50 signatures reached
To: Owen Sound municipal election voters
Rebound Owen Sound
Yes, count me in!
I will sign Rebound Owen Sound’s petition. I agree with you: We need a City Council that reflects the community, listens to its citizens and acts on their concerns. I support Rebound Owen Sound’s efforts to find candidates for the October 24 municipal election who will make the city’s social and economic recovery the major focus of the next Owen Sound City Council.
Please indicate your support by filling in the boxes to the right.
Background:
We are Rebound Owen Sound.
We are residents of Owen Sound. We are people who care about this city and everyone who lives here.
We want to see a successful community that values all cultures, respects our rich history, deep agricultural roots, and the natural beauty of where we live. We want leadership in Owen Sound that understands the need to protect our environment and manage growth while making sure no one is left behind.
Today, we face rapid changes, including economic uncertainty and overburdened healthcare and social services systems, resulting in:
• growing demand for mental health and addictions services
• rising crime rates
• the housing crisis and increasing homelessness
• slow population growth
• slower economic development
• failure to find and keep healthcare professionals, resulting in too few nurses and family doctors
• property taxes that are among the highest in the province
Public policy failures at all levels of government have resulted in more homeless people on the streets of Owen Sound and across Canada.
Rebound Owen Sound believes it’s the responsibility of citizens and local governments in small cities like ours to address social challenges like homelessness.
It's been done before in places like Medicine Hat, Alberta that has nearly wiped-out homelessness. Mayor Ted Clugston credits the city’s success to its Housing First program, which seeks to immediately place unsheltered people in long-term housing before addressing mental health and addiction problems. The city is saving millions in policing and related services as a result.
The Housing First program enables people to get the most important thing – an address, in order to maximize available social services benefits from federal and provincial governments.
“It costs us about $20,000 a year to house somebody. Even if you don’t care about these people, and have no feeling about your fellow man, if you’re a taxpayer, it saves you money. We’ve housed over 1,000 people at a cost of around $2 million.”
Clugston has some advice for politicians who “mean well.”
“They are good people for the most part, but they have this sense of helplessness that they can’t do it,” he said. “I keep telling people that they can’t do it alone. You don’t have the money. You must have the other two levels of government involved.”
We can apply lessons learned about homelessness, mental health, and addictions from Medicine Hat and elsewhere to help Owen Sound grow and prosper.
Rebound Owen Sound is encouraging candidates to run in the municipal election on October 24 who will make the city’s social and economic recovery the major focus of the next Owen Sound City Council.
Let’s make the best of the worst and take the COVID 19 pandemic as an opportunity to reconsider what Owen Sound is all about, where we’re headed, and how we’re going to get there. Let’s help Owen Sound rebound from the pandemic with compassionate leadership from our next Mayor, Deputy Mayor, and City Council.
Let’s elect a Council that will apply what we know to rebuild excitement and opportunity by bringing citizens together to plan and act.
Stay tuned for more!
Stay tuned as Rebound Owen Sound brings you news and information about the issues at stake in the 2022 municipal election. We will let you know how candidates answer questions and respond to our policy priorities. Rebound Owen Sound will give you opportunities to talk with candidates, to help you decide who to vote for. And if you need help casting your ballot, we’ll make that happen. We also welcome your voice and your assistance with spreading the word.
Be sure not to miss anything – just check the box to receive our updates.
Why is this important?
• In its 2020 report, Canada’s Most Dangerous Cities, Maclean’s magazine ranked Owen Sound #42 out of 237 communities across Canada, with a violent crime index of 106 (the Canadian average is 82.4). Owen Sound showed a five-year increase of 32.6% in violent crime, including assault, sexual assault, break and enter and impaired driving.
• According to the Statistics Canada 2021 census report, the population growth rate for Owen Sound remains at the low end among local municipalities, with a net population increase of 271 people to 21,612, up just 1.3 per cent over the previous census. Between 2011 and 2016, Owen Sound’s population actually fell 1.6 per cent.
• Even before the pandemic began, levels of community belonging and satisfaction among people residing in Owen Sound/Bruce and Grey Counties were comparatively lower for how well they felt the local government was responding to community needs, how well democracy was working in the community, and regarding access to educational opportunities. (See footnote below)
COVID-19 and the damage it has done has forced us to take a hard look at the facts and rethink what community belonging, and civic leadership mean.
The goal of Rebound Owen Sound is a community where the majority of people feel safe, feel like they belong to this community and that this community belongs to them.
“You’ll see impact in just about every aspect of community life, whether it’s public safety, education, housing, economic development, population growth or just being good parents or good neighbours. By strengthening that social, human and community bond, we could just take Owen Sound into an entirely different way of thinking about our city ,” Jan Chamberlain, former city council member and 2021 - Owen Sound Senior Volunteer of the Year
Note: “Wellbeing in Bruce and Grey Counties: A Summary of Results from the CIW Community Wellbeing Survey.” Waterloo, ON: Canadian Index of Wellbeing and the University of Waterloo. (Smale, 2018)
How it will be delivered
The Rebound Owen Sound campaign petition will gather names of supporters and candidates who commit to act on the policy priorities identified by Rebound Owen Sound for the October 24 municipal election. An all-candidates event is planned for October 12th at the Harmony Centre in Owen Sound. Policy priorities and the candidates’ responses on the issues will be shared back to all voters. To make sure you don’t miss any of Rebound Owen Sound’s news and events, subscribe to our email list.