Quesnel's newly-elected mayor, Bob Simpson, says his landslide victory over incumbent Mary Sjostrom came as no surprise.
"I had door knocked maybe 1,700-1,800 doors and I was hearing that people really wanted a change in the mayor's position," Simpson said Tuesday.
The former MLA for Cariboo North, who lost to Liberal Coralee Oakes last year after he was ousted from the New Democrats, drew 2,128 votes to just 884 for Sjostrom, who had been the town's mayor for six years and was a councillor for nine before that.
Simpson also sees as significant the fact that he bucked a trend and drew more votes than the most popular candidate to run for council. The first place finisher in that race, Ed Coleman, attracted 1,979 votes.
"The strong difference in the vote between me and Mary signaled the community's desire for substantive change in the mayor's office but also, giving me a higher vote than the leading council vote has suggested that that leadership is supposed to be brought into the council chamber as well," Simpson said.
Among his first steps will be to "reset the clock" and, with council, go through a strategic planning exercise leading up to the budget process. As someone "who has not been trained as a councillor and then became mayor," Simpson said he will apply "fresh eyes" to looking at every line item and ask "does it still hold?"
"Does it really reflect the needs of our community, do we have the right priorities and really do an assessment," Simpson said.
Simpson is moving into the position at a time of transition for the community, which has seen its population decline to slightly less than 10,000 over the last few years as its forest sector has endured a series of blows.
He is expecting the trend to continue and said he wants to get Quesnel in a position to absorb those hits, a significant reduction in the annual allowable cut within the next 18 months expected to be among them.
"It could be a quarter of what it is now and there are implications for us in the community but there are also opportunities for us to use that as leverage with not only the province but the federal government to be able to do some of the repositioning we need to do in the community," Simpson said. "One of the differences between Mary and I is I don't believe that we wait for that event to occur and then figure out what to do."
For the last 20 years, he made a living as a change management consultant, Simpson noted.
"I helped organizations reinvent themselves, I did the critical analysis and really, once you get people over the sort of instinctual fear of change, you find out that people can be really creative," he said.
Sjostrom said she was disappointed but not bitter with the outcome and suggested she was a victim of such circumstances as the closure of Canfor's sawmill, which employed 209 people.
"I don't think there was anything more I could do," Sjostrom said. "Certainly, some people thought I could have done more but....I really think there of lack of true understanding with the electorate of what exactly the true power of the mayor is."
