Business View Magazine | April 2020

274 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE APRIL 2020 from the surrounding area to come out for ‘daycation’ visits. We also have the Stony Plain & Parkland Pioneer Museum and the Multicultural Heritage Center, which helps us preserve and retell the stories of our past to make sure we’re aware of where we came from. So, we have a good grounding as we continue to grow and mature as a community. “Our single largest employer is the school division. We also have Westview Health Centre, and the Town of Stony Plain is a fairly large employer, along with large multinationals like Safeway and some hotel chains. In the cannabis sector, there are three retail stores open in the community and a couple more that have applied for licenses. When we were going through the initial process, we made sure our bylaws matched our community sentiment and it’s worked out well for us. “Energy and extraction is another growing industry. We have some great synergies with companies there that are looking to provide value-added services to that sector. We know that will change with society, but we also know that fossil fuels will be the number one economic driver for Alberta for the next 50 years before everything changes over. So we have to make sure that we’ll also be able to support those services. Stony Plain has quite a few companies that are doing painting and pipeline coating and tank maintenance technology for the resource sector, such as Barrier Coating and RK Enterprises. “I believe in working better to preserve our environment and our climate because we only have one world to live in but we also have to be realistic about what drives the economy right now. There has to be a balance of nurturing the new emerging technologies that will support us in the future but also maintaining what we have now that’s providing those dollars so we can invest into the future.” BVM: Does the Town have housing inventory to