Business View Magazine | January 2020

333 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JANUARY 2020 WINKLER , MANI TOBA that includes a personal satisfaction for one to be here. And you deal with the heart and mind and body - if they’re all healthy, that is the essence of creating a strong community. Mental health is a big issue; the Nature Sanctuary is a piece of the puzzle that helps people cope with life. We’re trying to present it in a way that helps foster quality of life in conjunction with good jobs and good homes.” BVM: Is the city experiencing significant growth? Harder: “Our population has been booming. In 2018, we had huge industrial expansion which created a large number of building permits in excess of $87 million in one year, including this Meridian Exhibition Centre, and a new school that was being built. For the size of our community, normally it’s $35-40 million, which has brought us to three percent growth per year. In 2018, the focus was on the industrial side of it, and the job side of it, and housing, as well. But we had just under 90 housing starts for the year. This year, by the end of October, we had 146 housing starts; a mix of multi-family, duplex, and single family. We have a lot of land available and multiple developers who are involved, and they need to pay attention as to how we’d like it designed. “And we now have an absolutely awesome fiber optic network available to every single home and business in Winkler. The neat thing is that since we had our local company, Valley Fibre, install the infrastructure, Bell MTS is now installing fiber to homes. So, not only did we initiate the installation and services of high- speed internet, we now have the competitor coming up and saying, ‘me too.’ As a result of what we did in Winkler, Valley Fibre got the Province of Manitoba Investment Tax Credit available to the investors into Valley Fibre. Then, they approached our federal government that had a program to improve accessibility to high speed internet across Canada. Valley Fibre came up with a plan and said, if they got a grant, they would reach out from their data center in