Wood Buffalo mayor offers up hope from behind the wheel of her ‘office’
In the parking lot of the Crestwood Shopping Centre, Melissa Blake, the mayor of the Regional Municipal District of Wood Buffalo, is meeting with her city council. In the passenger’s seat beside her sits the bag of bread she’s just picked up at the nearby Cobs bakery for her family.
Without a laptop — or an office — Fort McMurray’s mayor-in-exile is working these days from the driver’s seat of her rented Jeep Grand Cherokee. Her conference call is patched through to her car speakers via Bluetooth, leaving her hands free to keep checking her smartphone for messages and updates.
She’s been offered office space, but she’s declined.
“I just don’t see the value in sitting down,” she says. “I’d rather be out.”
In the three weeks since a wildfire forced Blake, and everyone else in Fort McMurray, from their homes, the mayor has been visiting evacuee centres to raise spirits and solve problems, using her Twitter account, @MayorMelissa, to keep people informed, and calming and leading a fractious city council, a council feeling the strains and stresses of exile themselves. She’s had to be a den mother, not just to her own two young sons, but to a whole community of displaced persons.
Now, though, she faces another challenge: not of raising people’s spirits, but of helping to plan for their successful return home. Through it all, she’s presented an indomitably upbeat presence.
In a crisis, she says, a leader must choose between two paths — one of hope, or one of anger and despair.
“If you are a true leader, you want to lead people into a hopeful place,” she says. “You want to lead them into a future that is better and brighter.”
Her message to her fellow evacuees is straightforward. They can rebuild their city together. And they can give themselves a fresh new start.
“It’s your home. It’s just not the home you know,” she says. “But you’re going to have to work to recreate what you hope it will be.”
Fort McMurray is a place of fresh starts, where people have always gone to remake and reinvent themselves. And Blake is no stranger to tough fights. She first ran for council in 1998, when she was just 28. At 34, she became mayor, defeating a powerful incumbent.
Over the last 12 years she’s battled with the province and the federal government for more infrastructure dollars, and with council members and local critics about the administration of the city and some of the salaries paid to senior city staff. But as Fort McMurray prepares to rebuild and renew, Blake is facing her biggest challenge yet.
On this morning, Blake has just dropped off her two sons, ages 12 and 6, at Laurier Heights school. They’re both French immersion students, and Laurier’s French program was a good fit for them, since they’ve all been living at her mother’s west-end condo. Blake; her husband, a Suncor engineer; and her younger son — plus their pet pug — are using the condo’s guest suite, while her older son and her brother, who was also evacuated from Fort McMurray, are sharing her mother’s apartment.
“She’s been putting up with us very well,” says Blake, a mischievous grin lighting her freckled face.
Making breakfast for her kids, packing lunches and dropping them at school sounds normal enough. Ironically, when Blake’s at home, she rarely has time for those tasks. “I always say I’m a mayor first and a mother second.”
But domestic chores are part of her new routine now, at a time where nothing is routine.
She’s been back twice to tour the abandoned city. If the reentry goes as scheduled, she and her husband will drive up June 2 to check their house, still standing in the city’s Timberlea district. But she’s not sure they’ll bring the boys just yet. Her kids will finish the school year in Edmonton and the family will try to move back sometime in July. Until then, she’ll be back and forth to help manage the city’s role in the re-entry.
The first priority, she says, is to restore clean drinking water service.
“We’re close,” she says. “But people are going back to a boilwater advisory. There’s just no way around it.”
Next is waste management. There will be a lot of garbage to throw out, and no curbside pickup, at least not right away. The city is trying, instead, to create some central dump sites where people can bring their rotted food or destroyed furniture. But the cleanup, she says, is something insurance companies, the city and the province will have to coordinate together.
That may not please some of Blake’s council colleagues. Several have expressed anger at the thought of non-residents taking part in the recovery work. But Blake says the community simply doesn’t have the capacity to rebuild single-handedly.
“Of course, we want to see our local businesses sustain themselves through this difficult time. But we can’t do it alone. And in a free-market economy, people are going to need the best prices available as they rebuild.”
Blake’s passion for her city runs deep. She moved there in 1982, when she was 12, from Quebec’s Eastern Townships, and made her life there. She earned her business degree via Keyano College and Athabasca University. Then she worked her way up at Syncrude, from tour guide to community relations staff to senior recruiter.
Leaving the city on the day of the evacuation was wrenching.
“All I could think was that captains go down with ships. And I thought, ‘Do mayors burn with cities?’ ”
She’s fiercely proud of the commitment and courage of those who stayed behind, the firefight- ers who saved most of the city, and of the senior city managers and staffers who stayed to make sure the water treatment plant could provide water for the hoses.
“I will say there wasn’t a single soul who could have done things better than they did under the circumstances.”
But as difficult as it’s been to fight the fire, bringing the city back to life may be harder yet. People will feel “shock and awe” when they see the damage, she warns, but also inspiration in the generosity and energy of their neighbours. People will need time to mourn their losses, she says. But then, they’ll get to work.
“Memories are good. They exist forever in your mind. Tangibles are gone, but there are pockets of hope everywhere. There is hope. There is something to come back to.”