Fiscal discipline, affordable taxes, support for local businesses and operational experience
About a decade ago, the board of a 90-unit condominium complex in Calgary was presented with a plan to replace its cedar shake roofs at an estimated $1.5 million.
Gary Cousineau, its longtime president, went looking for another option. He says he found cedar shake specialists who return every five years to repair the roofs and guarantee them for five more, at a cost of $40,000 to about $50,000 per visit. The roofs, by his account, have not needed replacing since.
Cousineau, a first-time candidate for Fort Frances council, wants to apply the same thinking to the town’s roads. “Don’t wait till they bust,” he said. “Preventive maintenance on anything—it’s a big deal.” The town’s 2018 asset management plan found only a quarter of the road network in good or very good condition, with annual funding about $1.75 million short of what was needed to sustain it.
Born and raised in Fort Frances, Cousineau spent 35 and a half years at the local pulp and paper mill, where he earned his First-Class Power Engineer licence, managed the 110-megawatt cogeneration plant and served 14 years as shift superintendent. He then went west and finished his career as chief engineer at Calgary Airport. He has since come home and has spent four years on the board of the town-owned Fort Frances Power Corp. (FFPC). He also volunteers with the Legion.
If elected, Cousineau said he hopes to remain on the FFPC board, pointing to the existing practice of municipal representation at the utility.
Heading into the Oct. 26 election, Cousineau’s platform rests on four pillars: fiscal discipline, affordable taxes, support for local businesses, and the operational experience he says he would bring to town hall.
Cousineau has a word for projects he likes but would not fund right now: “nice”.
“A roundabout is a nice thing,” he said of the Central Avenue intersection, but with the paper mill gone and the tax base smaller, “Fort Frances right now, it just can’t work.” He puts a proposed RV campground in the same category. “It’s nice, but we don’t need it.”
It is not a blanket no. After a mother called him about activities for children who aren’t in sports, he floated a second splash pad, in the east end, “if we can afford it.” His budgeting rule is simple. “If there’s 10 projects but we can only afford three, we’ll just do three,” he said.
Resolute’s closure of the town’s paper mill in 2014 still stings Cousineau after his decades of involvement. “I’m sick about it, I’m really sick about it, and I can hardly even look at where it was,” he said. “It hurts. It really does.” Asked what he lamented most about the closure, Cousineau cited the biomass boiler, built with the help of a $22.5-million provincial grant and demolished in 2022, little more than a decade after it was completed.
His plan for what comes next appropriately runs through the power grid. The FFPC is planning a 44-kilovolt distribution system that will connect FirstLight’s 57.2-megawatt solar project as a new industrial customer. On Sept. 23, the town announced $92,500 in provincial funding toward the first phase of a proposed biomass-to-energy facility, a second act of sorts.
Cousineau regards that kind of electrical capacity as the price of admission for any serious employer. “To attract a big industry where we got the power and all the resources around us, yes, I do think [it’s realistic], but we got to push to do that,” he said.
Capacity, however, is only half the equation. Too often, he says, the town hires staff who leave within months or a couple of years. He would rather recruit and train locally and “pay them a good buck to stay here,” as the FFPC is now trying to do, and help local businesses expand and “hire our own kids.”
He also wants residents to be heard, through advisory boards feeding ideas to council, but above all he wants councillors out talking to people. At a recent meeting at the Senior Centre, residents told him that when they bring something forward, “nobody comes back and talks to them about it.”
“It’s just not going to a meeting every once in a while,” he said of the job. “I will talk to anybody.” That doesn’t mean granting every request, he added, but residents should feel “they can be part of the whole system.”
Asked what result he would most like to point to at the end of a prospective four-year term, Cousineau went back to power, and to the hole the mill left. “If we brought in an industry that we can really help the town,” he said, “I’d be so proud of it.”
See upcoming issues of the Fort Frances Bulletin / Times for more candidate profiles
