At their March 16 meeting, Thompson city council voted unanimously in favour of entering an agreement with the Community Safety Knowledge Alliance (CSKA) to develop a community safety strategy.
Established in 2015 and based in Saskatoon, CSKA is a government-supported non-profit corporation that facilitates research and knowledge development to improve professional practices in the community safety system and improve safety and well-being outcomes.
The provincial government announced March 2 in Thompson that it was providing $35,000 to the City of Thompson to pay for CSKA to help existing community organizations come together and develop a comprehensive community safety strategy.
CSKA executive director Cal Corley, a former RCMP assistant commissioner, and research associate Janos Botschner, a behavioural scientist with a joint doctorate in social and developmental psychology, were in Thompson March 12 for meetings with safety strategy steering committee organizations and also spoke to the city’s public safety committee at their meeting later that day.
Corley said that CSKA supports the design and implementation of new approaches to community safety that involve more than just policing.
“The traditional view of community safety was really a police-centric one,” he said.
CSKA’s role with Thompson’s safety strategy is to pull interested parities together and help establish terms of reference.
“There’s lot of disparate, very good activities, programs, services being provided. Our role now is to work with the parties. The plan is important but it’s not as important as the process.”
Responding to a question from deputy mayor Les Ellsworth during the March 12 public safety meeting about whether actions can be taken before the strategy is complete, Botschner said, “As people come together … they may see that they can start to act on things very, very quickly.”
City manager Anthony McInnis said at the March 16 council meeting that the plan was to have public consultations in April facilitated by CSKA, though those plans may be derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic, as gatherings of 50 or more people are currently being discouraged.
The funding from the province has not yet been received, McInnis said, but the provincial government told the city it can go ahead and pay CSKA using existing funds from reserves and that the money from the province will arrive by the end of the month. Coun. Jeff Fountain asked if the $35,000 was only for the information-gathering phase of the strategy development.
“The funds for the public safety meeting are included,” said McInnis.
