Young Heath Kimber was quietly building a plastic and rubber shape castle Saturday morning at the Kootenay Child Development Centre (CDC) when he was joined by a fellow ‘builder.’

British Columbia Premier Christy Clark, in the region to help Kootenay East MLA Bill Bennett officially launch his 2013 election campaign, spent more than half an hour touring the soon-to-be officially opened Cranbrook facility Saturday morning (June 9).

Near the end of her tour, the Premier and Bennett announced they were delivering a $50,000 community gaming grant to the Community Connections Society of Southeast B.C., which oversees the CDC.

Clark said she was impressed by the expanded facility and noted it is taxpayer money well spent.

“It centralizes services for families and I think. It’s difficult enough to be a parent of a healthy child but it’s incredibly tough when your child is facing some kind of a challenge. And many people will say they don’t know where to go in the community and what they do is they have to go to one place after another, after another. So centralizing those services – regionalizing those services – is hugely important. It also means that you’re able to attract the highest quality people. For example, the pediatricians who are here might have thought twice about coming to Cranbrook if there hadn’t been this CDC (child development centre),” she said. “It means they are able to collaborate and work together. These kinds of centres make such a big difference.”

Clark credited Bennett for the grant money coming to the region.

“You have Bill Bennett to thank for that. Bill has been relentless in going from agency to agency, minister to minister in government to try and make sure he secures as much money as possible; piece by piece by piece. So, $100,000 from the Ministry of Health one day, $50,000 from the Ministry of Communities the next day. You know that’s what a great MLA does. And there is no MLA better at finding opportunities for his community to benefit in Victoria than Bill Bennett. “

After an extensive provincial review, Clark increased the annual base budget for community gaming grants, from $15 million to $135 million in January this year. Her predecessor’s government (Gordon Campbell) slashed the community gaming grant program in 2009, creating outrage throughout the province with arts/culture and social program organizations.

In these tough economic times, with so many needy organizations seeking help, it is a

challenge for government to find enough funds to keep everyone happy, Clark admitted.

“The thing is, we have to prioritize where we spend our money and we want to make sure that it is spent well and we want to make sure that it is spent on facilities that are going to be well supported in the community. This centre has huge, deep support in this community. You can tell,” she said, smiling. “You can see from the group in there and the amount of money they’ve raised. This is clearly a great investment for government. Yeah, we are saying no to a lot of organizations but organizations like this one – they’re ready, they’re able to deploy the money effectively and we are going to get real value for taxpayers out of it.”

Bennett agreed with the Premier, noting that when an organization comes to the table

with significant private sector funds, as the CDC did, it makes government’s job that much easier.

“If every project in the province that people wanted us to invest in had the same ratio of private and public dollars, think about all that we could do in this province. What they’ve done here by raising a million dollars privately” is a special feat, he said. “We’ve helped them. We bought the bingo equipment for them and we’ve helped them in other ways but think about that ratio between the public and private. If we had that then all these kinds of facilities around the province we could do a lot more.”

“That’s true and there’s all the volunteer support for it as well,” Clark added. “All that grassroots support that’s going to be here every day, supporting the staff and making sure that this centre continues to operate, and you cannot put a price on the value of all

that heart. Literally, it is heart that goes into an organization like this and you can’t pay people to bring that kind of heart to caring for their community.”

Bennett said it was almost a no-brainer not to dig deep for the CDC and its staff because of the hard work that has been done by them.

“You want to help people like Gwen (Noble) and Gail Brown. Gail Brown I have worked with since I became MLA and she’s a champion for all the children’s issues. She’s supposed to be retired. I haven’t seen any sign of it yet. People like Patricia Whalen and Gail Brown and Gwen Noble and all the other women who work in this building, they actually inspired tired old politicians like me to want to go find money for them,” he said, eliciting a laugh from the premier.

“I have no doubt the community will be well-served by the centre. A lot of hard work has gone into bringing this project to fruition, and I commend the board for seeing this through and creating such a valuable facility. It has been an honour to support the process and contribute to the completion of this important centre,” Bennett stated.

With the $50,000 boost, Community Connections Society of Southeast B.C. executive director Gwen Noble said they’re close to their goal of raising $1.1 million.

“We are very thankful for the advocacy of MLA Bill Bennett has shown for this project over the years and for his help in increasing awareness about the project at the provincial level,” Noble said. “The East Kootenay was the last area of B.C. to build a child development centre and we have been missing this important link in our regional service delivery system to families with children for many years; we can now say we have closed the gap in services to our region’s families.”

The CDC, which is celebrating its official grand opening this Friday (June 15), currently has 23 professionals on staff.

Ian Cobb/e-KNOW

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