ROB MURRAY: I’m speaking with Banff-Kananaskis MLA Miranda Rosin. The idea that was put forward is to do a Q&A session with your constituents, and I think there are a few locally relevant topics you wanted to discuss today. I guess my first question is, why did you want to do this kind of outreach?

MIRANDA ROSIN: It’s been tough during COVID to reach a lot of people. We have emails and we have telephones, but what COVID has really done for society is taken away our ability to connect with people and to hear each other’s voice sometimes, and just be human to human. I thought that coming on the radio today, it might be a really great chance to answer people’s questions and concerns, not in a written response over an email where it’s impersonal, but to be more personal about things.

RM: That leads into a good question. I have one from Katrina who wants to know about the choices you make when it comes to answering questions from your constituents. Aurora asks how you intend to reach out to those in your writing that feel unrepresented or ignored.

MR: I’m a people person and an extrovert, and what I love the most about my job is the ability to connect with people, even if we have different viewpoints or different opinions. It’s a very diverse riding, I would argue the most diverse in the province. One half of the riding is mountain tourism and environmental based, and the other half of the writing is your typical rural Albertan economy.  here’s always different viewpoints to balance, but I do my best to make sure that anyone who emails my office or calls our office with a question or a request for help or assistance hears back as quickly as possible. Typically, my office gets anywhere between 200 to over a thousand emails a day. I think our record so far is 2,954 in one day. We do our best to engage with everyone. Pretty much anyone who emails my office, as long as it’s in a respectful matter, is going to get a response. They may not like it, they may disagree with the policy or the direction, but we do our best to absolutely make sure everyone gets a response. I always try to do a good job of explaining the why behind the policy so that if people may not like the direction it’s going, at least I can try my best to explain why we’ve gone that direction and what we’re hoping to get out of the policy. Right now the bulk of our outreach work has been dealing with the difficulties that COVID has brought on. Over the last few weeks I’ve been working hand in hand with business owners to make sure that they have access to the Small and Medium Enterprise Relaunch Grant. We’ve had over 400 businesses from our riding be successful in the first intake. I think the bulk of those have been from Canmore and Banff.

RM: Let’s clear the air about your Christmas travel. I think there are some people who still have some lingering questions about this. Where did you spend Christmas?

MR: I spent Christmas in Saskatchewan, and I don’t want to shy away from that. I will fully acknowledged that I went to Saskatchewan by myself, and I want to apologize too if there’s any misconception that I was skirting the rules or that I thought I was above the rules. That could not be further from the truth. That complete honest truth is that I live totally by myself. I do have a boyfriend and I guess everybody in the riding saw the Christmas cards that I sent out. I wish that I was as good of an interior decorator or designer to be able to make my house look that good, but I’m not, so that photo was taken at a portrait studio and Morgan and I maintain separate residences. We’re not engaged, we’re not married. As Christmas was approaching, Morgan and his mother, his sister, his other sister, his grandma, and his grandpa all came in contact with COVID. They all tested positive, so I was completely unable to see him for all of December. When he was finally coming out of his quarantine we chatted and I made the decision that because I’d already spent most of the month without him, I was going to spend Christmas with my parents and choose not to see him. Both Alberta and Saskatchewan allow individuals who live by themselves to see another household in Alberta. The regulations are that single individuals or those who live alone can see two other people. In Saskatchewan, they were allowed to see one full household, but nonetheless I made sure that I abided by the Alberta rules when I traveled. I drove straight there, stopped for gas in Medicine Hat, and that was it. I went to see my two parents, my mom and my dad, and no more. I understand the optics may have been a bit concerning for some people, and I know people are frustrated and exhausted from being stuck in their houses, alone and unable to socialize. I do want to be super clear that I was extra careful to make sure that I did not break any regulations and, at the end of the day, me driving across the provincial border by myself is really no different than me crossing the BC border on a ski lift at Sunshine. No rules were broken. I in no way view myself as above them or someone who deserves to make the rules and then skirt them. I think one thing we need the most in politics these days is integrity.

RM: I’m curious though – even though you didn’t break any rules, with the optics and how this has all played out, would you have made different choices over Christmas if you knew what the general consensus about political travel over Christmas would be?

MR: Yeah, I suppose I would’ve made different choices, honestly, if I realized the backlash this would bring. I also perhaps didn’t realize how people were perceiving these regulations. We thought that we were clear, as a government, that as long as you live alone you can see two other people. We didn’t specify whether those two people were inter-provincially or in your own hometown. I didn’t even realize that there would be a perception that I was possibly breaking the rules or putting myself above the rules. Knowing that people were so concerned and so scared of seeing their families or abiding by our rules, in hindsight, absolutely I think I would’ve made a different decision, but at the end of the day I didn’t break the regulations. I actually encourage people who are like me and who do live alone, I think it’s really important to recognize it’s not easy to be by yourself for coming up on a full year. Now you are allowed to have those two people in your cohort. As of this Monday, you’re allowed to see 10 more people outside as long as masks are worn.

RM: By far, the number one subject people have asked and commented about is with regards to coal mining, the rescinding of the coal policy, and the potential for coal mining in the Eastern Slopes of the Rockies. Not just in our area, but there’s a lot of concern about this across the province. Can you speak to that?

MR: I’m actually really glad we’ve brought this up today because there’s a lot that needs to be explained about what’s going on. You’re totally right, we’ve heard concerns about this not just from the Canmore and Banff crowd. We genuinely have heard an outpouring about this from all across the province, and we need to make sure that we’re protecting our mountains. There is also a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding that’s happened with the coal policy. First off, there is no open pit mining that is ever going to be permitted on Kananaskis lands or on any of the most environmentally sensitive lands of the Eastern Slopes, which are typically categorized as category one. We heard loud and clear across the province this past week that that’s not enough and that Albertans want us to take further action to make sure we protect this beautiful place we call home, so we made the decision to pause all future leases on category two lands as well, and we’ve made the decision to cancel the 11 leases that were awarded in the December auction.

I think it’s important to look at the background behind all of this too. The 1976 coal policy was the policy that was rescinded earlier in the year, and that’s kind of what sparked this entire conversation. The policy itself was essentially no more than an early attempt at land use planning, and it’s been amended so many times over the years and it’s been overwritten with other pieces of legislation. When we rescinded that coal policy, it by no means gave any additional permissions to coal companies or coal developers, nor did it make it any easier for them to develop, or explore, or mine coal in these areas. What repealing the policy actually did was it put the coal industry into the same regulatory system as every other commodity in our province. The reason we rescinded this policy was really to make sure that every project, regardless of its commodity, can’t advance in Alberta or in these environmentally sensitive lands without passing through a difficult regulatory and environmental review. The coal policy recission itself has the opportunity to be a really good thing for our province.

The other piece of this puzzle is the Grassy Mountain project. That’s the big mine in question that everyone has been concerned about and people have connected this Grassy Mountain project to the rescission of the 1976 coal policy, but those two in actuality are completely unrelated. The Grassy Mountain project is set to mine metallurgical coal, which is used to make steel. It’s not going to be used for thermal coal, and I should also be clear that our government is continuing with our plans to totally phase out thermal coal by 2030. This Grassy Mountain project was actually initiated back in 2015 and they received their lease from the former government, not us. The Grassy Mountain project has been under review since 2015, so going on six years now they’ve been going through their environmental review process, and they still haven’t been given the green light to proceed. Just because they have a lease does not mean that they can develop the coal. It doesn’t even mean that they can explore the coal. In fact, until they get that green light, they have no more rights even set foot on that land than the average Albertan does. This review process is very rigorous. It’s a joint process through the federal and provincial government. If the project does get go ahead from the review process, I believe projects of this size then have to go to the federal cabinet and the cabinet votes to give them the final yay or nay, similar to the Teck Mine that got killed earlier in the year. It’s also important to note, with the Grassy project, that this land has been designated for coal development since the 1970s. This land was never zoned for public recreation or protected lands.

At the end of the day, I just really want to assure everybody listening that we are not blowing up mountains, we’re not cutting the tops off mountains, we are not open pit mining on the mountain by any stretch. We’ve rescinded this policy to just make sure that coal has to pass through strong environmental review processes before any new mines can be approved, and we’ve done that just to make sure that we do protect the mountains while also balancing Alberta’s industry. As the MLA for Banff-Kananaskis, I’ll continue to making sure that our mountains are protected, and I take the needs of everyone living out here back to cabinet. Hopefully we’ll continue to see policy direction that balances the needs of everyone.

RM: Speaking about protected areas, I think a topic you wanted to discuss that’s very locally relevant has to do with Alberta Parks.

MR: It’s undoubtedly been the biggest file that I have faced as an MLA. We’ve received, I think, over 5000 or 6000 emails related to parks over the course of the past year. I just wanted to take the opportunity to explain what’s actually happening in parks and what’s not happening in parks.

Our government by no means has intent of taking away from our parks system or harming parks. In fact, we announced a $43 million investment in Alberta’s provincial park system Kananaskis Country here at home,actually got the biggest chunk of that investment at $15 million. All of that $15 million is going directly into hiking and ski trail maintenance and upgrades in the park. We’re upgrading the Barrier Lake visitor area and rebuilding the William Watson Lodge. We’ve also spent $10 million over the past year to conserve an extra 22,000 hectors of land across the province that have been deemed environmentally sensitive, but at the end of the day we’re still hearing a lot of people concerned that parks are being sold or parks are being privatized. Again, same as the coal issue. I want to be so clear that we are not selling parks. There is not one single square inch of park land in Alberta that is for sale. Some people have claimed that, because some small portions of park land are turning to crown land, that our intent is then to sell the crown land, but I can assure you we are also not going to be selling one square inch of that crown land ever. Those lands that have been moved out of the parks designation represent only 0.3% of provincial park land in Alberta. We are looking for partners to help us co-manage the lands. We have been very firm on the policy direction that anyone who wants to take over and help us manage those lands has to be either a not-for-profit community organization, an indigenous community or a municipality, but in no way are we privatizing any of these lands nor are we selling them.

RM: With the Alberta parks file, it really seems there might be a trust issue. People aren’t necessarily sure if they can take what the government says about Alberta Parks at face value right now. How is the government going to work to rebuild that trust with people who really care about our parks?

MR: You’re somewhat right. Initially when these park changes happened I don’t think we were prepared for the amount of blowback that we received, but we’ve been doing a lot better job to try and be as transparent about the direction we’re going in regards to parks, the environment, and also coal. We’ve been making sure to do more press releases. We’ve been trying to explain the why behind decisions. We launched a website called My Parks Will Go On that really lays out the facts and kind of myth busts the word on the street as to what’s happening. On the coal file, we’re actually launching another website to do the same thing. We’re making sure to have more transparent press conferences. We’re launching websites. We’re launching various ad campaigns to make sure that the facts are out there and whatever means people want to use to try and find the facts, whether it’s contacting us directly or doing their own research, they’re available on the internet and not just in a government policy book somewhere.

RM: A couple of questions here from Jessica and Kirstin. They both want to talk about teachers, specifically regarding consultation for the curriculum redesign and rollout.

MR: One of the largest things we were elected on was rewriting Alberta’s curriculum. We’ve had one of the most extensive consultation processes in Alberta’s history to work on this new curriculum. I believe a draft has now been submitted to Alberta Education by the people who were tasked with brainstorming and coming up with suggestions for this curriculum. When you appoint a panel or any review body, the suggestions they report back to the government are by no means guaranteed to be implemented by the government. I believe our hope is to have the curriculum begin piloting either later in this year or early September of next year, and hopefully to have the entire curriculum rolled out shortly after that as long as all goes well. We are just trying to get back to our basics. We want to make sure that kids in Alberta are prepared for success. It’ll include the typical things that we expect to learn in schools – our history, our math, our sciences, but it’s also going to include some new topics like financial literacy and energy literacy, and try to educate our kids on things that are really important, not just inside the classroom, but in life once they get out of school.

I think it’s important to touch on just how important education is for our province. Under our last budget we made sure that every single school division in the entire province got a significant budget increase. In fact, every school division in the province now is sitting at its highest budget in their history. We’ve also worked to amend the rural funding formula, which I know is something the school divisions like CRPS here in town have been advocating for years. For context, Canadian Rockies Public Schools here in town received a $1.7 million increase last year in their budget, and then we went through the COVID-19 process to give them an additional $2.5 million increase. I know our superintendent in town has told many people publicly that this has been their best budget in history. We wanted to make sure that as students went back to school and that as their parents sent them back to school they felt safe to do so, so we provided over 466,000 liters of hand sanitizer to classrooms all across the province. We also gave two masks to every child. For those parents who still felt uncomfortable putting their children back in school, we made sure that there was a free online learning toolkit to help make their lives a bit easier.

RM: I have a question here from Sue. She wants to know how you’d recommend balancing the government goal of expanding tourism in the Bow Valley while ensuring a livable community. She also wants to know if there will be a goal to increase tourism to other areas of the province, not just ours.

MR: One of the things that I was proudest to run on when I first ran for our government two years ago was the fact that we had made a hard commitment for tourism to be a large part of Alberta’s economic recovery. Our goal was going to be to double the visitor spend in Alberta to $20 billion by 2030. Not to double the amount of the government is spending on bringing visitors here, but to double the amount that visitors are spending when they come from out of province. Banff and Cenmore have always been kind of the tourist capital for the province, maybe the country one could argue. We have the most beautiful landscapes anywhere in the world, and we have incredible people doing incredible things out here. Because of that, I think it’s so important for the expertise from our communities to help drive the government’s tourism strategy. Sue is right that we need to find a way to balance tourism with livability. We need people to work in our tourism industry and at these businesses, and to do that people need to want to live in our towns, and they should. We are so fortunate to live where we do so. I know the Town of Canmore and Tourism Canmore Kananaskis have established a Tourism Task Force and they’re working together to try and find a balance between the community needs and the needs of the tourism industry. The most important thing we can do is to make sure that we balance tourism growth. There’s no denying, if you walk down Banff Avenue or Canmore’s Main Street in July in normal year, I guess maybe not a COVID year, but in normal year it is packed. I think one of the most important focuses for not only Tourism Canmore Kananaskis and Banff & Lake Louise Tourism, but also for our government and a lot of the operators in our tourism communities – we’re all kind of trying to work together on this – is to find a way to spread out the visitation growth. We’re already doing a great job attracting visitors in the summer, but there’s still a lot of opportunity to expand our visitation either in the winter or in the shoulder season.

Also, absolutely, we need to be expanding tourism across the entire province. There’s no doubt the Canmore/Banff/Kananaskis areas are going to lead that tourism strategy, but if we want to double the tourism spend it’s going to take a lot more than just doing that in Canmore and Banff. We are definitely looking at expanding all throughout the province. Earlier in the year, I led a group of about a hundred tourism operators across the province to gather ideas, feedback, and strategies, not just for survival, but for what happens after COVID. How are we going to grow tourism all across the province? There are a lot of opportunities to be found in agritourism, small breweries, little unique experiences across the province, pubs, restaurants, and so the only way we’re going to be able to double our tourism spend by 2030 and achieve that goal is undoubtedly by branching out just from the Bow Valley and working with operators all across the province. It’s trying to promote Alberta as a holistic experience and as a place that everyone, whether they’re in the United States, or if they’re in China, or they’re in Europe, they can come to Alberta and spend a month here, and travel all across the province and get a different experience. We’ll hear more about that when we eventually get around to releasing the ten-year tourism strategy. Similar to the education curriculum, the ten-year strategy is being largely developed by industry, kind of hands-off from government, and they’ve come back to us with our first draft. We’re going to go through it and see what’s feasible. The strategy was supposed to be released last fall. We’ve kind of taken a step back when we realized the key thing that the tourism industry needs to focus on right now, frankly, is survival. We’re just going to try to get through this period, and then hopefully we’ll be able to release the full ten-year strategy sometime this year and kind of see what the future for tourism will look like all across the board.

RM: Regarding economic recovery after this pandemic in general – what are the government’s plans for that? Are there any riding-specific things that people need to be aware of?

MR: We were elected on a pretty clear platform of jobs and the economy. Earlier in the summer we officially launched our economic recovery plan and I’m super excited about it. It really capitalizes on innovation, entrepreneurship, and diversification of our economy all across the province. I think if there’s one common theme to the plan it’s that it will really do a good job of capitalizing on what I’ve always said is our best natural resource, and that’s our people. The biggest pillar of our plan was to lower the corporate tax rate from 12% to 8%. Alberta now has not only the lowest business tax rate in Canada, but in all of North America, and our goal with this is we want Alberta to be competitive for every business and every industry. The best way we figured to do that was to make sure that it was easy for businesses to work here and that it was cost effective for them to relocate here. The goal is to have businesses move from all around the world, whether that’s Europe, or Wall Street, or Texas. Wherever it may be, we want those businesses to move to Alberta, set their headquarters up here, and hire as many people as they need to fill those operations. There’s been a big misconception on this that we only dropped the tax rates to help out the big guys, but that’s completely false. 97% of businesses in Alberta that pay the corporate tax rate are considered either small or medium sized businesses. For context, my dad is a photographer. He’s a one man shop that runs a portrait studio, and he is incorporated. By dropping the corporate tax rate we’re optimistic it’s going to really help a lot of smaller businesses and medium sized businesses either scale up or give people the leg up that they need to finally start a business that they’ve been thinking about for years.

Other themes would be diversification within our existing world-class energy sector and resource sector. The economic recovery plan has comprehensive strategies not only to continue supporting our typical oil and gas, but also for natural gas, liquid natural gas, hydrogen, and petrochemical production for medical equipment and other forms that petrochemicals are used. There’s also a whole other stream of our economic recovery plan that has to deal with these new and emerging sectors, which is where I get quite excited. I’m younger than a lot of politicians have traditionally been in the province, and I think I bring a different perspective on the way the world is heading. To me, there’s no denying that technology is the way of our future, so I’ve been super excited to see that we’ve launched the Innovation Employment Grant. It’s the first grant of its type in all of Canada, I believe, that will target companies who are either new or pre-income to help them grow and research and develop in Alberta. We’ve also deregulated the green energy industry, and in the last year we’ve already seen $2.4 billion of private investment from wind and solar, and co-generation companies moving to Alberta and setting up which is awesome news. We’ve also done things like invest $175 million into Invest Alberta. We’ve launched a rural broadband strategy to bring high-speed internet to rural Alberta. As well, we’ve officially made the largest infrastructure investment in Alberta’s history, $10 billion. We’ve advanced a lot of infrastructure projects that were to be on the books for later years and should higher up to about 32,000 Albertans to work on these projects while also making sure that we capitalize on Alberta’s best, which is our innovators and entrepreneurs and the people who really built this province over the years.

RM: I just want a little back up a little bit to the the corporate tax rate cut. I know this is something that’s a long-term thing, and I know it’s something that scales over time, but is there any evidence that method is working to attract growth and investment in our province?

MR: Right now it’s a weird period because we’re in COVID-19, and I think a lot of investors all around the world and businesses, frankly, are a little bit skittish about everything going on, but Suncor announced that they are relocating every single position from their Ontario headquarters to downtown Calgary. I met with them and they assured me that they are moving here because they believe in this province and they believe in the business friendly policies we’re putting forward. We’ve seen bio-refineries set up in the province. I think the reward of this tax reduction will really pay off once we get past the COVID-19 era. On the contrary, and I hate to do this, but the previous government raised the corporate tax and they brought in $9 billion less revenue because the higher tax rate actually drove business out. We’re confident that if that scenario is true, the inverse will be true.

RM: Dennis has asked a question. He says the UCP has set up a panel to study the impact of the $15 minimum wage on businesses employing so-called liquor servers. He realizes that the panel is still meeting and nothing has been published on this one, but do you have any preliminary opinions on this?

MR: To be honest, I have not really heard or seen any of the work that the panel is doing. I know the reason this panel was struck is that we heard from servers across the province, although maybe not necessarily in the Bow Valley. I will preface by saying that I completely understand the cost of living in the Bow Valley is clearly exorbitantly higher than anywhere else in the province, if not most of Canada, so it’s a bit of a different situation. We heard loud and clear, and not just from restaurant owners across the province but actually from young people all across the province, their hours are being cut and they were getting less hours and less money because the restaurants couldn’t afford to give them the hours they needed to survive. The reason we struck this panel was to investigate if liquor servers would be better off if they potentially had a lower hourly wage but way more hours, allowing them to get way more tips. The panel is still doing their work. They haven’t reported back to us and until I see their findings I think it would be wrong of me to give an assumption as to when I would think of such a policy. When this panel does present their findings and when our government has to make the decision, I’ll be sure to make sure that those who are making the final decisions know about the situation that exists in our Valley and know how this could impact us, and know that the wages required out here are higher to begin with than in the rest of the province. Hopefully we’ll be able to find a balance of making sure that restaurant workers all across the province and in the Bow Valley are able to get the hours they need and able to make the wages they needed to pay the rent, pay their bills, and just enjoy life. I think everybody needs to enjoy life once we get out of COVID.

RM: Jessia wants to know what degree substance abuse and mental health issues in Banff are on your radar. What kind of harm reduction or recovery strategies do you think would work best in Banff, and how you could help support those efforts at the provincial level?

MR: This is a good question, especially in light of COVID-19. Kids Help Phone released their stats and just how much calls to Kids Help Phone have increased over the past year. We’ve seen some of the opioid overdose statistics from various jurisdictions across Canada that have been pretty grave. Across the province, our government has put a really strong emphasis on mental health and addiction support and that’s something I’m really proud of us for doing. In our first budget we increased the mental health budget by $200 million, and that included $22 million for students on university campuses where we typically see a lot of the worst mental health issues arise. During COVID-19 we also tacked on an another $53 million so that we could provide more online phone and in-person recovery supports and so we could also create 4,000 addiction and mental health treatment spaces. Something else we also did was a pretty significant policy change around mental health. The Mental Health Act is a piece of legislation that exists to allow individuals with serious mental health disorders to be involuntarily detained at facilities for treatment, or even receive mandatory treatment. We took a hard look at that act and looked at what are the rights of people who are being involuntarily detained. We changed the definition in the act to ensure that only patients who have a potential to improve can be detained, so those with permanent brain injuries or incurable disorders can’t be involuntarily detained for an extended period of time with no out. We’ve also expanded the rule of the mental health patient advocate to ensure patients know their rights and they know what legal avenues they have, and we increased power to the mental health review panel which supports community reintegration for long-term patients. One other big thing we changed under this act was we allowed, for the first time, nurse practitioners to perform mental health assessments and evaluations on patients.

But I really understand, especially in places like Banff, for this portfolio it’s not just about the mental health aspects. There is a huge addictions aspect. The biggest thing that I’ve been really proud of our government for doing is, for the first time in Alberta’s history, we eliminated all user fees from publicly funded addiction treatment beds. Before this happened those publicly funded treatment beds were running at an average cost of $40 a day. We can make sure that any Albertan, regardless of their age or their community or their social demographic, is able to access the treatment that they need to overcome that addiction and to move on with their lives. Something else we’ve begun the process of creating are drug treatment courts. We’re in the process of creating five of those across the province. They’ll allow offenders of non-violent crimes, which are typically the consequence of an addiction or a drug related offense, to have judicially supervised treatment and recovery rather than being sentenced to something much more difficult that would inhibit their recovery process. These will also supplement the treatment by frequent drug testing, social services support, and really hopefully help break the cycle and the revolving door of crime that often exists in our province, especially in rural communities, motivated by addiction.

RM: I have an interesting question from Trish. She’s rather appalled at some of the things that people have called you online and on social media. She’s wondering if you think you might be getting some of that flack because you’re younger or you’re female. Do you have anything to say about negative comments on the internet?

MR: Yeah, I have  lots to say on that, but I’ll bite my tongue on a lot of it. Phil, in my office, keeps a folder of all of the worst things that people have said to me over email so that I don’t have to see them, because some of them are just ruthlessly terrible. He kind of triages them out so that they don’t get to me, but I went through them yesterday because I thought  I should try to compile a list, and if asked I could read some of them on the air or something. I think people don’t realize the gravity of what they’re saying when they email our office sometimes, or when they comment on Facebook, or whatever their platform may be. People say some really nasty stuff. If I had a dollar for every time someone emailed me an F-bomb, or the B-word, or the C- word, or a list of 500 other profanities and insults that I’ve been called, ranging from my appearance to my maturity…it’s getting, frankly, unbelievable. I guess it’s easier for people to type things behind a computer screen that they would never say in real life, or I hope they wouldn’t say it to my face…I guess I haven’t seen a lot of people over the last year because of COVID. People really have become nasty on the internet and the level of discourse that society has stooped to has to be a record low. It’s one thing to aim that animosity towards a politician, but in my Facebook feeds I’m starting to see it aimed towards one another. We need to really think about the words that we are saying and typing and the effect those words has on society as a whole, and on the person on the other end of that screen who’s receiving those things. As an elected official I want to help people as much as I possibly can, but if someone emails me an email with 26 swear words in it, it’s hard to help that person. When we get those emails to our office it slows down our ability to actually help the people who are reaching out for us asking like, please, my business is about to go bankrupt, I need to access this grant, can you help me? We’re bombarded with insults, derogatory comments, and to be honest, death threats and surveillance threats. I think our next generation of kids that we’re raising are going to look at our world and say, what is this place? Like, why are all the adults so nasty? I don’t have kids now, but I don’t want to raise kids in a world that is so toxic and so nasty. We’re also going to struggle to attract people to run for public office when they see that the only way they get treated is by being battered and bruised, and having cars do drive-bys on their house to report when the lights are on or to share their home address on the internet, as people have been doing with me over the past week.

On the topic of a lot of the vitriol being directed at me because of my age or my gender or my hair color, which is blonde for everyone listening…I don’t think that it plays a large role. I do get a lot of backlash and people making comments that I’m too young, or too immature, or too blonde, or just a little girl who is beholden to the big boys. I do get comments that are clearly directed at me as a young female in politics, but my male colleagues also get comments that are just as nasty, they’re just different. Interestingly though, what I’ve found is that the bulk of people who insult my appearance or my age or my immaturity or whatever it may be, are other women, not men. Women should support women in leadership roles, or even in just general life. Sometimes we just need to look in the mirror as a society about how we’re treating others and think about if those others were treating me that way, would I like it? Or if those others were treating my child that way, would I stand for it as a parent? Our society is so divided and so polarized, and we all need to come together and support one another, but we need to get out from behind our computer screen and we just need to start treating each other as human beings.

RM: I’ve had a lot of questions submitted to me here and there’s definitely a lot more areas we could talk about, but we’ve been talking for quite some time, so I have one more question and this one comes from Alexandria. She wants to know if you have any New Year’s resolutions, maybe some areas that you would like to improve on in 2021.

MR: I do have few New Year’s resolutions. Most of them are admittedly just in my personal life. One of them, and this is so cliché it almost hurts me to say it out loud, but I need to get more active. My goal is to go to the gym or at least work out at least three times a week because I’ve gotten really bad at that lately. McDonald’s just opened up literally one block away from my house which has been devastating for me because I have no willpower. I’ve been taking French tutoring for the past year and I have a resolution to actually study my French more than just doing my one hour session every week. The other resolution is that I want to learn more about the stock market. My dad has always been very active in the stock market. It’s something that I’ve always wanted to learn more about and I’ve never taken the time.

In my job as MLA, things I really wanted to accomplish this year seemed to continually change, but I want to be as heavily involved in the development of the ten-year tourism strategy as possible and to be more active in our communities. I also have a private members motion coming up in the legislature at some point this year. I’d like to put forward a motion that I think can actually do something to make our world better, and hopefully to have that motion pass. There’s never a guarantee on private members things. I have an idea of what I want to do with it, but I suppose I’ll wait until it hits the official orders.

RM: If people want to reach out to you, what’s the best way to do that?

MR: Contact the office. I would recommend using our email. Every email that we get we do our very best to answer as long as you’re not swearing at me. For more urgent requests, people can always phone (403) 609-4509.

The transcription of this interview has been edited for syntax

Filed under: Banff, Canmore, Miranda Rosin