Kelowna mayor and other city officials will attend this week's FCM in Toronto

Kelowna Mayor Tom Dyas will lead a small city hall delegation to this week's Federation of Canadian Municipalities Conference in Toronto.

The annual conference runs Thursday through Sunday.

Dyas, Coun. Gord Lovegrove, city manager Doug Gilchrist and two other managers will make the trip east.

"My agenda is to network with people," said Dyas during a one-on-one interview with Castanet News.

"These are the mayors from all over the country. Watching the news (last week) and situations that came up on the East Coast in Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick that were dealing with areas around housing and how they were going to deal with housing."

"There are a few ideas they had that were interesting, so going to FCM gives me the opportunity to have discussions with other individuals across the country on initiatives they are advancing."

Dyas says while building those relationships with civic officials from across the country is important when it comes to sharing ideas on common initiatives, he says there are also seminars and workshops he is interested in attending.

"There are workshops on everything...workshops on homelessness, workshops on crime, workshops on infrastructure funding, on housing. It will be busy in on sense that this is my first FCM, but it's not my first conference on a national level."

And there is the possibility of speaking with some federal ministers.

FCM is not like the Union of BC Municipalities Convention where provincial ministers make time to speak with civic leaders about their individual wants and needs, however Dyas says there may be an opportunity where "you can get into a discussion and bring forward some of your issues and set the stage for further communication down the road."

The FCM Conference comes about a week after Lower Mainland mayors travelled to Ottawa to lobby for more funding for transit.

Dyas says those talks could help lay the groundwork for future talks involving other municipalities including Kelowna.

"Those are some of the discussions and insights because now you get to hear more from exactly what happened at that point in time.

"What was the discussion, what was the information they uncovered and how can we work with those items?"