Regina mayor Sandra Masters expected life as usual, then 2020 happened

As was the case for nearly everyone else, 2020 hardly went according to plan for Regina mayor Sandra Masters.

If you were to ask about her expectations for the year in January, she would have been looking forward to life as usual, including finishing her final year on the board of the Regina Exhibition Association Limited and quality time with her granddaughter.

“I didn’t really have grand plans beyond the Exhibition Association, work and family,” Masters said in a year-end interview last week.

Nowhere did her plans include a career change, or becoming the main character in one of the biggest political stories of the year when she defeated two-term incumbent Michael Fougere in the November municipal election. In doing so, she became the first woman to be elected mayor in the city’s history.

Her campaign included promises like finding efficiencies, building a new aquatic centre, a poverty reduction strategy and tackling the root causes of crime. Throughout, she appealed to voters’ sense of ambition, saying it was time for a change.

“For too long now, we’ve accepted the status quo as good enough,” Masters said during her campaign launch in September.

“I believe we can realize our potential to be one of the greatest cities in Canada and I want to be part of that plan to get us there.”

Masters said there was “a very specific moment” when she thought about entering the race. At that time, there was a vetting process to determine her viability as a candidate, she said.

“In August, I’ll tell you for sure that I knew I was going to run for mayor.”

The advice she got was to be herself and to stay focused on her message. Politics was not how she pictured it. For one, she’s been surprised by how many people want to speak with her. Then there’s policy versus politicking.

“I thought there would be a bit more conversation amongst people that are in politics where you would talk about ideas, as opposed to … personality things or flare-ups of singular issues,” said Masters, who had never run for political office.

“I think anybody who’s involved in social media would know that there are issues that aren’t really issues, they’re just sort of people postulating about circumstances that in the end of the day aren’t really that significant.”

The COVID-19 pandemic is not the only crisis the city is dealing with. Regina also experienced high numbers of drug overdoses in 2020. In a recent Vice story, the mayor was quoted saying she is considering the decriminalization of drugs.

Masters said her point was that whatever the city is doing isn’t working and that solutions will come from groups on the front lines of the problem, like community groups and police.

She said the city’s role would be to gather those players and devise a plan that would be presented to those who would fund them, like the province and federal government.

“To make a case for how they’re economic, how there would be huge social benefit, and how they would save people’s lives.”

One of the groups doing that work is the Newo Yotina Friendship Centre, which has applied to operate a safe consumption site. Masters has written in support of it.

“I don’t believe it’s the city’s place to create that but when you have an organization, that’s what I’m talking about, support the organizations that are doing it on the ground,” she said.

Looking ahead, Masters sees a return to large gatherings in post-COVID Regina, provided mass vaccinations end the pandemic by summer or fall.

But for people to participate, she said they need cash, which means getting people back to work.

Managing Regina’s economic recovery is a matter of being business-friendly and providing a quality of life, Masters said.

“I’m a big believer in boots on the ground. You have to be knocking on doors and I mean that almost literally where you have to be calling upon organizations to understand what they need,” she said.

“Who could we locate here? And how do we go entice them here? I think we need to incent some construction in certain areas of the city. We need to clean up some areas of our city.”