Colleen Lavoie during her swearing in ceremony as Mayor of Candle Lake. (submitted/Brent Lutz)

By Susan McNeil

New mayor

New mayor of Candle Lake an old hand at municipal issues

Aug 13, 2024 | 5:00 PM

Candle Lake’s new mayor Colleen Lavoie might be sitting in the mayor’s chair for the first time but she is not new to how a municipality works.

Lavoie spent time in the past as a municipal administrator and has been coming to Candle Lake in the summers for her whole life.

“I don’t think we ever missed coming to Candle Lake for a holiday every year. That was kind of like our happy place. So, it seemed like as our children got older and we had time and money, we finally bought a cabin here and made it our weekend place to be,” she said.

Her parents used to own the only store on the road to Candle Lake, called the Pine Valley Store. When a new highway was built to the resort village, she said her parents closed the store but before that, her mother would send her children to visit aunts, uncles, grandparents and other family who were at the resort.

After finishing high school, she moved to La Ronge with her boyfriend, got married, had two children and moved back to Albertville.

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Now it is her children and grandchildren that regularly travel to Candle Lake to visit.

Her husband was mayor for nine years and she worked as a municipal administrator but for the most part, her career was working for Health Canada.

Lavoie is confident she has a good handle on the business side of things when it comes to how a municipality works.

The newly sworn in council in the Resort Village of Candle Lake. (submitted/Brent Lutz)

That will serve her well as the village continues with a big expansion in the form of a new subdivision that needs to have walkways and roads planned.

“Anytime there’s a big subdivision it needs oversight and I hope as a council, we will do well at that,” she said.

Development aside, Lavoie said the single biggest resource in the village is Candle Lake itself and it is her priority to keep it a clean and healthy waterbody.

“Candle Lake is a wonderful, pristine, sand-bottomed, clear-watered lake and I hope as a council, we work with the provincial bodies and the federal bodies to make sure this lake stays healthy, more than anything,” she said.

To that, the council needs to work with oversight bodies such as the Water Security Agency.

The recent election results showed that the community has a lot of confidence in Lavoie, voting her in over her opponents for mayor by a large margin.

She is joined at the council table by two veteran councillors and two other new faces.

As with all things human, Lavoie is pretty sure there will be a mistake or two, but she wants the public to know that the council has the community’s best interests in mind.

“I hope we have a council that feels like each one of them has a say and that would be the healthiest council you can hope for,” she said.

The new council are incumbents Johnathon Attig and Debra Hunter and new councillors Hugh Garven and Shelly Voykin.

Election day was July 27.

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susan.mcneil@pattisonmedia.com