New Contributor to Community TV
Kelly Allard
Speaking Out and Speaking Up
I’ve known Tom since he videotaped me in front of the provincial building in 2019. I was protesting the substandard care my husband Carl received at MHRH. That video got the attention of the Powers That Be. The day after it was posted the hospital contacted me; I was appointed someone to call any time I had issues with Carl’s care.
During the election campaign, I got to know Tom a little more. He interviewed me and we did a number of live streams during the campaign at Mayoral Candidate Alan Rose’s headquarters. I posted regularly on my FB campaign page and my campaign website. Obviously I was not elected but I did not stop posting articles of local interest and doing research.
Fellow candidates that I did not know before the election got me on a couple of local boards.
Councilor Alison Van Dyke nominated me to join the board of the Palliser Chapter of Friends of Medicare.
Fellow candidate Marco Jansen (now serving on the Police Commission) nominated me to join the board of the Family, Fun and Flight (my dad used to be a bush pilot; we had a float plane when I was a kid before we became poor). Fellow candidate Brian Webster (now serving on the Combative Sports Commission) also serves on that board.
I do NOT speak for either board.
Fellow candidate Mark Asham is on the Municipal Planning Commission.
Fellow candidate Stephen Campbell is part of the Alive After 5 Downtown.
Fellow candidate Justin Wright is the Spectrum Board President.
Apologies to those I missed, I don’t catch everything. There were 32 candidates after all. Please tell me what you’re doing now and I will happily update this.
I love the fact that most of us candidates, whether we were elected or not, are still cordial and work together after. I made a lot of new friends last year.
(Other candidates have gone silent, one even moved to a different province. Please remember that for the next election when they want your votes. See who stayed interested and active in serving the City. )
After the election I rebranded as
Kelly Allard Speaking Out and Speaking Up
For over a year I’ve been Speaking Out and Speaking Up on a variety of issues, mostly to do with municipal politics. My grown children have told me that’s called Watchdog Journalism. :)
For over a year, I’ve been doing it for free. Tom has been following my work and whenever he shared it on his platform it got a LOT of attention which I very much appreciated. Meanwhile, none of the other local news outlets contacted me or picked up any of the stories. CHAT once interviewed me on the subject of King Bob but that never made it on air.
Tom has offered me the opportunity to get paid for my work so we are now collaborating. My strengths are writing and researching, Tom’s strength is his production training and everything else he does and has done for the last 15 years. I’ll keep do what I’m doing and he’ll keep doing what he does. I believe our talents and experience will complement each other well. This is a win-win.
I’m very excited about this new venture and new chapter of my life. I will still keep my Kelly Allard Speaking Out and Speaking Up Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/kelly4mhcc/
and website.
(Yes I have to figure out how to change the links from my campaign stuff.) Slowly over the next few months I will be adding my old posts to the Community TV platform. New stuff will appear on here too.
To make this work we need new sponsors so he can pay me what I’m worth. (Okay, he could never afford that much but he can try. )
Best of all, you get to support me without publicly supporting me. You have plausible deniability, you can just say “I just sent money to Community TV, I had NO idea that crazy bitch worked there!”
I don’t care if people don’t like me, high school was decades ago. I’m here to keep people honest, that’s what a Watchdog Journalist does. It’s what I’m good at.
If that makes me a bitch, then it’s very apropos.
