DENZIL, Sask. (Staff) – If local people don’t create their own jobs, no one will do it for them, says Norbert Leibel, chair of the Eye Hill Rural Development Corp.
He’s one of the founding board members of a business-encouragement group that has a 100-kilometre reach around the west-central Saskatchewan town of Macklin.
Since the late 1980s, 38 RDCs have been formed in the province. They receive some funding from the provincial government as well as local rural municipalities and town councils in order to nudge business and job creation, but not to fund it.
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Under the new government, the RDC concept is gradually being supplanted by larger bodies called Regional Economic Development Authorities. There are eight REDAs now, said a provincial economic department spokesperson. These are to be supported by more organizations in their areas and can receive up to $25,000 in matching funding from the province.
Eye Hill RDC was set up in 1990 and has offered would-be entrepreneurs advice and two educational conferences since then.
Leibel said about the most recent conference that “maybe it’ll develop into something or not” for the score of participants.
And it’s not all about job creation. Leibel said, “some businesses are still here as a result of the corporation,” such as a garage still running after the owner wanted to retire.
Thirteen years ago Leibel was a farmer who liked cooking meat for groups as a sideline. A square dance group asked him to cook for their gathering, but he had promised to take the family to the lake that weekend.
So the group made him an offer to pay for the meal if he did it all. He agreed and now is a caterer rather than a farmer.
“I got too busy in the summer, cooking when I was supposed to be farming,” Leibel said.
He and his wife Elsie do weddings, homecomings, graduations, meetings and Christmas parties from Oyen, Alta., to Turtleford, Sask., through their business, Norbert’s Country Catering in Denzil.
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