Town of Cochrane Strategic Plan – Final Report October 2014
opportunities. This is a very engaged group that is especially interested in developing a highprofile community location to showcase their products.
First Nations
The community appears to have very good relations with both the urban and adjacent Aboriginal
communities. The turnout for this focus group was excellent. There is little evidence of tension
between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in the community. Participants in this session were
engaged and interested, and discussed ways to collaborate with the municipality on projects of
mutual benefit.
Technology
The focus group for the Technology Session had two participants, both of whom were from CTS.
While the turnout for this session was small, this is not entirely unexpected. A common problem
around recruiting participants to participate in technology discussions is that they often don’t
define themselves in those terms. For example, manufacturers, web designers, architects and
trades people may be helping to build local technology capacity, yet often don’t consider
themselves as part of this sector. One of the concerns that arose across several focus groups was
the fact that local businesses and organizations are not readily or proactively engaging technology
for use in their operations. It will be important to build some leadership capacity in an appropriate
group to promote technology applications and implementation.
Forestry/Mining/Transportation
This group was well-attended, although none of the Mine representatives were able to attend, we
later captured their input through face-to-face interviews.
Business Sector
The business and retail sector showed a lack of interest in participating in the strategic planning
process. For example:
• There were no respondents to the Business and Community Ideas survey. Nor did any
private sector business owners attend the Retail Sector focus group. In our experience, it is
unusual to have such low engagement from the business community. In other
communities, local business owners have tended to be enthusiastic about the opportunities
that strategic planning brings, and they are usually motivated to contribute towards
economic development plans.
• Our perception is that the Board of Trade is somewhat disengaged from Municipal Council
and its members. Interviews and focus group comments suggest that there is little proactive communication between the BoT and the business community. It may be struggling
to determine how best to develop and deliver services to its membership.
We anticipate that there may be significant challenges associated with trying to engage the
business community in strategic plan projects.
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