Marcel Michaels has been in Fort Frances for a few weeks now and is starting to get a feel for the municipality he is now the lead administrator for. After meeting staff, he is confident that the Town has a good team in place.
Though born and raised in Hamilton, ON, Michaels comes to Fort Frances after multiple positions in municipal governments in Alberta. He studied political science at McMaster University in Hamilton and then studied broadcasting at Loyalist College. It was a radio job that initially brought him to Alberta.
“I was the municipal local journalist for West Yellowhead which included Hinton, Jasper and Edson, and I did that for a year or two,” Michaels said. “Then I was on town council (in Hinton) and then ran for mayor in 2017 and was reelected in 2021.”
When a major project in Hinton – trying to build a new recreation centre – didn’t get the support of council, Michaels chose to resign after about 10 years of municipal service there.
“I felt my skill set was better suited to the administrative side, so I got a job as the chief administrative officer in Consort, Alberta, that’s where k.d. lang is from,” Michaels said. “A lot of people in Alberta weren’t overly familiar with it unless you’re in the area but k.d. lang’s from there.”
Michaels was brought into the town of Fort Frances CAO hiring process when the hiring committee decided to use a recruitment firm. Michaels was among three final candidates who were all interviewed by the full town council at the end of the hiring process.
Michaels says the decision came at a pivotal point in the lives of his family. He has three young children and he and his wife said if they were going to move they wanted to do it before they were locked into school long term.
“My twins are five, and we have a seven year old, and my wife and I decided if we’re going to move to Ontario, or for me, move back this was probably the time, and then I applied for this gig,” Michaels said.
He’s not totally unfamiliar with the environment of northern Ontario, in fact it’s where his family roots are. His parents were born and raised in the Timmins area and he has other family members scattered around northern Ontario from Sudbury and North Bay to the Thunder Bay area.
He’s hoping to be able to indulge in the outdoors when moving here.
“My kids are involved in every activity,” he said. “Baseball, soccer, hockey, swimming, piano. Those are the ones they’re registered in plus we do other outdoor activities. We like to camp, I’d like to rekindle my previous passion for fishing, obviously being close to the lakes. We’re big campers, we had a 36 foot motorhome and we’ll be looking to buy another one.”
Having spent almost a year as CAO in Consort, Michaels says he picked up some valuable experience.
“(I have) that experience as a chief administrative officer already, where you’re the CFO, you’re the development officer, you know, you do everything in a small town,” he said.
While he hasn’t had a lot of time in a similar CAO position Michaels believes his other job experience can be of big help.
“Look at the turnover, the CAO turnover is shorter than it’s ever been in the history of town and city managers,” he said. “I think there’s a huge cycling (of those positions). I believe being the person that has to balance council needs and manage staff is a delicate position and sometimes many administrators don’t understand it from a council perspective. So you’re starting to see more and more administrators having some political experience because that’s a huge element of it.”
While many people with political science education go on to politics or administration people very seldom have experience in both areas and Michaels believes that having the political experience before his administrative roles can be a big help.
“I’m educated in political science. Generally people get political science degrees and become administrators and start their career path that way. Mine is unorthodox. But I think it’s a benefit,” he said. “Because I had that formal education I could have been an administrator but then I would have been an administrator my whole life without the experience of the elected side. Now I have both so I had the education, albeit a short, administrative experience but I did it. Now I can bring those experiences from every facet and be in a role where I believe you have to be multifaceted in order to succeed. So again, time will tell, but I’m confident that my approach and my experience blend well with the success of this community.”
Michaels says the transition into the role has been helped by Town staff and Interim CAO/Manager of Operations and Facilities Travis Rob has been helpful in the transition.
“…The staff has been amazing. Having somebody like Travis hand it off and all the work he’s done, I can’t express how fortunate I am to come into this situation,” he said. “You hear horror stories of CAOs starting and the organization is a mess and there’s no help during the transition and it’s just ugly. This is not the case here, we have a strong staff, and again the work Travis has done has made my transition way better than I thought.”
Michaels sees it as a challenge to try to bring the best out of the staff.
“For me, human capital is really important. I think organizations across Canada aren’t immune to not really bringing out the best in their staff,” he said. “Like I said we have an amazing staff here so I think I’ll be able to leverage high expectations but a sense of great work/life balance. I think people need to be happy and enjoy their work.”
Michaels also wants the community to know that he’s open to hearing from them.
“I have an open door policy, I’m looking to speak to everyone in the community and that’s an important role of the CAO that I think some communities across Canada are struggling with because there’s a divide or separation between residents and the administrative officer. I don’t want to say that I’m going to be anything close to what the mayor and council does, but I have some part of that in order to be public facing and be accountable to communicate with everyone in the community. The experience I have doing that in other roles I am going to try to introduce into this role where you’ll see a lot more of me than you might from your average or typical administrator. That’s an important concept to me.”
To that end, Mayor Andrew Hallikas has been impressed by Michaels’ efforts to be out in the community so far.
“I really like that he’s already attending community events,” the mayor said. “He’s only been in our community a short time and he was in attendance when we raised a pride flag and made a proclamation, he attended the pride kickoff at the Fort Frances Public Library. He even attended the Borderland Orchestra concert where they asked him to be the MC and he MC’d that concert. So he’s already making an impression in our community so I have very high hopes for him.”
Michaels will head back to Alberta at the end of June to help his wife and kids make the move to Fort Frances where they’re hoping to settle quickly in a new home.
