How the West became ‘home’
Foundation book offers some fresh points of view
Ken Lyotier is an activist for bottle pickers and Dumpster divers in Vancouver’s downtrodden downtown Eastside. Yael Cohen is founder and CEO of a Vancouver charity called F—ck Cancer.
John Cross is a holistic Alberta rancher. Lindsay Burns is a Calgary actress and playwright.
They are probably not the first people who spring to mind to help define public policy as seen through a long-standing and conservative Western Canadian think-tank.
But they are among the eclectic crew of interview subjects featured in A Place to Call Home: Building Community, Inspiration and Creativity in Western Canada, a coffee-table book created by the Canada West Foundation that got its official launch Thursday in downtown Calgary.
“We have artists, we have actors, we have playwrights,” says Shawna Stirrett, senior policy analyst for the Canada West Foundation and co-author of the book.
“We have people who are really involved in building their community, just strong community advocates.”
“We have aboriginal activists, we have a Muslim community builder from Winnipeg,” adds coauthor Sheila O’Brien, the Foundation’s executive-in-residence.
“Not the usual suspects, but the people who are on the front lines of building community who don’t really often get a chance to talk about how they do what they do and how important it is.”
A Place to Call Home is the third and final book in an ambitious two-year project spearheaded by O’Brien and Stirrett, done to reflect on the changing role of the Canadian West and help mark the 40th anniversary of the Foundation, a think-tank that conducts research and offers commentary on issues affecting Western Canadians.
Forty-two years ago, the Foundation was started on a “the-Westwants-in” platform when there was a great disparity between the West and the rest of the country.
Obviously, things have changed. So in 2010, O’Brien and Stirrett set out to ask “where are we now and where should we be going?”
Book 1, An Extraordinary West: A Narrative Exploration of Western Canada’s Future that allowed “the big guns of the West” — the former premiers, prime ministers and university presidents — to pontificate about what can be done “to ensure Western Canada remains a great place to live in the 21st Century.”
Book 2, Catching a Rising Tide: An Energy Vision for Canada, set out an energy strategy for Canada from a Western perspective.
Unless we got community right, the west would not achieve its full potential.
SHEILA O’BRIEN
“In the process of doing that, it became very clear that unless we got community right, the west would not achieve its full potential,” O’Brien says.
“We need to attract and retain the best and the brightest to come here and do what needs to be done. And people don’t come just for money. They come for quality of life. They come for a compassionate existence, not only for tolerance but understanding. They come for arts, they come for natural beauty. So we really have to invest in all those things. And that’s what this book is about,” she adds.
Through interviews with activists, artists, faith leaders and other community boosters, the foundations puts forth an argument to help attract, and maintain, one of the West’s most precious natural resources: its people.
“The West is on the cusp,” says Stirrett.
“There’s a growing realization that wealth for wealth’s sake is not enough and we need to be investing in our communities and we need to be building and telling our story. And I think there is a real appetite for that.”
For more information about the book, visit cwf.ca.