BIOGRAPHY
Carl Kuhnke lives in Walkerton with his wife Beth and their two rescue dogs, Pippin and Zoe. He retired as CEO of the Walkerton Clean Water Centre in April of this year and currently operates his own organizational consulting firm, Great Lakes Strategies.
After two decades serving Canada as a diplomat in Asia, Europe, and the U.S., he left to create several technology start-ups across Canada. He was asked to return to public service in 2013 as the CEO of Saskatchewan’s Infrastructure Centre and came back to Ontario in 2017 after a nationwide search for a new CEO for the Clean Water Centre. There he led WCWC’s new First Nations drinking water initiatives and expanded the Centre, purchasing four acres of land from Brockton.
Carl founded Saugeen Hospice in 2021 and currently sits on the board. He is a provincial appointee to the Brockton Police Services Board, a member of the Brockton Economic Development Committee, and was previously a Director of the Board of the South Grey Bruce Health Centre.
In their spare time, Carl and Beth volunteer for juvenile diabetes initiatives, and mentor insulin pump users in Brockton and across Canada. Both Type 1 diabetics, they wear life-saving insulin pumps. Beth’s entire family is from Elora/Elmira and she co-led the Grey-Bruce “Canada Sews’ initiative during COVID, which sewed thousands of gowns and hundreds of thousands of masks for libraries, retailers, and front-line health workers during the pandemic.
BIGGEST ISSUE
Brockton, and all smaller municipalities across Ontario, face one overriding issue – providing the services and amenities expected by their ratepayers without increasing taxes to a level that cannot be sustained by the very residents requesting the services. Just like any corporation governed by its bylaws and accountable to its shareholders, Brockton the municipality is governed by rules and regulations established under the Ontario Municipal Act of 2001. Its shareholders are its residents, and its Board of Directors is its municipal council, chaired by its mayor.
In my mind the critical issue facing Brockton is preparing it for a thriving and community-based future before that uncertain future arrives with us unprepared. This means getting back to the basics we all expect but are too often taken for granted – transportation, water, housing, community safety and well-being. Managing our basics effectively in a rapidly-changing world requires long-term strategic planning and the ability to foresee whether the light at the end of the tunnel is real, or just another train coming at you. Managing issues effectively also requires total teamwork, with colleagues who may or may not share a given opinion on any given day, or subject.
Four decades of my life have been invested in strategic planning, long-term thinking, and working with governments and boards of all shapes and sizes to maximize results for shareholders and shareholder communities. Immediately after arriving in 2017, I was asked to join the Brockton Economic Development Committee, as additional revenues from potential development were seen to provide a stronger tax base to lessen resident tax increases. This has borne fruit. Similarly, I was appointed by the province as an independent member of the Brockton Police Services Board in 2019 given my keen interest in community safety and well-being. Its oversight of the large OPP contract has resulted in reasonable contract expenditures despite significant growth and OPP expense increases.
Going forward, I believe it to be unrealistic for anyone to claim to have the instant solutions to all the challenges a growing community faces. My commitment to residents is to use the skills, and the relationships, I have developed over the past 40 years in the public and private sectors to collaborate with our colleagues at various levels of government to maximize the returns we in Brockton get from those relationships. That is the beginning of effective decision-making for housing, economic growth, transportation, water, and a sense of community.
