Kowalchuk says she’ll bring ‘grassroots voice’ to national board
Medicine Hat Chamber of Commerce executive director Lisa Kowalchuk returned Tuesday from Thunder Bay, where she was named to the national Chamber’s board of directors at its annual general meeting.
Kowalchuk is the only executive director from a local Chamber to sit on the national board.
“What I bring to the table is being able to represent Chambers of Commerce across Canada as a management role and to really be able to bring that grassroots voice to the Canadian Chamber of Commerce board to make sure they’re aware of the issues that are affecting businesses in every community across Canada — whether a small rural community to the large metropolitan centres to a midsize city like ourselves here in Medicine Hat,” she said.
Canadian Chamber of Commerce bylaws allow for one member of the Chamber of Commerce Executives of Canada to sit on its board.
Kowalchuk was elected president of the CCEC, whose board she’s sat on since 2014, starting this month.
The national appointment is a oneyear term, but she can be re-elected at next year’s conference.
This year’s AGM took place from Sept. 22-24, with 66 policy resolutions brought forward. It was the ninth national conference Kowalchuk attended.
“It’s a great opportunity to network with other Chamber professionals across the country,” she said.
A wide array of topics was discussed at the AGM — finance and taxation, infrastructure, transportation, internal and international trade.
The Medicine Hat Chamber put forward a resolution with recommendations for tax indexing, calling on the federal government to address inconsistencies in which tax deductions are indexed.
This inconsistency “substantially raises the cost of payroll taxes, putting more pressure on businesses,” said local Chamber president Sarah MacKenzie in a Tuesday news release.
As a member of the national board, Kowalchuk hopes to address these “regulatory challenges within governments at every level from federal to provincial to municipal levels.”
NAFTA is a hot-button issue of concern to chambers across the country, and intimately connected to internal trade issues, she added.
“When we have concerns with international trade, we have to ensure that our regulatory challenges within our own country are such that (they) allow for free movements of goods, services, trade and labour across our provincial borders,” Kowalchuk said.
Pipelines are another major issue on the federal Chamber’s radar, “ensuring that we’re able to get critical infrastructure built to allow access to markets and making sure it strengthens are overall economy, labour force and investment, as well as the GDP within our country,” she said.