Economic Development, improving initiatives for local non-profit agencies, and finishing projects on the strategic plan are just some of the focuses of the RM of St. Laurent for 2016. Reeve Cheryl Smith says they started to take on a more innovative approach to applying for the Manitoba Green Team Initiative --which sees students coming to the municipality to work with local non-profits and municipal governments-- in 2015. Rather than having the RM, and each individual non-profit applying for students, they started to have one group look after the application, with the RM taking on a supervision role once the students are in place. Smith says they feel it's a more viable model, and hope to expand on it in the future.

"The RM is sort of stepping up to the plate and saying we have office staff, we have public works staff, we can assist in that area. It's a different way of applying for the program, but we're hoping to leads to a policy change down the line that this may work better for some communities than each organization applying on its own."

When it comes to their strategic plan, Smith says one of their major focuses over the next year will be the creation of a Metis heritage museum. The projects been discussed for some time, with the proposed location at the St. Laurent Welcome Centre. While it's a project being worked on for some time, council's hoping to really begin to move forward, now that St. Laurent's Metis artifacts which are currently on display at the Smithsonian Museum, will be returning to the community. Smith feels the results of the 2015 federal election may help provide a boost to the project, citing some of the discussions by the Liberal party surrounding heritage funding.

"We're seeing opportunities. Obviously because of our Metis cultural museum, we're seeing more opportunities with this new government because of the programs they're talking about in funding new cultural programming. To us that's exciting, so we're going to be watching out for that."

Smith says they'll also continue their focus on economic development, following a challenging few years after the 2011 flood which resulted in an economic downturn for the municipality. Smith says they've been able to accomplish much of the rebuilding, but hope to continue that process to improve the local economy.