There is officially a race in Canmore to see who will become the community’s next mayor.
One-term Councillor Hans Helder announced this week he will also seek the top political job in Canmore. He said he will bring a new style of leadership to the role and provide those who voted for him three years ago with a return on their investment.
“From my perspective the community has invested in me,” he said. “Certainly, I really take the community’s faith in me very seriously. They had enough faith in me to elect me and shown a lot of support in the time I’ve been on council.
“People have asked me to run for mayor and I certainly take their investment in me very seriously and so part of this is there is an obligation on my part to give them a return on their investment.”
Helder said he has been seriously considering going for the role of mayor since Ron Casey stepped down after he was elected as a provincial representative.
“I decided not to at that time for a variety of reasons and some of them were just timing,” he said. “I really hadn’t thought about it enough at that point, so I have really thought about it a lot since that time.”
Helder said since the byelection he has been considering what it is that he would have to contribute to the job as mayor.
“What I have to contribute is a particular perspective on leadership,” he said. “I realize the mayor is one of seven members of council and the mayor is one vote on council and I realize it is kind of unique for a community like Canmore, where everybody is elected at large and represents the entire community.
“But I think the mayor has an obligation to take a leadership role to help shape the thinking for the community and for council and to be pretty future oriented.”
Helder, who made Canmore his permanent home after he retired, said one of his strengths is what he calls strategic thinking – focusing on those things that are important, rather than everything.
“That is the challenge sometimes in this role,” he said. “One of the things I have noticed is the last couple of councils haven’t been particularly focused; they have taken on what has come their way and often these things are generated externally, not something council has generated itself.”
Future thinking for Canmore council includes a strategic plan that Helder said he was surprised didn’t exist before he was last elected. He said a strategy would act as a filter for those things that are essential for development of the community and those that are more administrative in nature.
“I think mayor and council need to take a much more strategic leadership role, rather than an administrative one and part of that is selecting the things you want to focus on,” he said.
That leadership platform as mayor, he said, falls into three areas: environmental, economic and social.
Helder said in the past several years other Alberta communities have turned the economic corner, but Canmore hasn’t, and to some extent that is because there are barriers to economic activity.
Helder pointed to the restriction of retail sizes along Bow Valley Trail as one example and council’s sustainability screening report process as another. Even with recent changes to the process to include more data, he said the process remains subjective and has left the business community hesitant to develop new opportunities.
Using a new approach towards economic development that includes what are traditionally called private public partnerships is one thing Helder wants to look into.
That includes a possible solution for Three Sisters Mountain Village.
“I think there is room for a significant private public partnership for developing Three Sisters rather than waiting for somebody to come to us and we respond to it – we can be part of shaping it,” he said, adding it would also create an opportunity to have a broader community conversation on it.
That also leads into a new leadership approach for the environment. Helder said he would like to shift the conversation to be about living with wildlife instead of just conservation.
“One of the things that has been really quite remarkable for me is this has been one of the most remarkable things I have done,” he said about becoming a councillor in 2010. “It takes a lot of personal commitment. It takes a lot of emotional and intellectual energy to be engaged in council activities.”
Helder said as mayor he would focus on picking outcomes for the community and focusing on those.
