The headlines of stories throughout June 1973 screamed of a town council that, due to personality conflicts and mistrust, was becoming increasingly unable to perform its day-to-day functions. The precursor to the crisis was an undisclosed, ongoing issue with Protective Social Services that came back to council in early June, while Mayor Ray Gibbon was attending the Convention of Mayors and Municipalities in Charlottetown, P.E.I. Chief administrator Dan O’Connell brought a recommendation to resolve the issue, which was subsequently voted down by the remaining council, sitting without the mayor. As a result, O’Connell tendered his resignation, saying he had lost the confidence of council. At the ensuing council meeting when Gibbon had returned, the mayor blasted the entire council for its decision and treatment of O’Connell. Coun. John Bakker yelled back that it was the mayor who should resign, arguing council still had to work, even when the mayor was away. A motion to discuss the issue in camera had to be voted on three times because councillors kept raising and lowering their hands. In the end council voted 5-2 to accept O’Connell’s resignation.
But that wasn’t the end of it. Two weeks after recommending a pay increase for the director of PSS, Gibbon demanded her resignation and unilaterally suspended her. His action was overturned by council. Gibbon called a special meeting for June 25, but councillors refused to adopt the minutes of the previous meeting on June 19, meaning two mill rate bylaws previously passed could not be enacted. With no one certain of how to proceed — whether by re-introducing the bylaws or seeking a court order — council tabled the entire issue, leaving it hanging in the balance.
There would be more council histrionics in the ensuing years, but not before four “sunburned men with floppy bottoms” streaked through the Bruin Inn in June 1974 and the parks and recreation board recommended to council it pursue a Junior A tier II hockey franchise to promote the growth of the game in June of the following year. June 1976 saw council pass a plan that would resurrect the downtown with 535 surface parking lots, 705 covered parking lots and three separate cores encompassing 600,000 sq. ft. that would house everything from restaurants and cinemas to offices and housing.
June 1977 quickly heated up. In junior A hockey, the transfer of the club from Spruce Grove was being negotiated (later to be named the Saints). With Doug Messier as head coach, the team hoped to play its first few games away from St. Albert while arena renovations could be finished. But the ongoing battle between the Richard Plain council, the St. Albert Gazette and its publisher Ernie Jamison, also the city’s MLA, continued to grow in ferocity. The Plain council, upset over an article listing the deficiencies of the local fire department months prior, had called on Jamison to attend a council meeting, which he had been unable to do. In response, council passed a motion to seek help from the Minister of Municipal Affairs in dealing with its “relationship with its MLA.” Then-councillor Myrna Fyfe further inflamed the situation in an Edmonton Journal article, stating Jamison had openly advocated in the legislature for Edmonton to annex St. Albert. Jamison delivered a copy of Hansard to her and printed the speech in question in the Gazette, demanding an apology that Fyfe never proffered. Days later, Jamison sent a letter to Plain, informing him the Gazette had eliminated the long-running “Mayor’s Column.” The letter further stated that Jamison was willing to meet with council as the city’s MLA to discuss issues of government but not to discuss the operations of the Gazette. As a result, council moved forward with two motions it would recommend at the upcoming meeting of the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association (AUMA). The first called on the province to extend the powers of its ombudsman to include the functions of newspapers. The second originally called for a prohibition on members of municipal or provincial governments from actively engaging in news reporting or editing. That motion was later amended to require owners of newspapers to place their entities in a blind trust if elected to municipal or provincial office.
The following June, the city was shocked as the RCMP were called to a murder-suicide on Perron Street. According to the police, Lincoln Bertrand, 42, entered the office of Imperial Lumber where his estranged wife Dixie Roma Benton worked, barricaded himself and her in a second-floor office, shot her three times fatally before turning the .22-calibre gun on himself. The previous month, Bertrand had been charged with the attempted murder of his wife and, though initially held in custody, was released over Crown objections on bail. In Gazette news, the paper announced its first Gazette Fun Run, which would become an annual fixture in St. Albert until 2009. The whole point was for the community to come out, run for a bit and receive a free T-shirt.
June 1979 saw the city’s first parking meters installed outside the St. Albert Day Care Centre due to heavy parking traffic from users of the pool on one side and Paul Kane High School on the other. Local member of Parliament Peter Elzinga introduced a private member’s bill to resurrect capital punishment in Canada. On the sports scene, local product Jim Hole, who had been drafted by the Edmonton Eskimos after playing football for the University of Alberta Golden Bears, left camp after a few days.
“It just wasn’t my bag,” Hole said. He added he was going to spend the rest of the summer working on the family farm.
Peter Boer is an editor at the St. Albert Gazette.
