Lindsey Coyle has called Airdrie home for 10 years and moved here a decade ago with her young family.
The former owner of Airdrie Exchange ran for council in 2017 and says she’s put her name in the hat again because she has a “deep desire to create positive change in Airdrie and beyond. She says she believes in democracy, which by design is meant to unite the people.
Q&A Portion:
- Why are you running for office?
I want to revive people’s faith in the system and governance and build structures to enhance engagement, transparency, and accountability. To connect our community as I envision, it is a full-time endeavour and that is why I am running for mayor.
- How will you help to make Airdrie a better place to live, work and play?
The opportunity we have right here, right now is to create a better normal and that will take making progress in inches, not miles to start. If we made it easier to put on events (in Airdrie), it would increase our arts and culture, attract more people to come to Airdrie and better connect our community. We have great venues and we need to encourage better use of them.
- What is the most important issue in this election and how do you plan to address it?
There are many and the one that I am focusing my attention on during the election is to increase voter turnout and engagement. We need to meet people where they are at and I want to introduce quarterly townhall meetings that are two hours long and recap of key issues in the last quarter as well as an introduction to what is coming up. (I want to) give people direction on how they can access resources and contribute their voice to the process.
- How do you plan to be transparent and accountable to your constituents?
I want to introduce a structure that will provide both transparency and accountability of the council, it’s called PAR the Politician Accountability Record. Along the lines of what a report card is; it will be a live document that records what committee and boards a politician is on, their attendance record, voting record for key issues, the pages of required reading and their attendance to community events. This record is meant to increase the public’s confidence that their elected officials are there to serve them.
- Why should residents vote for you?
I am an outspoken, community minded and politically engaged person, who believes we can have difficult conversations with civility and respect. I believe having the conversations about the subjects people are divided or upset about will require someone willing to wade into the discomfort. My commitment is to lead myself with integrity and serve the people of Airdrie to the best of my ability.
Your Questions
We asked our readers/followers on social media what they wanted to know from City of Airdrie candidates and came up with three questions.
The answers for each candidate will be listed here and posted to airdrielife‘s social media channels on Sept 22 (question 1), Sept 29 (question 2) and Oct 6 (question 3).
Editor’s Note: The answers below are completely unedited and appear here exactly as they were sent to airdrielife via email.
1. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action published 94 “calls to action” urging all levels of government — federal, provincial, territorial and aboriginal — to work together to change policies and programs in a concerted effort to repair the harm caused by residential schools and move forward with reconciliation. Which of the Calls to Action do you believe the City of Airdrie council should focus on?
I believe 57 which is Educating Public Employees about TRC would be where I would focus. I would first need to understand what education has been provided to this point and how we have integrated it into the fabric of the City of Airdrie. I believe the last council meeting they discussed creating the framework for when and where we would want and need indigenous consulting and developing that process. The discussion of adding flag poles to accommodate the Indigenous flags at City Hall and Nose Creek Park was also discussed and I would be supportive of moving forward with this as well.
2. How would you work to improve arts and culture infrastructure and opportunities in the city if you were elected?
I believe if we can make it easier for people and businesses to put on events, festivals, art shows, concerts and tournaments in Airdrie we will see increased access to arts and culture. One way we could achieve this is through creating an event coordinator role at City Hall that walks organisers through the process from start to finish and make better use of the facilities we already have and play a part in sharing and marketing the events on city platforms to increase ticket sales. As well I see opportunities to marry the arts and culture community to other aspects of city initiatives. If we were to pair businesses and artists together to create a legacy piece of public art that serves to make Airdrie more interesting and beautiful and earmarks a space for a business to be visible in the community they serve while funding a local artist to create a piece, that to me is win/win.
We could also explore using funding for community safety to commission a local theater group to create an age appropriate play to delve into social aspects like bullying, consent, safety and have them travel to our schools to present in collaboration with our School Resource RCMP officers.
3. What is your vision to help progress Airdrie’s economic growth over the next 10 years?
I see aggressively seeking specific businesses to come to Airdrie making sense at this point. We are saying we want to revitalize downtown, we need to create incentive to fill the blank lots with anchor businesses that will draw people to downtown. We would use this same focus for our industrial land use area in the NE and I believe with the Telus investment in fiber optic and 5g underpinning in Airdrie, our proximity to the airport and excellent community to raise families, we could attract larger corporations with export potential and higher education training/testing facilities (discussion with Derrick Greenwood inspired the testing facility component). This would bring purposeful tourism to Airdrie and provide our kids with opportunity to be highly employable with certification training.