As part of CHMA’s year-in-review week on Tantramar Report, Erica Butler sat down with Sackville’s deputy mayor, Ron Aiken, to reflect back on 2020.

Aiken looks back (and forward) on the town’s experience with the COVID-19 shutdown, the threat to services at the Sackville hospital, hirings and retirings with the town, and the postponed municipal elections due to happen this May.

Here’s the conversation:

TRANSCRIPT:

ERICA BUTLER:
Deputy Mayor Ron Aiken, thank you so much for joining me.

RON AIKEN:
Oh, my pleasure.

EB:
So 2020 obviously has been dominated by COVID-19. So maybe we should start off by harkening back to March in Sackville, and talking about how that initial lockdown affected the town.

RA:
To go back, it was March 13th when everything locked down. And for the town that meant we had to do a lot of very complex things in a big hurry. We had to essentially develop an operational plan for COVID, about how we’re going to conduct the town business and so on. We had to start working with Mount A about getting the students here safely, both for themselves and for the rest of town. So we developed that Mount A-Community bubble. And then we had to do the council meetings, virtually, which I guess people will remember took a couple of months to sort out all the glitches. But I think we got it down pretty well after a couple of tries.

So it’s all sorts of things, and it’s been… I think I should congratulate the staff of the town, because it was just a Herculean effort to do all this. Any one of those things that would have been difficult to do, but put them all together, and it took a lot of effort on the part of a lot of people.

EB:
I often marvel at Michael Beale, because he’s the town treasurer. But he’s also basically the town ‘AV guy’. He handles the Microsoft Teams and the stream on YouTube. And he sort of makes that all work.

RA:
Yeah, Michael wears a lot of hats from time to time. And I think just on the financial front, he’s been just superb in organizing the finances of the town. And you’ll see, as you saw from the last council meeting, we had a pretty good surplus last year, which they were able to put into various reserve funds, which are essentially rainy day accounts.

And as I pointed out in the meeting, I think this year is pretty good, but I think next year might be a real challenge to handle because all the debts are going to start coming due for the province. And their general habit is to download stuff to the municipality. So we are wary.

But Michael’s done such an excellent job of handling the money that we’re in really quite good shape.

The other person I’d like to mention is Jamie Burke, who, when all this happened, was actually CAO and senior manager of corporate projects. So he was wearing two hats at the same time, two full time jobs, essentially. So he really pulled that off quite well.

EB:
Now, we’ve been in and out of the orange phase since coming out of that initial lockdown to a bit of a ‘new normal’, as they used to call it. But since then we’ve been in and out of orange phase restrictions twice. What kind of impacts have you noticed and heard about from Sackvillians?

RA:
Well, I think people in town have handled it really quite well. I’d note that we’ve had one case of COVID in town since March. And that was travel related. It was a student who isolated and as far as I know, showed no symptoms, and went through a regular quarantine period and it was fine. So in fact, we’ve had no community-based cases in town. And I think that’s in large part due to the really quite good adherence by people in town to the all the protocols that have been established by the medical people.

I mean, it’s rare to see someone in town without a mask on now. And the distancing has been well done. So I think we can congratulate ourselves on pulling that off.

There’s a general frustration with, you know, obviously having to do it, and with Christmas being so disrupted for people, but I think people generally have the idea that there’s a greater good involved here. And if we can suffer through the next couple of months of some restrictions, then things are going to get a lot better.

EB:
It seems to me one of the biggest effects or impacts has been with the border closure. Because we’re so tightly associated with Amherst, lots of people are back and forth. Some people live here and work there or live there and work here. Having that Atlantic bubble, I guess really made a big difference in terms of easing things up. And now of course, the bubble has burst somewhat and we’re back to limited travel into Amherst. Do you have any idea or any sense that border might be reopening?

RA:
Well, it’s obviously going to reopen at some point. But I’m of two minds whether it’ll be very soon or not. Because I mean, our cases are quite low in New Brunswick and I think they’re coming down in Nova Scotia. But the problem is what happens in January? Because we’re going to go through the Christmas season and we saw a bit of a bump after our Thanksgiving. The Americans are certainly seeing a bump after their Thanksgiving. So after the Christmas holidays, we might see a bump in cases again. We could well go back to orange for a couple of weeks in January.

But it’s been a major impact. Essentially Amherst and Sackville are, for people doing shopping and so on, are kind of, you know, they come here and we go there.

It’s helped in a way with people buying local, because it’s just too much hassle to try and move around to much. So I think a lot of businesses in town have benefited from that. It’s very difficult to tell you know exactly what the economic benefit is. But the sense you get is that a lot of people are buying local these days.

But I guess it’s just the lack of convenience. And I think when the border was first closed, there was considerable confusion over the rules around it. If there’s any place the province fell down a bit, it was on making that very clear from the beginning. Did you have to get a piece of paper to cross or didn’t you? Or did it make any difference? I know I got the little travel document that said you’re going for legitimate purpose, and every time I came up to the border checkpoint there, I was just waved through. And nobody ever, in the number of times that I went over there, was I ever checked. So I think people were kind of wondering just what the rules were and you know, what they were up to so. So if they try that again, I don’t know if they’ll do that kind of border closure.

I would like to see the bubble reestablished. But, again, we have to leave that to the medical professionals that know what all the models are and what they’re telling us as far as spread of the virus.

EB:
Now back before the Atlantic bubble, Mayor David Kogon of Amherst and then-Mayor John Higham of Sackville actually met at the border. Mayor Higham stepped down in September, and you’ve assumed the duties of the mayor, as Deputy Mayor. That is all related to COVID, in a way, because we were supposed to have an election back in May, and that got postponed.

Talk a bit about what happened there and what will be happening.

RA:
They wisely postponed the election last May. And it’s going to be this May 10th or 11th, I forget the exact date. What the rules will be around that election, I don’t know. They can control quite closely how we do the voting. But I’m wondering what the, I think all people who are considering running for office are wondering, what will be the rules around campaigning? You know, do we go door to door, do we risk it? I think if the pandemic hasn’t slowed by April, then going door to door is probably a very bad idea. Because it’s a guaranteed way to essentially spread things around.

EB:
That will be interesting. You mentioned about campaigning, because you know, I find that amongst the people I know in Sackville, there’s different levels of concern and worry over certain protocols. So I can see some people appreciating a knock on the door, while others would be quite horrified with a knock on the door. So that’s going to be a challenge for candidates, I think.

RA:
Oh, absolutely. And, you know, I don’t know how you get around it. And I think it’ll all depend on what the state of the pandemic is at that point. If we haven’t had a case for a month in New Brunswick, well, then that makes it a much easier decision. If there’s still a steady trickle of one and two and three cases a day, then it’s going to be more of a problem.

And you have to remember too that the rules surrounding the election and the campaigning don’t just apply to Sackville. So they have to develop something that applies to the whole province. So if there happens to be an outbreak in Moncton, or Edmundston or Fredericton, then that will be taken into account when they do the rules around campaigning. And that will trickle down to affect places like Sackville, that don’t have any cases.

EB:
Now this year, we lost two members of council. We have now two retired spots. So I guess there will be some competition coming up in this May election. It won’t be a full slate of incumbents. We’ll likely see some new entrants into the race.

RA:
Oh, yeah, for sure. The second time I ran for council, I think there were 20 candidates in the running. There were really a lot of people doing it. And people say, oh, well, John Higham, and Joyce O’Neill are retired or resigned, so there’s two positions available on council the next time around. That’s the word from people. And it’s not true. There are eight positions available on council, plus the mayor, every time we have an election. The incumbents often get reelected, but in effect, it’s a new council.

I don’t know if you’ve been here for a municipal election in Sackville, but you can vote for up to eight people for council. So you can vote up to eight times.

I don’t know how many people will want to run. I think it might be an idea that has some sort of either online advice, or information session for those that want to run. Because there are lots of things about the job that people don’t realize what’s involved. And to have I think current councillors express their opinions on the job might be helpful for some people who might be considering running.

EB:
That’s an interesting suggestion. I’ve noticed that in some other places I’ve lived, the authorities may have a campaign school or introductory sessions, to let people know what its about. And that’s mainly a way to increase the diversity that you end up seeing in people taking a step and actually running. Because you need to sort of demystify and say, here’s what the job actually is.

RA:
Exactly.

EB:
And the job of mayor and councillor, they’re largely volunteer roles, are they?

RA:
Well, we get an honorarium for doing it. And there’s considerable discussion about whether we get enough or not. But no, we get a regular, we can call it a paycheck, I guess, for doing the job. Councillors get between $7,000 and $8,000 a year. The deputy mayor gets an extra two on top of that. And the mayor’s job is about $14,000 a year.

And people say to me, well, how many hours a week do you work? Well, it really depends. I know as acting mayor, I’m doing more than twice as much as I did as councillor. But there’s some weeks when you don’t do much at all, and there’s some weeks you’re spending 30 hours at it. So it’s quite irregular. I mean, around budget time, we spend a lot more time on it. In the mid-summer, not as much. So it’s quite variable. I would say on average, it’s about a 20-hour per week job, maybe, if you’re doing everything you should be doing.

One thing I would say to anybody thinking of running is the amount of reading you have to do. Nobody realizes that, but there’s always reports and papers coming down. Right now I’ve got right in front of me on my desk about 300 pages of various things I have to go through. So that’s one aspect to it that really people don’t realize, is the amount of just sitting at a desk and reading things you have to do.

EB:
We would be remiss not to go back before COVID, if we can remember that far back, but there was a crisis brewing in Sackville in 2020, even before COVID came. Can you remind listeners what happened in February with the Sackville Hospital?

RA:
Oh, yeah, well, the health authorities, Horizon and Vitalité, pretty much I think on their own–as I deal with the provincial politicians more and more, I get the impression that they really didn’t know what was happening–they came down with, they suggested “reforms”, which for us entailed cutting acute care beds, turning them over to long term care and cutting the hours of our emergency department. And we had, I mean, the biggest protest I’ve ever seen in Sackville. Hundreds of people showed up for two protests at the hospital. And we managed to convince, both through that and at the time John Higham talking to the people in the province, that these were really badly considered reforms. And I give the premier credit on this one. He jumped on it really quickly and said, okay, it’s not going to happen. It doesn’t make sense, there’s not been enough consultation.

And so now we’ve been positioning ourselves, pretty much since then… I don’t know if people realize, but the six communities that were affected by the these reforms, the mayors and CAOs and deputy mayors have been on phone calls and zoom meetings, early on it was every couple of weeks and now it’s monthly, about how we’re going to position ourselves to essentially fight any changes. Or not fight, that’s the wrong word. To have a say in what changes might happen to the healthcare system.

They seem to think, well, there have to be changes somehow, because their metrics tell them it’s not working very well.

And so right now, the new minister of health has asked for a kind of a overview of what the hospitals in the community should look like. And I’m in the process right now of writing that. It’s a brief vision statement, which is supposed to sum up the Sackville Hospital in a couple of pages… what we think it should look like. So I’m putting something together that I’ll circulate among the group that got together to deal with these reforms. And we’ll have to send it in by the end of the year to the Minister.

But it’s been a major problem. And the major question I ask and I’ve never really got a complete answer is, what problems are they trying to solve? All the problems that the minister in her letter to me and to other mayors, most of the questions she asked are not about health care, which surprised me. They’re about long term care. And I think we do ourselves a disservice when we don’t separate those two. Because the long term care bed people that are, you know, they call them bed blockers, that are in the hospitals. That’s not a health care problem. That’s a long term care problem. And if they solve that one, I think the problems with waiting times and all that and hospitals will largely take care of themselves.

EB:
So you’re saying they have to sort of direct the solution at the actual problem.

RA:
Exactly. And I got a pile of statistics from the health department, that I’m still trying to work through. But how they were judging the performance of our emergency was, at best, odd. Because they would say, okay, how many people are using emergency, and they said there was two or three people on average in Sackville overnight in emergency, which I think if you talk to anybody in emergency is ridiculous. There’s always more than that there.

What they were doing is they count people when they check into emergency. And they divide the day up into from up until midnight, then midnight to eight in the morning. So if five people checked in at 11:30 and were there until six in the morning, and then one person checked in after midnight, they would say there’s one person in the emergency, not six.

So we had to sort of really take a good careful look at how they were gathering these data and see exactly what they were using. It’s a big problem and it’s really quite confusing sometimes the way they’re trying to work it out.

EB:
Everyone wants quantifiable evidence, but I guess the big question is the decisions you make in how you quantify things really affects that evidence, I guess.

RA:
Before I retired from Mount A, I used to teach a biology course in statistics, and I read what they’re doing and it’s just… it mystifies me sometimes. I have no idea how they’re doing what they’re doing.

EB:
Before before COVID happened, there was you know, plans afoot for a health summit. Is something as ambitious, is that going to be happening in 2021?

RA:
There will be something. Now what it is, we don’t know. The six mayors of the affected communities asked if we could have a role in setting up what that consultation will look like. And that apparently is not going to happen. So we’ll have to wait and see what the what the Minister of Health comes up with.

But there will be some sort of consultation. The premier promised that he would come around to the six communities personally and talk to us about it, and that seems to have fallen off the radar. I don’t know if he’s going to do it or not. But the minister will certainly be around and probably bring, you know, deputy ministers and so on, to talk to us.

Now, I went with the mayor of Perth Andover and the mayor of Rogersville, we went to have a meeting with the deputy minister last July. And you got the impression from them that the nature of the reforms that were proposed in February were really off the table. That was just, I think, too embarrassing for them. So they’re stepping away from those, I think.

And we’ll have to see what what they come up with. And if they actually listened to us when we were talking to them. The Minister has said that the reforms that were proposed are currently not on the table, which gives me a little bit of leeriness about it, because she said ‘currently’ not on the table. Will they come back, is the question. And so I think we have to be on guard to fight that sort of thing.

EB:
So we’ve covered some issues with the hospital and the COVID-19 lockdown issues that the town has had, postponed election. Are there any other, I don’t know if we’ll call them highlights, the good, the bad and the ugly from 2020… Anything else that you wanted to mention?

RA:
Well, I’m putting together an online message for people in lieu of our Mayor’s levy this year, which won’t be held because obviously, COVID.

But a lot of things happen in town that people don’t realize. People do their work, they go about doing things and we don’t publicize it.

There’s the ongoing study about the flood preparations and protection measures. They’re doing a study on dykes, which oddly does not include the dykes around Amherst or Sackville, so I don’t know what they’re going to come up with on that.

The climate change roundtable has been very active. And we’ve got a proposal in now to the Environmental Trust Fund to hire a climate change coordinator for the town for a two year grant. And that will be a grant from the ETF, the Environmental Trust Fund, and that will not cost the town anything.

Again, the hospital steering committee was very active initially when the so-called reforms were put in, and it’s probably going to gear up again, because we’re going to get back into the hospitals problem.

We created the COVID taskforce. We had exit 506–a few years ago some citizens proposed we clean up that area and make it a kind of a second entrance to Sackville. So we’ve done repaving and installed services for a potential development.

The fire department has now set up a training facility. And I will say, the nice thing about that training facility has been it’s done largely with the money supplied by the firemen themselves. So it’s been from their volunteer fund that they raised money for.

We hired a new CAO. We hired a new senior manager for corporate projects. So those are two big jobs that were dealt with. And just as of the last meeting, we have a new superintendent of public works, which is Michelle Sherwood.

And so there’s been a lot of activity going on. I don’t think people realize, or are aware of. Something will come up in a council meeting and you vote on it goes by, but that doesn’t reflect often the amount of work involved in getting it to that point.

EB:
So a busy year.

RA:
It’s been a very busy year. And I would give staff a big thumbs up because they managed to do all this… All this work has got done in the background of COVID.

So it’s been really quite good. And the town’s in good shape, I think right now. Financially, we’re in great shape, pending what happens next year, we’ll have to see. But as of now we have a lot of money in reserve. And we have applied for more from the province to cover our COVID costs. So we’ll just see what happens with that.

EB:
Deputy Mayor, heading into 2021, do you have any resolutions?

RA:
I was joking with my wife that I don’t generally make new year’s resolutions, because I’m so bad at keeping them. I said if I kept my previous revolutions, I would have lost about 700 pounds by now. And that hasn’t happened.

No, I think… Personally I’m in a funny position, because you know, I’m acting mayor, I’m doing the job, but I’ve not been formally voted as mayor. So I don’t feel I have a mandate to do too much, without going through another election.

So for that, I think if we can just sort of keep the lights on, keep the doors open, and make sure all the basic services get done properly. I hate to say it, but snow plowing and all that kind of thing.

We only have, if you think about it, we only really have four functional months until the election. Because, you know, we’re sort of mandated not to do anything really radical or major in the last month of the current Council. The local governance act tells us, you know, don’t start doing major changes when there’s one month left.

EB:
No big decisions in April.

RA:
No. And it would be unfair to a new council to saddle them with a decision they might not want to deal with. So I think from my point of view, I have ideas about things I’d like to see, but I think until I might have a mandate to do something like that, it’s really just a matter of keeping the lights on and keeping things moving.

And I should mention, too, that people think the job of mayor is… Actually in a way you have more power as a councillor, because you have a vote. And the mayor doesn’t vote. And so the mayor is kind of the face of the town, but in terms of getting things done and actual things you can vote on, which is really the source of the power for a council, the mayor is somewhat restricted. We have what John Higham used to call a weak mayor system.

Some municipalities have, not necessarily in New Brunswick, but if you look, especially across the states, what they call a strong mayor system. Where actually the mayor governs what happens. He says, this will happen, that will happen, and it does. We have a very different system than that. If I stood up and said, you know, we have to do it this way, I’d just get laughed at, I think.

EB:
So you’re a figurehead as much as a politician, I guess.

RA:
Yeah, in many ways. And you’re kind of, in a way, the lightning rod that transmits any controversies and so on.

EB:
Well, Deputy Mayor Ron Aiken, thank you for joining us today, we wish you a Happy New Year.

RA:
Same to you and to everybody. Have a safe one and hopefully next year, we can be back to some semblance of normal.