The leader of the Saskatchewan New Democratic Party spent the start of his week touring around our city. 

During Ryan Meili's outing, he spoke with representatives from the education sector about the various challenges they face, toured two unique local businesses and also made a point of hearing from our two senior organizations who are facing closures in the coming years if they don't get more support or find a solution. 

Meili stated that upon hearing the concerns from various areas in our cities he said there's a pair of things people can do to make sure those issues are making their way up to the people who make decisions for our communities and province. 

"One is connecting them to folks in our office to try and figure out are there ways that they can access existing programs. The other way is to amplify their voice; in opposition, while we don't have the levers of policy we're able to raise people's voices. Something I'm encouraging them to do is, bring that to the legislature, let's tell that story," explained Meili. 

He noted that speaking with residents he found himself more in the listeners seat rather than leading the conversations, especially when it came to small business owners as many of them have a unique perspective. 

"They're cool to talk to, they're entrepreneurs, which means they're troubleshooters, they're problem solvers. So when they talk about the challenges they've faced getting started whether its ways to help have supports to train new employees or have supports to make their way through the regulatory processes so that they can deliver safe products and do a good job but not have to start from scratch to get there. They've got ideas on how to do that and I think aside from learning what the challenges are, I actually find that a lot of the best ideas come from these conversations out in communities," said Meili.

Stating that a squeaky wheel gets the attention, Meili said Moose Jaw needs louder cheerleaders and representatives who are willing to get the spotlight shining our city in the legislature. 

"I feel that's something Moose Jaw could use a bit more of, in that we have two MLAs here that are not particularly vocal on the needs of Moose Jaw we don't hear a lot about it in the legislature from them. This is a community that has been in many ways taken for granted by the Sask Party and deserves better representation than they've been getting."

Meili added that he recognizes all the publicity and economic growth we've made as a community but said with some of the larger upcoming projects there are even more opportunities to support our local people and businesses. 

"One of the things I'll be watching closely is projects like the power plant where there are provincial government programs, that's great stuff, but when we build them we should make sure we build them with local companies. We've seen that from the Sask Party that they tend to have out of province and out of country companies doing those major builds."

He said he feels like Moose Jaw is the perfect size for new developments and existing businesses to flourish but wants to hear from residents about the challenges they face when beginning these ventures.