Executive Summary: Town of The Pas, Opaskwayak Cree Nation, Rural Municipality of Kelsey, Manitoba
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The first round of the Smart Cities Challenge is closed. The Government of Canada announced the four winners (City of Montréal, Québec; Nunavut Communities, Nunavut; City of Guelph and County of Wellington, Ontario; and Town of Bridgewater, Nova Scotia) on May 14, 2019.
As finalists in the Smart Cities Challenge, the Tri-Council region in Manitoba is pleased to submit this proposal on behalf of our communities; the Rural Municipality of Kelsey, Opaskwayak Cree Nation, and the Town of The Pas. Our challenge statement is as follows:
Our community will utilize LED Smart Farm technology to support local nutritious food growth and promote food security, create a smart phone distribution system and integrate wearable technology to achieve a 40% reduction in the number of imported vegetables and a 20% reduction in community diabetes rates by 2023.
The goal of this project is to both demonstrate a decrease in diabetes incidence rates within our region, as well as create the infrastructure necessary to inexpensively scale the solution to many other communities in Northern Canada. The two major barriers that currently hinder wide-scale consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables in the Tri-Council region, as well as many other northern communities, is the cost and quality of these products. To decrease transportation costs while increasing the quality of produce, it is necessary to bring production of these goods to the local scale.
Our proposal will flow in a logical manner as outlined by the finalist guideline. In Chapter 1 we discuss our vision and our transformative approach to solving it, utilizing connected technology and innovative solutions in our approach to develop critical levers that will positively and uniquely impact our goals. Establishing these levers is the focus of our Smart Cities project.
In Chapter 2 we developed our performance measurement outcomes, creating a logic model and ensuing narrative that describes the activities required to complete our project, outcomes statements, indicators to measure the outcome statements and data source identifiers that inform indicator measurement. We have also included a payment schedule in this chapter. The content of this chapter informs the content of an outcomes-based contribution agreement.
Chapter 3 contains the elements required for successful project management including a work breakdown structure, which identifies tasks associated with completion of each activity as presented in Chapter 2. This information is also presented graphically in a Gantt chart which illustrates the project's critical path and correlates financial reporting periods and project activities. Furthermore, this chapter identifies required resources, risks, stakeholders, and considerations for long term project sustainability.
The technology that will be utilized for the success of our project is described in Chapter 4.
The first formalized governance structure of the Tri-Council will be the not for profit corporation that has been established for this project. The Board of Directors that will have equal representation from each of the three governments and the articles of incorporation are such that each of the members will have equal voice at decisions made. This has been described in Chapter 5, in which we also indicate who our partners are and their readiness to participate in this project.
In Chapter 6 we discuss our engagement strategy and tools used for gathering the thoughts and ideas from our community members. The population of our communities and our long-established history of living together has allowed us to create pathways of communication that supported the development of this proposal and will allow us to continue to receive the feedback we need to ensure that we are aware of and addressing the needs of our community members as we proceed with the project.
Chapter 7 is an overview of the initial steps we have taken to understand the legislative authorities that guide all aspects of our project that are associated with personal information or personal health information. Because we have both provincial and federally regulated entities within our partnership, we have both provincial and federal authorities to consider when implementing our project. We have completed preliminary impact assessments with both and will complete more comprehensive assessments upon implementation.
Our financial plan is detailed in Chapter 8 and corresponds to the performance measurement outcomes and project management requirements that were detailed earlier in the proposal.
Chapter 9 identifies our plans for meeting policy requirements pertaining to Duty to Consult with Indigenous groups, modern treaty obligations and community employment benefits required under the Investing in Canada plan.
Beyond the benefits to our own community, we recognize the potential of our project to be adaptable and scalable to any community in Canada. We trust that our contribution to addressing food sovereignty in our own community, similarly, contributes to the national food security issue. We also trust that our innovative approach to addressing diabetes will be widely used across Canada as we know that too many of our fellow citizens suffer with the same affliction.
We recognize that our efforts in developing this proposal have created new synergies among our communities and welcome the opportunity to build upon these in the future.
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