Social issues are at the forefront of the campaign of gallery assistant and archivist Misa Nikolic, who is running for mayor in North Battleford.
Nikolic, who moved to the community earlier this year, said the reason he is running is because he is “fed up.”
“I have seen a lot of things that I am unhappy with [that] I think are being handled poorly, at a time of crisis, frankly, that calls for leadership,” said Nikolic. “And that leadership has been lacking.”
He has mostly worked in the arts and heritage industry. One of his positions in Alberta required him to visit some 200 communities, which opened his eyes to what is possible.
“There are a lot of municipalities that have similar problems to North Battleford and some of them have come up with really innovative solutions — solutions to crime, to stagnant population, to economic decay. If we want to address those things we don’t need to reinvent the wheel, we need to look at the success stories and find out how they did it.”
He points to Medicine Hat, which “famously solved homelessness in their city.”
“They had a multi-pronged strategy to address not just homelessness but poverty, food insecurity, they offered job counselling, family counselling, addictions counselling. If you’re committed and you get other agencies involved, which they did, there’s an economic benefit because abandoning those people to the justice system and the healthcare system is a lot more expensive.”
“Looking at North Battleford, historically our crime problems go back about four decades. And successive administrations here have always done the same thing — more policing, more policing. But we’re still a crime city and we are known as a crime city and it hurts us, it hurts our reputation. But it’s not undeserved.”
Nikolic said he wants to bring a different perspective — not a business or finance perspective, he said — and “challenge the established logic.”
He wants to bring more project management techniques to City Hall and “start tightening up the reporting relationships, the communication chain. There’s a lot of things that are broken and in the absence of real leadership, you have different administrators pulling in different directions with their own agendas. These people were not elected and they weren’t given instructions to pursue those agendas. But council is largely unaware of these things because the information they get is heavily filtered.”
Nikolic said there will be still be finance and business experts on staff at the city and will still have some say, “but I want to have a better balance because right now they are drowning out other voices. They don’t have the sociological expertise, they don’t have the cultural expertise, and some of the decisions they are making are based on assumptions and stereotypes instead of data. And I am a data driven decision type of person.”
Nikolic points to the economic benefit of cultural facilities.
“When somebody comes to North Battleford to visit like our museum or the art gallery, they’re not just dropping a couple of bucks into the donation box. They’re buying gas. They are buying a meal. They’re going to buy stuff at a gift shop. They’re going to go to on Facebook and tell people about the experience they had. And that’s what’s hard to measure, but it’s a big deal and it’s an economic driver.”
His platform calls for making the cultural sector a priority, and would make reconciliation a permanent process. “This needs to be at the forefront of everything council does and it needs to be a renewable process so we can address issues like institutionalized racism and inter generational poverty.”
“Those people aren’t ‘vagrants’ or ‘outsiders’ or ‘others.’ They’re our neighbours, they are the community.”
Nikolic would review the city’s handling of the pandemic and introduce measures to prevent unwarranted spending. And he calls for pedestrian-oriented planning to address the city’s sidewalks.
What makes Nikolic distinct from the other candidates, he said, is that he has a wide ranging education and experience, but he’s “not afraid to admit when I don’t know something or be corrected if I have made a mistake, and I’m not afraid to call on experts for their advice.”
He also emphasizes he will bring something different to the table at City Hall.
“We need more discourse, more conversation. And we need to reassess priorities and that’s not going to happen if everybody’s in agreement.”
