It may not be immediately clear to everyone how important a recent visit to the city could be.
Andriy Shevchenko, the new Ukrainian ambassador to Canada, was in Yorkton, and while the visit was a short one, the long term impact could be significant.
The City of Yorkton is already teaming up with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), to support the implementation of the Partnership for Local Economic Development and Democratic Governance Program (PLEDDG Program), following a unanimous decision by Yorkton Council earlier this year.
The partnership for Local Economic Development and Democratic Governance (PLEDDG) is a 6-year, CAN $19.6 million dollar program, developed by FCM and Ukrainian partners and funded by Global Affairs Canada (GAC). PLEDDG began on March 27, 2015 following the signing of the national agreement.
PLEDDG aims to strengthen Ukraine’s municipal sector by increasing capacities in sixteen cities in four oblasts (Ivano-Frankivsk, Poltava, Vinnytsia and Zaporizhia) to advance local democracy and economic development, create a more enabling local environment for entrepreneurship and local economic development (LED), detailed a report circulated to Council at the time.
Shevchenko’s visit builds on such connections, connections which run deep locally given the influence of Ukraine immigrants on the cities and region’s development and history.
The Ambassador referenced the ties, which bind the two countries while in the city.
“We have such wonderful emotional warmth between Canada and Ukraine through the Ukrainian-Canadian community,” Shevchenko said in a YTW story June 15. “My mission and my challenge is to make sure we can supplement that with very pragmatic reasons to be good partners. That’s why we’re exploring new opportunities in terms of trade, in terms of investments, and in terms of security cooperation. I’m really looking forward to that.”
It is such connections we need to build on locally to foster better trade opportunities.
Shevchenko, as Ambassador, must look at the connections on a bigger picture scale, country-to-country, and those are of course important to both countries.
But we have an opportunity locally to use the connections to our region’s advantage.
While we tend to think of trade in terms of products flowing from country-to-country, increasingly the key resource of trade is knowledge, which again Schevchenko eluded too.
“I would encourage the Ukrainian-Canadian community to stay together, to stay united,” he said. “They have been wonderful examples, role models, as community leaders, as community activists around country and specifically here in the Yorkton area and I would really encourage them to stay together, that helps them to have a strong voice, a strong say.”
Role models come in many forms. The aforementioned MOU partnership will draw on Canadian knowledge and experience in terms of local government to help move reforms forward in Ukraine.
However, local knowledge is more broadly based than how to best operate municipal governments.
Look around the city and region and there are examples of people with long resumes in value-added processing of farm products, farm equipment manufacturing, production farming, tourism, small business development, outreach education and a number of other areas.
In each case it is knowledge which could be of interest to those in Ukraine as they continue to evolve as a country independent after decades of Communist Russia-influence and control.
That Schevchenko made time to stop in the city, as brief as it was, just opens the door a bit wider to just trade in knowledge, and that would be good for our region, and Ukraine.
