Winkler City Councilor Marvin Plett was recently selected to continue sitting on a 75-member national board, representing municipalities in our province. Plett is one of five people representing Manitoba on the Federation of Canadian Municipalities Board.
Retired from his full-time career, Plett says he has the time to sit on a lot of committees, locally, something he enjoys doing, but he also has the time and energy to devote to others.
"For me, it's very important that we also have input in larger settings, like provincial or federal, so that we can have input with other members and jointly come up with solutions and options of needs for municipalities, generally across Canada and communicate those to our federal counterparts."
With more than 2000 member municipalities, representing about 90 % of Canada's population on the FCM Board, Plett says there is a whole range of issues they work on, including some that are uniquely common to them all. One of the key issues across the board is the national issue regarding mental health.
"And we feel it's very important that all three orders of government work together," said Plett. "Our national system is, in a way, maybe a little bit complicated. Healthcare is really the jurisdiction of the provinces, but they get a large amount of funding through granting those systems from the federal government and so so they those two organizations have to work together. And then of course in terms of where all the citizens are, they're in municipalities."
Other topics high on the list for all members included addressing the cost of housing and homelessness and seeing federal grant money to be allocated in a more reliable way, similar to how gas tax funds are distributed to municipalities on an annual basis.
Plett pointed out the way gas tax funds are distributed each year, is one of the success stories of FCM's lobbying efforts.