10 Years

It's a long, and winding road.

10 years ago I had no position, authority, or access to power. You could easily make the argument that I barely have any of those today. Position, certainly, because I had the great privilege of being elected to represent the riding of Calgary-Beddington. But authority or power? An Opposition MLA has little enough of that.

10 years ago, I had just moved into the community of Huntington Hills and I was working full-time raising my three kids. We walked to school and every day we crossed Hunterview Drive, the long and winding collector road in west Huntington.

I lost track of how many police reports I filed as cars blew through the marked pedestrian crosswalk, usually when we were waiting patiently on the sidewalk to cross…but more often than I liked while we were already in the intersection. I remember the day a car came screaming out of the alley without looking and I yanked my kid back so hard his little shoe was left lying in the road. The car ran over it.

Something in me changed that day. Small scale, I started working toward traffic calming measures for that intersection. In the bigger picture I knew I needed to find a path where I felt like I was making a meaningful contribution to my community, every day.

Yesterday, driving home from Edmonton, I drove through the intersection that now includes the traffic calming measures I spent 10 years advocating for. It wasn’t only me, of course, and I’m so grateful to the community members, parents, and the local parent council who helped. But I was the little engine that could, pushing relentlessly to advance traffic calming at that intersection. The sight of that flattened little shoe in the road has never left me.

What struck me about the 10 year timeline is what my local elected official *could* have done. Would it have taken 10 years if my councillor had returned my calls or emails about the intersection? There’s no way to know for sure, but I felt a deep certainty that an elected representative had a duty to be responsive to their constituents. Even if their politics didn’t align. Certainly, there is nothing political about keeping kids safe on their walk to school.

Why am I telling you this story that has nothing to do with provincial government policy? It’s because I have had a recall petition filed against me which felt like a good opportunity to tell you about why I chose to follow the path that lead me to the office I currently hold.

In the recall petition filed against me, a constituent makes the argument that I was not representing the wishes of the families of Calgary-Beddington during the recent teacher strike. Of the many thousands of pieces of correspondence we received over the teacher strike, the vast majority urged me to support teachers and to continue to speak up for the UCP government to change their approach of funding education at the lowest level in the country. In my best reckoning (as I mentioned, the correspondence volume was large) we had 5 or fewer letters from constituents who urged against support for teachers.

Recall legislation is the law, and like any law I have no issue being held accountable to it. If being unapologetic about representing my constituents makes me a target for recall efforts, so be it. That’s the job.

Don’t agree with a position I’ve taken? My door is always open. My job is to represent the people in this riding and while we await the results of the recall petition, I’ll keep doing that job.