Quality of Life Sector

Report Synopsis

Step ahead a decade, and imagine that future: Alberta in 2015 and beyond, the place to find quality of life.

Here is a province where health care, education, justice, culture, recreation – indeed, all human service fields – act in concert, consciously pursuing shared mandates and goals under a Quality of Life umbrella. Gaps and overlaps consume far less time and money as each agency focuses on what it is best equipped to do. That clarity of roles includes government and business as well as the voluntary sector, resulting in accountability that is appropriately placed rather than off-loaded. Citizens, communities and the environment are benefiting as never before.

In the environmental arena, we protect our natural capital by stewarding resources and pursuing smart growth. We capitalize on change at the rural-urban fringe, creating heritage centres and natural corridors that connect future generations with our roots, and with the land.

Individuals, meanwhile, are healthier than ever. By eating well and living actively, we have put the epidemic of obesity behind. In fact, nearly 100% of us engage in the physical and social activity needed to prevent poor physical and mental health. A new culture of wellness has sprung up. Leisure education, motivational campaigns and innovative programs reach people right where they live, learn and work – and hone in on what motivates them. Structural changes such as healthy living tax incentives, nutrition standards and evidence-based, leading edge policy reflect current research in public facilities and other active living programs. Thanks to stronger links between health and recreation, doctors whose patients suffer from inactivity related diseases proactively promote behaviour change.

Community wellness is also on the rise. New initiatives such as Alberta Active Communities are equipping both rural and urban centres to assess their walkability, physical activity levels, service excellence and other aspects of quality of life – and then plan and enact positive change. Inclusion is now the norm, superseding the bottom-line focus that had driven user fees up. As a result, all citizens in our increasingly diverse province have access to affordable services that enhance quality of life. Populations that could benefit most from increased participation are highly involved and active, thanks to targeted emphasis on children, comprehensive school health, after-school youth, teen outreach, active aging, community arts and sport, leisure education and lifestyles coaching. That culture of inclusion is fueled by Alberta-wide participation in such efforts as the national Everyone gets to play™ initiative.

Expanded initiatives reflect not only the synergy of coordinated effort but a significant reinvestment in recreation and parks by federal, provincial and municipal governments. Public recreation facilities, which were crumbling after years of inadequate attention, stand among the beneficiaries. Thanks to a bilateral infusion of funds, those existing and new community facilities have become multipurpose centres and community hubs that serve other quality of life fields as well as recreation and parks. All across Alberta, funds are also being used to expand and link the trails and corridors needed for both active living and wildlife movement. Staff are equipped and eager to incorporate environmental sustainability and lifecycle management at every decision point, ensuring that public assets will remain viable for years to come. Underlying these changes is a distinct shift toward recognizing the key role municipalities play in ensuring quality of life, coupled with understanding that quality of life contributes directly to community growth and sustainability.

This future Alberta benefits from a quality of life sector – and within that, a recreation and parks field – with vastly expanded capacity. That is no accident, but reflects concerted effort to attract excellent staff, develop visionary leadership and build quality assurance standards. Research and modeling in the field has leapt ahead, thanks to collaborative initiatives such as a university based Leisure and Cultural Policy Studies Centre. Findings are broadly shared through electronic and other means, ensuring that staff and citizens at the front lines benefit from the latest wisdom in the field.

Multiply those positive outcomes by the number of fields contributing to quality of life, and it’s clear that, working together, those involved can make a real and measurable difference. We can create an Alberta far more enticing than the one to which today’s trends are pointing. What better time than now. What better place than here, Canada’s best province.

A Nexus of Change

Citizens of Alberta are living through significant change – a post-industrial, creativity-hungry era when quality of life is key to success. Yet numerous signs alert us that Alberta’s quality of life may be endangered. A decade from now, will we have enough water? Will our best farmland be buried beneath concrete? Will obesity and inactivity be draining health care coffers? Will disparity explode into violence? Will latch-key youth have role models to counter drugs and gangs? Will public facilities and services be further crumbling into disrepair?

Living day to day, it’s easy to characterize those questions as the fears of an alarmist – easy to block out the massive change we’re living through and believe 2015 will look like today. But futurists such as Ruben Nelson40 warn that we’re at a hinge-point in history – a time when the hierarchies, silos and consumption of the past must give way to more fluid, networked, stewardly interactions with each other and with the environment that sustains us.

This nexus of change demands huge shifts:

• From extraction of commodities to value added processing.
• From consumption of seemingly infinite resources to stewardship of scarce resources.
• From a homogenous society that values conformity to diverse communities that respect nonconformity.
• From local communities of place to global communities of interest.
• From recreation as discretionary leisure to recreation as necessary for wellness.
• From disease focused healthcare to wellness focused holistic health.
• From discrete policy envelopes to integrated policy paradigms.
• From top-down governing to governance as shared accountability.
• From quality service for customers who can pay to quality of life for all citizens.
• From individualism and privatization to communitarianism and social engagement.
• From social capital involving small, tightly knit communities to creative capital involving diverse cosmopolitan communities.

This time of change opens tremendous opportunities for positive action. Particularly in resource-rich, post-debt Alberta, we have the capacity to make the necessary shifts, to shape our new environment. Against this backdrop of unprecedented wealth, a new expectation is emerging: a call for Alberta to show wise leadership in its use of its economic resources. To the extent that all Albertans recognize the imperative of change and commit to action, we can create a far more liveable future than our current course would produce. A future that not only provides higher quality of life, but costs far less in the long run.

The Emerging Quality of Life Sector

Recognizing that the crucial work of maintaining and improving quality of life will require concerted multi-disciplinary action, in 2001 ARPA invited leaders from diverse disciplines to form a Vision 2015 Steering Committee. The committee has since hosted several interdisciplinary planning initiatives, including a visioning symposium40, a leaders’ forum and workshops. Those venues enabled representatives from education, health and wellness, human and community services, the environment, heritage and culture, recreation and parks and other disciplines to begin outlining the urgent work ahead for the emerging Quality of Life Sector.

Four years of visioning and planning have culminated in Foundations for Action: Enhancing the Quality of Life in Alberta. This report provides both a policy framework and a draft action plan for the emerging Quality of Life Sector. Parts 1 and 2 of this report outline a framework and purpose for the sector as a whole; parts 3 through 5 map a path for the recreation and parks field based on the direction set for the broader sector. Other fields within the Quality of Life Sector are invited to use the first two parts of this report as a springboard for their own strategic planning using the template laid out in parts 3 through 5.

This work coincides with growing recognition of the need for visionary leadership that consciously involves citizens and integrates disciplines. Decisions regarding resource extraction and commodity consumption, for example, can no longer disregard resulting impacts on individual, community and environmental health. Decisions regarding economic development can no longer ignore the fact that today’s most precious commodity, human creativity, gravitates to community centres offering outstanding quality of life.

Numerous Alberta government initiatives, including its Today’s Opportunities, Tomorrow’s Promise: A Strategic Plan for the Government of Alberta16, the A Place to Grow – Alberta’s Rural Development Strategy13 and A Learning Alberta13, reflect an understanding that our province must move beyond segmented, top-down decision-making. As a result, the silos and envelopes that characterized the past are giving way to integrated paradigms that recognize the importance of such cross disciplinary public goods as human capital, wellness, environmental sustainability and quality of life. Yet it will take concerted effort to ensure that those far-sighted priorities remain at the forefront of policy making during this time of societal change.

The Quality of Life Sector is a most appropriate avenue for advancing those key priorities, offering potential far greater than the sum of its fields. Those involved are reluctant to solidify a definition of the sector, preferring instead to allow organic evolution as additional fields come aboard, but consensus is growing about the united framework and purpose depicted in Figure 2.2, Page 18. Participants share a sense of heightened anticipation about the sector’s draft vision, which envisions Alberta as

“a re-creating, sustainable society that lives and promotes a culture of wellness, creativity and stewardship for the enhanced quality of life of all Albertans, their communities and their environments.”

Although the vision remains fluid, the accompanying values, guiding principles and outcomes have received full support as cornerstones for the work ahead. It’s instructive to note that virtually all fields involved are anchored by these same six values:

• respect for diversity,
• full inclusion,
• involved citizenship,
• long-term sustainability,
• valued creativity, and
• community governance.

The guiding principles and the outcomes flowing from those values promise to enhance wellness for individuals, communities and the environment all throughout Alberta. Building on those cornerstones, what might this Quality of Life Sector accomplish? Among the many priorities suggested, the 2005 Leaders’ Forum identified the following as most urgent:

• A Livable Communities and Cities Framework that enables communities to measure their quality of life and identify prescriptions for improvement.
• A new measurement paradigm that tallies long-term costs and benefits more accurately than the GDP, thus shifting focus to what really will enhance quality of life.
• An Active Communities initiative that puts legs on Alberta’s Active Living Strategy by providing a mechanism for grassroots delivery and cross-community/agency synergy.
• A Premier’s Wellness Council that provides appropriately high-level planning and coordination for preventative health and wellness strategic initiatives.
• A Provincial Volunteer Sector Accord that buttresses this crucial and often overburdened aspect of citizen involvement by outlining aims, roles and relationships.
• A coordinated Alberta Land, Water and Air Strategy that protects our environment for current and future generations by making integrated decisions the norm.
• An Environmental Assets Inventory and Database that serves as a baseline for informed and holistic stewardship of key environmental resources.
• An Alberta Cultural Policy that finally recognizes cultural vitality as a fourth pillar in community sustainability alongside social, economic and environmental vitality.
• A Social Infrastructure Investment Program specifically targeted at renewing Alberta’s aging community recreation, parks, culture, heritage and library facilities and provides new facilities to meet the demands of Alberta’s growing population.

These priorities remain open to debate and refinement. Whatever their final form, consensus is growing that the time has come for the sector to move from planning to action.
The Vital Role of Recreation and Parks

Among the various fields contributing to the Quality of Life Sector, recreation and parks is centrally positioned to provide the leadership needed to build on momentum developed to date. In addition to supporting sector-wide planning, the field has put energy into analyzing its own heritage and charted a course for its unique yet complementary role in enhancing quality of life.

The fact that recreation and parks can make key contributions to quality of life is reflected in the field’s four fundamental purposes:

• positively influencing individual growth and wellness;
• enhancing social inclusion and community development;
• protecting and preserving natural environments; and
• enhancing economic vitality.

Recreation and parks is part of a growth industry. Already, one third of our time, land and consumer spending is devoted to leisure pursuits, making this our number one economic activity. In short, recreation and parks stands at a point in history when its potential to make a difference is huge.

In decades past, strong belief in the potential of leisure and recreation to enrich individual and community quality of life prompted significant public investment. As recently as the 1960s and 1970s, Alberta funded a broad array of infrastructure and programs. Since the early 1980s, however, fiscal conservatism, commercialization and privatization have forced recreation to narrow its focus, charge user fees and do less to involve the disenfranchised.

Yet the new Alberta demands that recreation and parks join in creating the “people climate” that Dr. Richard Florida76 and others champion as key to attracting and nourishing human capital. We need to recapture the concept of leisure as something everyone is entitled to and that everyone shares. In this postdebt era, Alberta has an opportunity to show leadership by taking a communitarian approach that recognizes leisure as a central common good. Then recreation and parks become a positive part of the catastrophic change that futurists such as Ruben Nelson challenge us to consider.

The strategic plan for recreation and parks as proposed in this document (and summarized in Figure 4.1, page 72) sets the stage for exactly that. To be refined through upcoming inter-agency consultation and engagement, these key results and strategies have the potential to significantly expand recreation and parks’ role in ensuring enhanced quality of life. In concert with the direction set for the sector as a whole, this plan promises a better future for all Albertans.

Alberta has the resources, the grassroots support, the organizational structure, and hopefully the political willingess to chart a better future. Promising signs indicate the province is poised to act, as are partners in the Quality of Life Sector. Recreation and parks is poised to provide leadership. All the pieces are there. We just need a blueprint. The Foundations for Action Report provides an initial conceptualization of that blueprint.

This report is not the end of the journey but an invitation to new behaviour, new attitudes and a new way to work. It’s a way to engage Albertans in conversation about where Alberta is going and how the recreation and parks field will be involved.

Four years ago, when the roots for this blueprint were planted, Nelson challenged us all to commit ourselves to the task of inventing and developing new, life-giving perceptions, relationships and structures – approaches that embody and reflect wisdom and responsibility. “That which you love, you have great expectations of. I urge you to become the world’s first truly global civilization: prosperous, inclusive, innovative and humane,” he said. “We haven’t begun to dream of what we can become.”

from Foundations for Action – Alberta Recreation and Parks Association

The Alberta Context: Nexus of Change

Alberta is at a nexus of change that raises both concern and opportunity. The resource extraction and commodity consumption fueling our economic boom are leaving behind mounting costs: environmental degradation, scarce water, health impacts and related quality of life issues. Ironically, these impacts are occurring amid a global shift toward a knowledge based economy that places a premium on human capital, sustainable development and wellness. The following points illustrate key aspects of the catastrophic change that is our new reality.

1.1 Shifting Public Policy Agenda

Policy priorities in Alberta have shifted markedly in recent years.

• Mid-1990s. Deficit elimination and debt reduction rise to the top as key policy priorities, while public management centres on two challenges: achieving financial efficiency and satisfying “customers.”

• Late-1990s. Planning processes such as the Future Summit12, the Financial Management Commission11 and the Government of Alberta’s 20-Year Strategic Plan16 recognize that challenges such as the following require new approaches:
  • Global competitiveness demands value added approaches. In a global marketplace that rewards value-added economies, it is not enough for Alberta to be rich in natural resources such as wood and commodities such as cattle; we must add value.
  • Complex public issues require holistic policy paradigms. Quality of Life begins to emerge as a paradigm that recognizes links between environmental, cultural and social amenities and the ability to attract mobile knowledge workers.
  • Shifting fiscal fortunes demand long-range planning. As debt elimination shifts from goal to reality, the Alberta Government creates a Stabilization Fund to buffer revenue swings while anticipating a decline in public revenues as traditional oil/gas reserves are depleted.
• Entering the 21st Century. As Alberta steps into the new century, a new series of policy issues emerges, including the following:
  • Rural/urban split. The Edmonton-Calgary corridor becomes a robust economic engine, transforming Alberta into a province whose differences are no longer north-south but rural-urban. Significant disparities in wealth and opportunity prompt the Government of Alberta to develop a Rural Development Strategy15 aimed at addressing rural needs.
  • Threatened resources. Urbanization and economic growth combined with geographic and environmental realities raise urgent concerns about water scarcity and landscape conservation. The Province begins implementing a Water for Life Strategy9, supported by regional basin councils and local stewardship councils. As well, senior officials from a wide range of ministries work with stakeholders in the energy, forestry and agricultural sectors to develop stewardship policies for the provincial land base.
  • Health care pressures. Changing demographics, new medical technologies and growing public expectations redefine the focus of health care reform. Affordability is no longer the primary driver; instead, waiting times for treatment, quality, continuing care and private insurance become major policy issues. As well, there is a growing realization that acute care, chronic disease and health promotion/disease prevention are very different “business streams” within the health portfolio. In this context, promotion of, and support for, healthy lifestyles is emerging as a major focus of 21st century health/wellness policy.
  • Asian explosion. The rapid growth of such economies as China, India and Malaysia generates new markets for Alberta resources and commodities. Chinese demand for coal-fired electricity revives Alberta’s coal industry. Chinese demand for gasoline places new pressures on global oil supplies. Across Asia, opportunities seem ripe for Alberta meat. In short, Alberta is no longer solely dependent on North American markets.
  • Need for knowledge capital. Amid increasing awareness that Alberta’s long-term competitiveness depends on intellectual capital, particularly individuals adept at innovative knowledge work, advanced education has emerged as a dominant policy portfolio.

1.2 The Promise of Continued Economic Growth

Simultaneous with the above policy issues is dawning realization that the current boom may not be followed by the bust that typically follows in a resource-based economy. The supply-demand equation for oil is changing as China’s population acquires motor vehicles. At the same time, instability in oil supply regions such as the Middle East makes Alberta’s non-traditional oil reserves more and more attractive. Non-traditional oil production has come to include extraction from the shale underlying much of Alberta; when the global market price remains high, extraction from such sources is highly profitable. Meanwhile, non-traditional gas reserves such as coal-bed methane promise yet another resource boom.

1.3 A Call for Leadership in Stewarding our Wealth

Against this backdrop of unprecedented wealth, a new expectation is emerging: a call for Alberta to show wise leadership in its use of its economic resources. A recent Canada West Foundation article illustrates.48 Noting the lack of popular support for such Alberta-championed causes as institutional reform (e.g., the Triple E Senate) and enhanced political clout (e.g., the Reform Party, “West wants in,” “firewall” policies), the article concludes:

the only option left may be to exert national leadership by example. The province, for example, could use the financial capacity that comes from being free from debt, and from natural resource wealth, to help put into place the country’s best urban communities, the most well-designed environmental policies, the country’s best public school system, and the most supportive social policies.

In short, the Canada West Foundation envisions an Alberta that serves as a model for other jurisdictions by offering the best possible quality of life.

1.4 A Learning Alberta: Hints of Hope

An initiative launched in 2005 by the Minister of Advanced Education seems to reflect the policy leadership envisioned by the Canada West Foundation. The initiative, A Learning Alberta13, involves a comprehensive analysis of advanced education along a continuum stretching from sheltered workshops to research by post-doctoral fellows. The analysis is very likely to include these learning components:

• agencies that enhance community capacity by supporting learners in such settings as social housing, literacy training and immigrant settlement;
• accessibility to culturally diverse and disadvantaged groups as key to ensuring the human and intellectual capital needed to sustain economic growth;
• links between environmental stewardship, recreation, cultural development and other aspects of quality of life and Alberta’s ability to attract, develop and retain human and intellectual capital;
• links between learning, employment and income levels and Alberta’s ability to promote wellness and prevent disease. These various foci correspond very closely to the five “focal areas” used to guide the discussion at the 2005 Leaders’ Forum.

1.5 Struggling Municipalities

Yet Alberta municipalities continue to struggle, unable to provide and maintain public services amid growing populations. Lacking sufficient own-source revenue and increasingly restricted in their use of diminishing fiscal transfers from other governments, municipalities rely on property taxes – an often over-burdened income source. Compounding their struggle is seemingly uncoordinated policy and program delivery among all levels of government that creates duplication, gaps and misplaced priorities. Needed instead are collaborative, strategic, sustained investments that enhance the economic, environmental and social/cultural health of communities. In our increasingly urban province, that shift is essential to quality of life.

1.6 Implications for Policy/Governance

Given the realities described above, anyone seeking to understand the policy development context in Alberta needs to appreciate the following:

• Uncharted context. The 2005 context differs dramatically from that of the late 1990s or even the earlier years of this young century. Seemingly unlimited prosperity, continued rapid urbanization and overwhelming pressures on land and water resources were not generally foreseen until very recently.

• Accelerating change. Provincial planning/ policy development exercises such as A Place to Grow – Alberta’s Rural Development Strategy13 and the Value-Added Economic Development Strategy10 may already require updating. In the case of rural development, the BSE crisis prompted the infusion of millions of dollars of subsidies into rural Alberta. Support for further rural investment may not be forthcoming, given urban Alberta’s expanding need for infrastructure. Regarding economic development, the emergence of non-traditional oil and gas seem to have superseded the immediate need for alternatives to energy as an economic development lynchpin.

• Linked issues. A booming economy, coupled with significant public revenue generation, has catalyzed a shift in the issues confronting policy makers. Quality of life is increasingly the focus as awareness grows that fiscal and economic development strategies are intimately connected to such quality of life issues as access to recreational/cultural services, population health and wellness, respect for diversity, pristine environments, education, urban sprawl and traffic gridlock.

• Crucial collaboration. Governments, of course, cannot enhance quality of life on their own. Increasingly the Government of Canada, the Government of Alberta and local governments are working with community-based partners to build local capacity and enhance quality of life. As the focus of policy development shifts to the community level, community governance becomes a significant issue.

1.7 New and Emerging Macro Challenges/Opportunities

The waning of the “fiscal agenda” in Alberta, the influx of resource dollars and growing recognition of the importance of quality of life signals a time of opportunity for this emerging sector. Thus development and promotion of a compelling new vision does seem timely. Success in these endeavours depends on sound analysis of the context just discussed. Relevant macro challenges and opportunities include the following:

• Economic Challenges/Opportunities
  • The limits of an extraction and commodity-based economy are being reached. Alberta is challenged to develop an economy based on more inclusive values and a more sustainable approach to resources.
  • Quality-of-life considerations are becoming dominant in the locational decisions of mobile knowledge workers. Government and business policy makers need to recognize this reality when drafting economic development and human resource strategies.
  • A new economic development strategy is needed. The limits on resource extraction/ commodity production combined with the growing focus on quality of life among knowledge workers suggests that Alberta needs a strategy that expands value-added activity and places quality of life front and centre in development plans.
  • The “Alberta Advantage” requires rethinking. A low tax regime and a streamlined regulatory system may be insufficient to assure competitiveness in an economy that depends on knowledge workers, value-added development and quality of life.
  • The current health care system may not be sustainable. Sedentary lifestyles and poor nutrition remain major contributors to chronic disease and thereby represent significant costs to the public health care system. Given that reality, investment in wellness, health promotion and disease prevention is emerging as a public policy priority.
  • Alberta municipalities are struggling with shifting populations and sustainability issues. In a province characterized by sprawling urban centres and shrinking rural communities, the rural/urban dichotomy continues to challenge Alberta decision makers.
• Social Challenges/Opportunities
  • Balanced lifestyles are proving difficult to achieve. Those with the financial resources to invest in recreation often lack the leisure time to do so. Conversely, many of those with adequate leisure time lack the financial resources to pursue recreation.
  • Alberta has become a highly diverse society. Multiculturalism, aging and expanding lifestyle choices are redefining Alberta’s demographics and culture.
  • Alberta is overwhelmingly urban. Rural areas are losing population while urban areas are growing rapidly.
  • Traditional models of community in Alberta are changing. The forces of diversity, urbanization and rural depopulation are redefining community in Alberta. Communities of place are being supplanted in importance by communities of interest.
  • Income polarization is growing between Alberta’s “haves” and “have nots.” Unless the future includes a full dose of equity, we will never have quality of life.
  • As in any society experiencing rapid change, Albertans are paying high psycho-social costs. Indicators include high suicide and divorce rates and increasing incidence of single parent families. Mitigating the impact of such stresses on individual health is a major challenge.
  • Human activity is placing unprecedented pressure on Alberta’s land base and water resources. Conservation and protection of our finite resources must take priority amid stresses placed by booming economic development, urban growth and numerous forms of outdoor recreation.
  • Urban centres require integration of natural and cultural heritage sites. Integrated landscape planning is needed to mitigate urban sprawl and avoid “paving over” green spaces and heritage sites.
  • Environmental degradation can pose threats to health. Air pollution, climate change, drought and tragedies such as Walkerton underscore the need for attention to environmental health issues.
  • Improved conservation planning is long overdue. Conservation planning in Alberta has not kept pace with increasing pressures on the landscape, resulting in irrevocable loss of environmental gems.

1.8. The Change Agenda
Analysis of these emerging macro challenges and opportunities culminates in the “change agenda” described in the following text and summarized in Figure 1.1.

• From production of commodities to value added processing. Alberta can no longer afford to base its growth on resource extraction and commodity production. Supplies such as water are finite; that reality dictates a strategic shift to enterprises that conserve and add value to these scarce resources. Using Alberta forest products to build furniture, for example, is preferable to export of dimensional lumber. Similarly, supporting eco-tourism in the boreal forest offers the advantage of creating wealth while retaining a valuable asset. Value-added enterprises place a premium on innovation and creativity. Providing the quality of life needed to attract knowledgeable, highly skilled and creative humans, therefore, is essential.
• From consumption of resources to stewardship of resources. The scarcity of water, lumber and other resources calls us to an ethic of stewardship. Pollution from such factors as fossil fuel combustion reinforces that need to shift from consumption to stewardship. The sustainable development paradigm provides a framework for this shift, encouraging a culture of stewardship.
• From a homogenous society to diverse communities. Alberta has become diverse. Multiculturalism, aging demographics and expanded lifestyle choices are fundamentally altering the complexion of our society. Richard Florida speaks of the need to accept such diversity in The Rise of the Creative Class – And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life.76 He points to the emergence of a new, nonconformist “creative class” whose members are critical to success in our knowledge economy. Dr. Florida’s research suggests that a community’s ability to attract this creative class depends on being open to differences and offering a range of formal and informal cultural and recreational opportunities.
• From communities of place to communities of interest. Traditional definitions of community are changing. Historically, community implied proximity and involved face-to-face interaction. Today, individuals around the globe form long-distance “communities of interest” via the Internet, air travel and other connections. Traditional communities of place typically influence nearby policy, e.g. by taking a NIMBY (not in my back yard) stance to development. Communities of interest can play major roles in advocacy irrespective of local preferences or priorities.
• From recreation as leisure activity to recreation as wellness. The high cost of health care and growing public interest in quality of life are providing new motivators for recreation. No longer equated with leisure activity, recreation defined as “spare time” is a rare commodity for many Albertans. Increasingly, recreation is viewed as necessary to physical and mental health and wellness, and thus a critical component of quality of life. Similarly, healthy communities are seen as places that protect citizens from contaminated air, water and land. Preservation and conservation of the natural resources required to support health and enable recreation are viewed as increasingly vital.
• From health care to holistic health. Public policy debates often focus on Alberta’s health care system, but that reality masks a more profound transformation from disease treatment to a more holistic view of health. Albertans increasingly view health as composite wellness with physical, environmental, social, economic and spiritual determinants. They seek health of body, mind and spirit.
• From policy as envelopes to policy as paradigms. Through the 1970s and 1980s, public policy was slotted into “envelopes.” The social policy envelope, for example, included the portfolios of education, health and social services. The economic policy envelope included portfolios such as finance, industry growth, transportation and trade. In the 1990s, the recreation movement positioned itself as a key portfolio within the social policy envelope. Today, a strategy linked to emerging policy paradigms seems more appropriate. (See Figure 1.2.) Those paradigms integrate select pieces of diverse portfolios. Active living, for example, fits into the wellness paradigm; skills training into the human capital paradigm.
• From governing to governance. In the 1970s and 1980s, governments in Canada expanded their governing roles. Throughout the 1990s, however, the Alberta government consistently embraced shared governance. Under shared governance, third parties delivered public services; local and regional authorities assumed new roles in managing and delivering public services; companies, communities and voluntary sector agencies entered into partnerships with the provincial government.
• From quality service to quality of life. In the 1990s, governments enthusiastically adopted the private sector’s notions of “total quality” and “customer service.” Resulting innovations in public service delivery included “one-stop shopping” for licences and other registry services. Liquor retailing was also privatized, leading to expanded outlets, product lines and business hours. By the close of the 1990s, public concern shifted to seeking quality and choice in public goods.
• From individualism to communitarianism. During the 1990s, the quality of life sector diminished as consumption, individualism and privatization came to dominate democratic nations. This focus has resulted in a neglect of community and the common good. Yet community has moral standing equal to that of the individual. Recognition is growing that we need to rebuild a sense of obligation to the greater good, of giving back even as we enjoy individual rights. Moving beyond individualism, it’s important to foster community and social engagement.
• From social capital to creative capital. The advent of the “creative economy” calls for a new model of citizen and community engagement. Participants in the creative economy yearn for some balance between being themselves and being part of a larger community. Not a community based on an older civic society with close-knit, church/organization ties but one that is more creative and diverse. An “authentic” community that embraces innovative economic pursuits.

1.9 Internal Change: Governance for Accountability and Outcomes

Changing paradigms are redefining the way public policy is developed in Alberta. For example, the division of roles, responsibilities and relationships between regional authorities and the provincial government has become the focus of intense debate, particularly in light of the Auditor General’s recent review of seniors’ policy and continuing care. Similar debate surrounds the roles, responsibilities and relationships of government ministries relative to collaborative initiatives. Discourse within the public sector increasingly calls for enhanced “horizontal policy coordination” and effectiveness in “cross-government initiatives.” These initiatives counter the traditional “silo” and “mandate” approach that has typified public policy development for decades.

Perhaps most important, public policy discourse that, in recent years, invoked such paradigms as sustainable development, population health, individual resiliency and community capacity is now being supported and enriched by a more pragmatic focus on results. Increasingly those results, or “outcomes,” are equated with ultimate impact on the economy, society, and/or the environment. Today’s policy development processes almost invariably begin by defining such outcomes, generally across three time horizons: short, medium and long.

This growing emphasis on outcomes prompts a shift in our understanding of governance and accountability. Accountability, of course, means nothing more or less than being held to account. Governance simply refers to the processes by which individuals or groups are held to account. The growing emphasis on outcomes within the public sector is shifting notions about governance, i.e., the internal context of government, as dramatically as the external context is shifting the focus of public policy development.

1.10 Achieving Outcomes through Community Governance

Horizontal policy coordination is emerging as a priority in both government ministries and local communities. Horizontal policy coordination at the government level focuses on closing service gaps, resolving mandate conflicts and facilitating “one-stop shopping.” Horizontal policy coordination at the community level, on the other hand, focuses on integrating public policy and services with the lives of individuals, families and markets right where they live.

Increasingly the so-called “senior” levels of government are recognizing that significant outcomes are realized in local communities, not in government offices. Federal and provincial efforts succeed to the extent that they encourage grassroots community governance. It is through community-level policy coordination and through integration of policy and life that social, economic, cultural and environmental outcomes are realized. This is where quality of life is truly enhanced.

Foundations for Action - Alberta Recreation and Parks Association