Club President Graham Gilchrist, speaker Kerry Diotte and club member Richard Karlsson
This week we heard from Kerry Diotte. Kerry spoke to us about becoming involved in our community. He said that he has always admired Rotarians for their commitment to their communities and for finding ways to help others through becoming involved. Kerry has been a journalist for three decades and has also served as an Edmonton city councillor for three years and a Federal Conservative Member of Parliament for Edmonton Griesbach for six years.
Kerry said that he developed an interest for civic issues while covering city issues as a journalist. With the rise of online news he could see that journalism was not what it once was so he started to think about how he could stay involved with his community in other ways. Once he decided that he could make a contribution to his community as a city councillor he had to figure out how to go about doing this. He said that it was not an easy transition and involved getting outside of his comfort zone.
He talked to a lot of people about what it involved, and they all told him the best way was to knock on doors and talk to people. Knocking on doors is difficult, some people are simply not interested. You need to ask people what their concerns are and keep track by writing them down. This gives you a better perspective of your community. Most of the concerns he encountered involved community safety, money management and using common sense to make decisions. He said that politicians should ask you what you think and what is important to you. He thinks that as a politician you are a servant of the public and should vote for things your constituents want even if you personally not support it. Even people of two very different political stripes can vote the same when they vote as their constituents feel.
When he later decided to run for federal election, he found that becoming a political party nominee is difficult. It involves selling party memberships to people in your constituency by knocking on doors. The constituency he decided to run in had sixty thousand households. In order to do this he spent four hours each day knocking on doors. His team consisted of a few good friends. Each day he sold between one and seven memberships but he kept at it. It was a very hard thing to do. When the day came to count up the results for the nomination he was quite worried about whether they had done enough. Some of his supporters were there but it seemed that the room had filled up with supporters of the other candidates. He thought that his team had lost, but when the counting was done, he had won the nomination by forty three votes. He then needed to pull together supporters from the other candidates to work towards winning the election. He knew that the party he was running for had an unpopular leader in his constituency so he emphasised that they were voting for him and not the leader of the party. In the end he won the election and enjoyed serving his constituents as their member of parliament.
Kerry said that as Rotarians, we are often out in the community. As we volunteer in our community we can get to know how they feel about various issues. This may involve stepping out of our comfort zone, but by getting to know the issues, it allows us to be able to make changes in the things we do and in turn to serve our community better.