For more than 10 years, former mayor Linda Bruce has known that when Gary Mar put his foot forward to lead the Province, she would be a part of his campaign.
“I heard him speak in the late 1990s or early 2000s and I connected with what he was saying,” said the mother of three.
“I knew he was truly a visionary and a leader. He could envision how this Province should be. Very, very, very, very few people have ever hit me the way he has.”
Bruce is a volunteer on the policy committee for Mar’s Progressive Conservative party leadership campaign.
“I have had a chance to spend some time with him and see how honest he is,” she said.
“The way he answers questions by relating them to personal stories is inspiring and when he doesn’t know the answer to a question, he will tell you he doesn’t know and find it for you.”
Anyone who pretends they have all the answers is someone you need to back away from, she added.
Bruce said she has learned a lot from the veteran politician who spent 14 years as a Member of the Legislative Assembly for Calgary Nose Creek and Calgary McKay and has five different cabinet portfolios under his belt.
“He’s a really good listener and he has an amazing capacity to interact with people,” said Bruce.
“He has a great sense of humour.”
Bruce is not new to politics either. She was an alderman from 1995 to 2004 and became the mayor of Airdrie in 2004. She was the mayor for two terms before being replaced by current mayor Peter Brown in October 2010.
She said working on a campaign for someone else is refreshing.
“It’s actually a relief to be doing it for someone else,” she said. “I don’t feel the same kind of pressure I used to.”
She said the switch from municipal to provincial politics is quite the learning curve.
“It is a big change to go from looking at the city to looking at the province as a whole and applying policies across a province.”
Mar’s idea that policies must be flexible to fit the needs of different sized communities is something Bruce really connects with.
“We need to work with communities and say, ‘What are your needs?’” she said. “We need to focus on each community separately and make sure they don’t get in each other’s way. We need to look at the big picture.”
Some residents may find Bruce’s jump to provincial politics confusing as it was the PC government that separated the City’s integrated ambulance and fire services while Bruce was mayor in the summer of 2010, costing the City millions and increasing response times.
“Gary and I were always on the same page on how ambulance services should be run and when he left the Minister of Health and Wellness post (in 2006), his ideas didn’t translate,” she said.
“The Province recognized that some larger cities and counties had the capacity to provide their own ambulance services and some couldn’t afford to do it well. So,, the idea was to provide Basic Life Support in every community and those that could afford it could improve to Advanced Life Support.
“The idea was to put the money where the problem was and after Gary was no longer health minister, I don’t know what happened.”
She said the current system with the Province controlling ambulance services and the City taking over fire services is inefficient, costly and not meeting Airdrie’s needs.
Since leaving the mayor’s office, Bruce has been able to concentrate on pursuits other than politics. She is the executive director of Creative Airdrie, the hub for investment, promotion, engagement, development and education of the arts in the community.
She is concentrating on her health and fitness and has completed two triathlons this summer with plans to compete in another in September in Innisfail.
“I truly don’t know what is coming next for me,” she said.
“If I knew I would tell you, but I’m just taking it day by day.”
For more information on Mar, visit www.garymar.ca
