The Northwest Metis Council held their regional meeting on Saturday at the 11th Avenue Hall.
There, it was announced that they’ve purchased the hall and it’ll be called the Metis Community Centre. Francis Chartrand, vice-president of the Northwest Metis Council shares her thoughts on the purchase.
“I’m so excited, we finally have a place and a footprint in the City of Dauphin. I’m just excited now we have a place we can have our gatherings, share information, work with the Knights of Columbus, work with the Ukrainian dancers, we made a commitment that we’d always have space for them in here. But this’ll be the Metis Centre, we’re going to focus on a lot of our meetings, lot of our consultations, lot of our celebrations. I just want to invite everyone to come down here.”
The regional meeting was held this past weekend because of COVID-19, it usually gets held by June and features over 400 people, but due to the guidelines, only 50 people were allowed in. Local executives were the ones in attendance to bring forward the issues, challenges, or needs that the citizens are facing.
President of the Manitoba Metis Federation, David Chartrand goes over some of the big announcements at the meeting.
“In this particular region, we’re spending 7 million dollars this year alone. A lot of construction is taking place, we’re building our daycare centre in Dauphin, we’re also building a pharmacy, we’re expanding our regional office and that’s going to be a major investment. We’re hiring potentially up to 35 new staff, new citizens to be working in Dauphin, over and above the people that are already working here, I think we hired 12 from the jail after it was shut down, so they got permanent jobs with the federation.”
The president also noted the provincial government’s funding that went to 7 museums across southern Manitoba and left out the museum in Dauphin. He plans to sit down with the museum in Dauphin to see if there are ways to work together.
MMF will also be spending 11.8 million dollars in post-secondary education, 16 million dollars in training, to go along with other investments across the province.
Swan River will also be getting a daycare centre, MMF is also building houses in Swan River and are looking to do that in Dauphin as well.
Chartrand expects MMF to spend over half a billion dollars over the next 10 years across the province.
