Name: Ralph Forsyth
Age: 36
Website: www.ralphforsyth.com
Occupation: Ski instructor with Extremely Canadian, Entrepreneur with Green Monkey Consulting.
Last book read: Freakenomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner and The Collaborative Leadership Fieldbook by David D. Chrislip.
What music are you listening to these days: Rage Against the Machine and Listen, Learn and Grow (kids).
Favourite recreational pursuits: Skateboarding, running, weight training, coaching kids’ soccer.
1. Why are you running for council?
To provide a new voice and a positive vision for Whistler’s future. We need a vision where families can buy homes, small businesses have meaningful opportunities and where entrepreneurs can share in the success of the resort.
All candidates have good reasons for running, but if you’re elected and don’t have a clear set of values, that’s where we get problems. My mandate is very clear. I would ask three basic questions before every decision – is it good for families, does it stimulate the economy, and does it support small business.
2. What are the biggest issues facing Whistler?
The biggest is retaining young families and young, talented staff who will go on to potentially raise families here.
The next would be stimulating the resort economy, and the last would be supporting small businesses. All three issues are interdependent.
3. What needs to be done to address those issues?
It goes back to my reasons for running, and that’s that I think young people and entrepreneurs are grossly underrepresented in town, especially in council.
I think people need to see that someone like me, a ski instructor and entrepreneur, can own a house in Whistler and raise a family here. It’s still possible, but it has become a lot more difficult lately. We need someone on council that reflects this side of Whistler.
There’s nothing wrong with Whistler that what’s right with Whistler can’t fix.
4. How will Whistler 2020 help us?
It provides us with a road map to make decisions, it gives us guidelines we agree we must work within and it helps us establish priorities.
Having gone to every Whistler 2020 meeting and served on the affordable housing task force, I can say that a lot of thought went into this and it genuinely reflects our community values. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time we make a decision.
If people use it to take positions and try to polarize people, of course it’s not going to be a working document. Council still needs to work as a group to make this effective.
What it really offers us is freedom within a framework. We can still be very creative as to how we get to the objectives we’ve laid out for ourselves, but the objectives themselves will be set.
5. Name three things you expect to accomplish in this council’s term.
That goes back to the three things I said – retain young families and young people through initiatives like affordable housing, support small businesses and entrepreneurs, and strengthen the economy.
For families and young people we have to move quickly, we’re losing these people now. Council has to deliver the initiatives that will deliver employee housing to stop the hemorrhaging.
Bedroom communities are creating a brain drain, and our intellectual capital is being lost. That’s good for other Sea to Sky communities, but Whistler is losing.
People need to know there’s a future for them here. With the absence of employee housing our best employees are quickly losing faith and becoming cynical.
We need to set audacious goals, like commit to deliver a minimum of 250 units of employee housing in the next 18 months. When you do that, set goals, things happen, which in turn increases confidence in the community.
To strengthen small business, and all business, I would create a resort-wide service training strategy. I would develop an innovation centre and create small business incubation units.
These aren’t ideas that are off the top of my head, they’re things I’ve detailed and researched, and wrote about in features for Pique. You can read about them on my website.
The third action item, is to stimulate the tourism economy. We need to improve the value proposition through better service; we can’t just discount our way out of our problems. A resort training strategy would go a long way towards that.
I would also diversify the mix of tourism to include educational tourism, arts tourism and food and wine tourism, all of which have been identified as major growth areas for tourism in Canada.
Another thing I would do is provide more support and direction for the Whistler Events Bureau. I think we should set a goal to be the number one venue for hosting events, and to do that we need to get small businesses at the table.
The last thing I would do, and it’s a difficult concept to grasp, is to support entrepreneurs and small business through an Entrepreneurial Governance model. It’s complex but basically it’s taking what makes us great and incorporating it into our government philosophy.
