The City of Flin Flon is starting to make plans to replace the irreplaceable - whenever it may be possible to do so.
Flin Flonners will be returning to the polls at some point in the near future to elect the successor to councillor Colleen McKee. McKee, the councillor, volunteer and community figure who received the most votes in the 2018 council election, died after a battle with cancer Nov. 11. Her seat on council is now vacant, requiring a byelection to fill it - the second such election to be held this year in Flin Flon.
There’s one problem - Manitoba is currently under “red” restrictions in the province’s pandemic response system, disallowing public gatherings, including any possible elections. Any byelection will need to be organized and held once the restrictions are changed.
Council members discussed the open spot during the Nov. 17 council meeting, which was held via Zoom instead of in-person due to the restrictions.
“The byelection that needs to take place will not take place until after the ‘code red’ is lifted,” said Huntley.
“We can’t give you a date on that yet.”
To save time or money, members of the public have proposed that council should simply take the second-place finisher in the recent council byelection - in this case, Carrie Hume - and name her to council, but the process will not be that simple. The City will need to hold another byelection according to provincial rules and cannot work off previous byelection results.
“I did have several comments about, ‘Do we take number two from the last byelection?’ Unfortunately, that’s not up to us and there will be another follow-up election,” Huntley said.
“Once we can confirm dates, we certainly will let everybody know and we look forward to hopefully having good turnout like we did last time.”
Huntley said with the ‘red’ restrictions in effect, very little new information can be released regarding the byelection. The ‘red’ restrictions are slated to end Dec. 10, but Huntley said the province may choose to extend the date, throwing any City plans made in the meantime into doubt.
“I think it’s as transparent as it can possibly be. We need to schedule another byelection and we can’t have it during ‘code red’, so we can’t schedule it until we find out when ‘code red’ is going to be over,” said the mayor.
