Candle Lake has a new library located in their recreation facility. (Submitted Photo/Wapiti Regional Library)

By Rob Mahon

New Candle Lake Library

New library to open in Candle Lake

Oct 25, 2021 | 5:00 PM

After years of working on the idea, Wapiti Regional Library has made a breakthrough on getting a library into the Resort Village of Candle Lake. Housed within a larger facility in the community, the new library is set to open Nov. 2.

“The new library is basically a room in their recreational facility,” said Tony Murphy, Wapiti Regional Director. “It’s a shared facility with senior’s organizations and a health clinic on the main floor and other community organizations sharing it. We’ve been given space to work with in there, so we’ve put in shelving and some computers.”

According to Murphy, they’ve divided the shelves into adult and children’s materials while keeping computers available for public access. Though he said the idea had been there for five or six years, they made slow but steady progress on it the entire time.

“What I look for is an ad hoc library board to start the process,” Murphy said. “That lets us know that there is interest in the community and a commitment in the community to support a library. So, the local board becomes official just before they open.”

The idea behind this is to keep the library community-based and to make sure more local people are involved. Because of the local involvement and continued interest, even a change in municipal government wasn’t enough to prevent the library from opening.

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“There was a municipal election in the middle of the process, so you go through that,” said Murphy. “I’m thrilled to say that even with a fairly new council in Candle Lake, they’ve stayed right on course, committed to the new library. That was really reassuring for us.”

It’s been 25 years since Wapiti opened a new library, so this represented a significant milestone for them. Despite that gap, however, Murphy said the role of the library in a smaller community hasn’t diminished.

“The last library opened in 1996, we’ve lost a couple in the interim period,” Murphy said. “A couple of communities got to the point where they couldn’t support their library anymore. In this day and age, with the absolutely erroneous death knell still being claimed for libraries, which is a mystery to me, it’s great to see a community standing up and saying, ‘Yeah, we’d like a library, thank you very much.’”

Murphy added it was also great to see a new library opening in the middle of a global pandemic. He also said the library will serve as a good resource for the senior’s centre that sits in the same building.

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rob.mahon@pattisonmedia.com

On Twitter: @RobMahonPxP