.
AC: Okay, thank you so much.
