After 116 years, RM elects a woman

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This article was published 31/10/2022 (1126 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Gail Johnson made history just by being elected reeve.

The 62-year-old became the first woman to win a council seat in the history of the Rural Municipality of Grey, which has been around since 1906.

She credits what she calls the “old school” approach of knocking on doors and listening to residents’ concerns.

“That’s what my dad always said: ‘Leave a note, lose your hope,’” she said Monday.

“So I didn’t want to do that, where you just stuff a thing in the mailbox. I kind of wanted to do it old school.”

It worked for Johnson, who has no political experience.

She and her husband are cattle farmers; she spent decades working her way up in the truck management industry, starting as a “flag girl” who directs traffic around construction and retiring as a maintenance manager with Manitoba Highways in 2019.

She knew she wanted to try her hand at politics.

“As a maintenance manager, you’re the leader for the maintenance side of the operation, so I just thought it’d just be the next step,” she said. “And I had time to do it.”

The RM of Grey is 73 kilometres southwest of Winnipeg and has just about 2,500 residents. Johnson won with 505 votes, almost twice as many as runner-up Bill Sisson. Only then did she learn she had broken a male-only streak the municipality had held since its inception.

“I’m pretty humbled,” she said. “It’s a fantastic feeling.”

Dealing with the issue of overland flooding is first on the docket for Wednesday’s council meeting.

Johnson, who moved to the area after being displaced from Domain in the RM of Macdonald by the 1997 flood, said Grey is prone to flooding, in part because there’s a drain in the middle of the community. Grey was one of many rural communities to declare a state of emergency during the flooding last summer.

“There are a few little outstanding issues that people have told me that haven’t been fixed since the flood, some culverts that need to be changed, and I just want to see where they are,” she said.

A wider issue she wants to tackle is encouraging visitors to Grey and promoting the community in hopes of getting people to stop instead of just driving through.

“We don’t want to be a drive-by RM,” she said.

“We have two major highways that run through our RM (Highways 2 and 13). You drive by our towns, you don’t go through any of our towns. There’s some great things in our towns that people need to take notice of, and we need to promote it better.”

When asked how she’d encourage other women in rural areas to run for leadership positions, she leans into a familiar, old school mindset: “Give ‘er a try.”

“We all have something to give to the rest of the community,” she said.

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca