For the second year in a row, a trio of Lower Mainland mayors have packed themselves into an RV to get up close and personal with Canadian municipalities.
Unlike last year's Town Haul jaunt to Niagara Falls, this year Port Coquitlam mayor Greg Moore, Coquitlam mayor Richard Stewart and Port Moody mayor Mike Clay are only going as far as Edmonton - the location of the 2015 Federation of Canadian Municipalities conference.
"We learned a lot, we met a lot of really great people and wanted to do the same (again)," said Clay.
Starting in Vancouver on Tuesday, the three mayors stopped in Burnaby, Abbotsford, Ashcroft and the Cariboo Regional District before they parked their 19-foot RV in Prince George Wednesday afternoon to chat with local counterpart Lyn Hall. They continued on to stop to Dawson Creek with visits to Fort St. John, Grand Prairie and Slave Lake scheduled before arriving in Edmonton for the Friday start of the FCM event.
"The purpose of going to the conference is to learn from different communities as well as learn about innovations that can make our jobs easier and can make our communities better," said Stewart. "This trip just allows us to see first hand, rather than simply talking around the coffee table with the mayor of Prince George, you can see first hand the elements that they were talking about."
The RV mainly functions as a mobile office, Stewart explained, where the mayors can keep in touch with their respective offices as well as edit and upload the videos and photos they shoot in each community. The trip is covered by sponsors, he said.
"Our goal was to make sure it wasn't a burden to our local taxpayers," said Stewart. "It was simply a unique effort to try to understand and showcase the issues that municipalities share across the country and across the province."
And as with last year's week-long journey across the country, the mayors said they were still surprised by the sheer amount of similarities between every municipality they visit, regardless of size or geographical location.
"I knew that our issues were going to be similar, but I'm still surprised every time we get into a city and realize their main issue is the same issue we're dealing with," said Stewart. "Different scale, different details, but the challenges of economic development, the challenges of job creation, the challenges of making sure your cities are as efficient as possible in an environment where governments keep adding more to the role of city without adding any sources of revenue for us to pay for it."
"It doesn't matter whether we were in Ontario or here in Prince George, there's some fundamental things that all of us as local government are dealing with, whether it's infrastructure or seeking a better way to fund local government beyond property tax," said Moore.
"We thought that when you went into Saskatchewan, people would have different problems than we did," said Clay. "But we all have the same problems."
Getting that face time with different parts of the province also helps to bridge some of the southern-interior divide.
The perceptions of the significance of resource-based economies shift as you travel further from Vancouver, said Moore, who had experience with those different outlooks thanks to his involvement as part of the Union of B.C. Municipalities executive.
"But I think listening to the mayors in their own communities talking about the importance of the resources to their local economy I think that's been more enlightening," he said.
To follow the mayors on their route, visit TownHaul.ca.
