The federal government is providing just over $24,000 to help pay for “acoustic renovations” at the Gibsons Public Market.
The money, $24,250 in all, is coming from the government’s New Horizons for Seniors Program and Minister of Seniors Deb Schulte was at the market March 3 to make the announcement.
Schulte said the government put an additional $100 million into that fund to help with ongoing efforts to address social isolation and loneliness. “We know that it’s an important determinant of health,” Schulte told the audience of around 50, which included volunteers from several groups focused on seniors. “People that are isolated and lonely are taking more drugs, they are making more visits to hospital, they are going into hospital earlier. If we can address that we can help our communities and we can help our seniors.”
Pam Robertson, president of the Gibsons Community Building Society, said the acoustic renovation project will help make the market building’s main hall a better space for people with hearing impairments as well as improve the overall ability to hear what’s going on when the hall is crowded. The society will also use some of the money to help with programming that engages seniors and encourages them to volunteer at the market and the Marine Education Centre.
“We call it ‘Hearing from our Neighbours’ because we’ve been hearing a lot from our neighbours about how they would like to be able to hear better in this facility, so we’re really, really excited about this.”
Robertson also described the New Horizons grant as a “down payment.”
“We still have a little bit more money to raise, but now that we have this grant we have the basis for getting this done in the next year and ideally in the next six months.”
Gibsons Mayor Bill Beamish said improving the acoustics will also make the market more suitable for some of the events the Town would like to use it for.
“We had our last intergovernmental meeting here,” Beamish said. “And we sat around in this room and it was difficult to hear, as you can imagine, as you try to speak across the room with normal voices. This will be a much more usable meeting space. Large venues is something we lack in this town.”
Schulte’s visit to the Sunshine Coast was also scheduled to include a meeting with the Seniors Planning Table.
Although the dollar amount in the announcement isn’t large, she said, she welcomed the invitation from MP Patrick Weiler to come to the riding in part because in small communities even a few thousand dollars in funding can make a big impact and because rural communities have more challenges providing services for seniors.
“Ministers often just go out into the big centres, they don’t go into rural Canada… Isolation is a really big issue because people are dispersed, the resources are less available for seniors, so I wanted to make sure as I got into this portfolio that we reached out and went into what I would deem as more dispersed rural Canada rather than just in the urban centres where there’s more resources.”
“I’m really proud to be able to show the minister the great work that’s being done here and what we can do to support that,” said Weiler.
