Ritchot to choose new council on July 19 after mayor, 2 councillors step down over alleged bullying
Majority of Manitoba RM's council resigned in April; province-appointed administrator to run byelection
Residents of the Rural Municipality of Ritchot will have a new council by noon on July 20, after the mayor and two council members in the Manitoba municipality handed in their resignations in protest of alleged bullying.
Roger Bouvier, the administrator appointed by the province for the municipality, told CBC the byelection is set for July 19, with the new council taking over the following day.
"All I would say [to residents] right now is basically come out and vote, you know, exercise your duty and vote," Bouvier said.
"We don't know who's going to run yet and, you know, they know the people. They're local, they will know the people."
Ritchot Mayor Jackie Hunt and two councillors — Coun. Jeannot Robert and Coun. Ron Mamchuk — stepped down on April 28. In a statement, Hunt cited problems within council including name-calling and belligerent behaviour she said had become "the norm," despite mediation.
Because the resignations meant council no longer had quorum, the remaining councillors' seats will also be considered vacant, Bouvier said, although all five are entitled to run for re-election.
Prior to her resignation, Hunt had held office since 2014.
Bouvier said majority council resignations like Richot's are "very unusual." The only other time he's worked with RMs in similar situations was in 2002.
"I've been doing this for a long time and it wouldn't do much good to anybody to sit and be all excited and, you know, get everybody nervous and riled up," he said.
"My job is to basically, No. 1, is to run a byelection, and I've done a lot of those, and we're going to run this one like we did all the rest. And yeah, we'll be calm and collected and we'll do a good job."
In the meantime, Bouvier said his job is to keep things running smoothly and conduct business as usual.
He said it's not easy to prevent the same thing from happening again.
"There's nothing that I can do," he said. "If 10 years from now, it would happen, I guess it would happen … We're going to do everything we can to make sure that everyone is aware of it, and we just run the process. It's up to the local electors to make sure that they elect a group that's prepared to work together, I guess.
"But you know, we don't know that till it happens, right? Once they get in the same room, there's difficult decisions to be made and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't."
With files from Ismaila Alfa, Leif Larsen