{"id":118675,"date":"2020-11-24T01:59:06","date_gmt":"2020-11-23T22:59:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/a-saskatchewan-towns-emergency-pop-up-mayor\/"},"modified":"2020-11-24T01:59:06","modified_gmt":"2020-11-23T22:59:06","slug":"a-saskatchewan-towns-emergency-pop-up-mayor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/a-saskatchewan-towns-emergency-pop-up-mayor\/","title":{"rendered":"#A Saskatchewan town’s emergency pop-up mayor"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#A Saskatchewan town’s emergency pop-up mayor<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Bryan Matheson took up an interesting part-time job after the provincial government called asking for a favour: Could he become mayor of Craik, Sask. for a little while?\n <\/div>\n
\n Bryan Matheson was whiling away a May afternoon on his laptop, as retired teachers do, when out of the blue came a call from a manager from the Saskatchewan government. She needed a favour, just for a few months. Could he become mayor of Craik? The town of 400, he was told, had suddenly lost its mayor and enough councillors that it no longer had quorum for meetings.<\/p>\n

Matheson, 71, had two reasons to potentially pass on the offer. First, he had a summer cabin on Waskesiu Lake in northern Saskatchewan, wonderfully close to the golf course. Second, he was already the mayor of Lumsden, the town where he lives, 90 km southeast of the mayor-less one in need of his services.<\/p>\n

That first factor gave him pause, but holding down two part-time mayoral jobs at once didn\u2019t seem so daunting. Matheson said yes, and embarked on this rare double duty for five months, until Craik could hold its election and replenish its council and top chair with locals.<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0Oshawa\u2019s new mayor once saved his own life from ruin. Can he save his city next?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He wasn\u2019t told precisely why the Saskatchewan government had identified him as a candidate to fill this emergency vacancy in a town he knew little about. Matheson reckons it\u2019s because, as a three-term mayor in Lumsden, he\u2019s on the provincial municipalities association\u2019s mentorship committee, and often fields calls and queries from fellow mayors in a bind. After presiding over his fifth council meeting in October, Matheson called it \u201ccertainly a learning experience\u201d and hopes it was positive for Craik, too. \u201cThe fact I missed three, four or five rounds of golf? Life will move on and I won\u2019t suffer so much,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Craik, which lies almost smack in the middle of the drive from Saskatoon to Regina, is no stranger to trouble. Though it sits near a reservoir that gives it the motto \u201cBest town by a dam site,\u201d Craik spent 10 years under a boil-water advisory until a new treatment plant gave the community clean drinking water in 2019. Like many small farming towns, it struggles for lack of economic development. It drew acclaim from environmentalists across Canada for an \u201cEco-Centre\u201d restaurant and meeting complex made of salvaged timber and compressed straw-bale walls, but that burned down in 2016 and was never rebuilt.<\/p>\n

\"Matheson<\/p>\n

Matheson at the town offices of Craik, Sask. (Photograph by Breanna Doucette-Garr)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This year, elected mayor David Ashdown and several councillors resigned amid a swirl of the sort of rumours and conflicts that afflict many small-town councils\u2014a level of bitterness that prompted one former councillor to hang up when Maclean\u2019s<\/em> called to ask about the brouhaha. Much of it centred on false insinuations from some locals that the town\u2019s lone administrator misused funds. The prolonged squabbling drove Ashdown to leave in June for the sake of his own health. \u201cMy doctor tells me I should avoid most stress of any kind,\u201d he says. Six weeks after he quit, along with two councillors who departed at around the same time, Ashdown had emergency surgery that he says was unrelated to the political stress he\u2019d withstood.<\/p>\n

The tumult left Craik with only three councillors, and it needs four to conduct municipal business or even schedule by-elections. That trigged the provincial government to use its extraordinary powers to fill vacancies by app<\/a>ointment: while out-of-towners can\u2019t legally run in a Saskatchewan municipality\u2019s elections, they can serve as appointed placeholders. Along with Matheson as interim mayor, the province appointed a Lumsden councillor (whom Matheson recommended) and a third new member from the highway-side village of Bethune. They\u2019d join the locals until the Nov. 9 municipal election would let Craik restock its own shelves.<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0Saskatchewan\u2019s sobering election campaign<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Matheson says he drove up to Craik a few times before his first council meeting, to meet colleagues and familiarize himself with the town and its issues. Reviewing council minutes, he was irked by how regularly the body held private \u201cin-camera\u201d meetings, and resolved to change that. \u201cWhoever was talking about me ahead of time made me sound a lot tougher than I am,\u201d he says of chatter around town. \u201cWhen I heard that I thought, That\u2019s not a bad thing to have people thinking<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

You might assume town residents wouldn\u2019t take kindly to a mayor from a bigger community (Lumsden\u2019s population is 1,824) swooping in to fix things. You\u2019d be wrong. \u201cThey seem to be holding the town together,\u201d Gwen Eyre, a retired nurse who chairs Craik\u2019s Legion board and runs the wintertime walking group for seniors, says of Matheson and the other newcomers. Craik-based councillor Lawrence McRae had himself turned down an offer to become mayor. Matheson, he says, \u201ckind of fell in with the ball game<\/a> here and was pretty good.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his brief, unelected tenure, Matheson mostly played caretaker mayor, funding a tree removal here; approving a building permit for a garage there. But he did have to tend to a brush fire or two. The old council had given the green light for an upgrade on a main road through Craik, but crews applied the wrong type of gravel, leaving a washboard-like mess. The Lumsden\/Craik mayor saw to it the road was fixed, properly this time.<\/p>\n

There were complaints, Matheson says, but of the petty sort the past council struggled with: workers shouldn\u2019t be mowing that <\/em>boulevard, or should be doing it this <\/em>way. \u201cIt was nitpicky stuff\u2014stuff that in Lumsden people know better than to phone me and complain about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two men registered to run for mayor of Craik in its next election, and 10 people for council positions. Matheson is acclaimed for a fourth term as Lumsden mayor. He\u2019ll think fondly of Craik the next time he passes it on Highway 11, but they shouldn\u2019t expect him to attend another council meeting.<\/p>\n\n

This article appears in print in the December 2020 issue of<\/em> Maclean\u2019s magazine with the headline, \u201cThe emergency pop-up mayor.\u201d Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here<\/a>.<\/em>
\n<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

If you liked the article, do not forget to share it with your friends. Follow us on\u00a0Google News<\/a><\/span>\u00a0too, click on the star and choose us from your favorites.<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

For forums sites go to Forum.BuradaBiliyorum.Com<\/a><\/span><\/strong>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

If you want to read more News<\/a> articles, you can visit our General category.<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#A Saskatchewan town’s emergency pop-up mayor” Bryan Matheson took up an interesting part-time job after the provincial government called asking for a favour: Could he become mayor of Craik, Sask. for a little while? Bryan Matheson was whiling away a May afternoon on his laptop, as retired teachers do, when out of the blue came…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":118676,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/SASKATCHEWAN-MAYOR-CRAIK-AND-LUMSDEN-MARKUSOFF-NOV03-750x422.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[67806,73136,81202,81203],"class_list":["post-118675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-editors-picks","tag-mayors","tag-saskatchewan","tag-small-towns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/118676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}