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City of Airdrie and Area, Alberta

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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.

Final Proposal title

Executive Summary

"Our plan is to help build connections to support our residents in living longer, healthier lives by focusing on what is important to them and working together towards become Canada's healthiest community."

– finalist video

Challenge Statement

Become Canada's healthiest community, by engaging and securing the participation of all in the community to create a community healthy culture that improves social, economic, physical and health care environments and individual characteristics and behaviours, so that healthy life expectancy is increased by 3+ years over 5 years.

Summary

We will become Canada's Healthiest Community – Own Our Own Health. We will increase healthy life expectancy by 3+ years over 5 years.

That will be enabled through our Smart Community Project.

Vision: "Own Our Own Health Information: Enabling efforts to be Canada's Healthiest Community – Individually and Collectively"

Mission: "Create a Community "Health Information Sharing" Culture"

Over the past two years, we have engaged hundreds of individuals and dozens of organizations in the community in thinking about what it would take to be Canada's Healthiest Community.

Five projects have been identified:

  • Airdrie & Area Blue Zone Project
  • Airdrie & Area Health Park Project
  • Airdrie & Area Need-Based Networks Project
  • Airdrie & Area Health Coop Project
  • Airdrie & Area Smart Community Project

The Smart Community Project will leverage and connect existing and add new infrastructure, platforms and applications to create an open data platform for use by all. Data will be secured and customized content pushed out to enable informed action.

The City of Airdrie sponsored this project. We know that one party cannot "do it to" the community. A Health Coop has been incorporated as the tool to bring all together as equal owners and equal beneficiaries.

Spotlight on Finalists cover page

Spotlight on Finalists:
City of Airdrie and Area, Alberta

Population: 72,874

Focus Areas:

Empowerment and InclusionHealthy Living and Recreation

Prize Category:

#smartcitiesCanada

The Jury's Perspective

Read the transcript

Hi, I'm Lisa Holmes. I live in the town of Morinville, Alberta. I'm the vice president of corporate development for Northlands in Edmonton, and I'm the former mayor of Morinville and the former president of the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association.

As a former municipal politician, I knew the value the "Smart City Challenge" would bring to communities across Canada. The opportunity for our own municipalities and communities to be innovative and to be successful in bringing those ideas forward to the federal government to actually get implemented; it's just such a wonderful opportunity and I'm really excited for all of these proposals to not just be implemented in their own communities, but to be spread out across the country.

So the city of Airdrie put forward a really great proposal. They want to be the healthiest community in Canada, and I was inspired by that and also the idea that they had that they would bring this blue concept to look at healthcare in a new way. Something that's been done in the US and in Europe that hasn't really been done in Canada yet. They also were the only community that had a cooperative model, so that they were able to allow the data that is being used to be owned by the resident and that was really important when you are looking at security and looking at making sure that people buy in to the project. So, I was really looking forward to seeing a lot of different opportunities for innovative health and I feel like Airdrie's proposal is one that is going to move the needle, it's going to mean things to people, it's going to actually have an impact

The Finalist's Perspective

Read the transcript

The smart cities challenge is a competition that called in Canadian communities to explore how data and connected technology can achieve meaningful outcomes for residence.

On screen:

Smart Cities Challenge

Winning communities

School

The finalists

$10M category: City of Airdrie and Area, Alberta

Tell us about your team and your community

Leona Esau (Intergovernmental Liaison, City of Airdrie): Our team is comprised of individuals from the public sector, the private sector and the not for profit sector and we've been doing a number smart cities initiatives in our community for a year, we believe we have a solution that will engage every one of our residents and have positive outcome in our community.

On screen: Why did you enter the challenge?

Leona Esau (Intergovernmental Liaison, City of Airdrie): Well, we were really intrigue by the idea of a challenge for government funds

Dave Jackson (Chief Technology Officer, Airdrie & Area Health Co-op): we are looking to be Canada's healthiest community, the way we're gonna do that is by engaging everybody in the community, looking at things like social determines of health and ultimately we're gonna be able to add 3 years of healthy life expectancy to everybody in the community. What would you do at 3 extra healthy years, right?

On screen: Challenge statement: Become Canada's healthiest community, by engaging and securing the participation of all in the community to create a community healthy culture that improves social, economic, physical and health care environments and individual characteristics and behaviors, so that healthy life expectancy is increased by 3+ years over 5 years.

Join the conversation: #smartcitiesChallenge

Infrastructure Canada

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