After spending 15 of the past 37 years in municipal politics, including a term as mayor in the 1980s, Coun. Ted Emond announced this week he will not seek another term in this year’s municipal election.
At age 82, Emond has made the decision to withdraw from politics to spend more time with his wife and family.
During his career as a human resources consultant, working with various organizations and levels of government, Emond found himself in office after being encouraged to run in the 1980s.
Following his stint as mayor, Emond continued consulting until retiring at age 70. He ultimately returned to council in 2014 and has served as councillor for the past two terms.
Through his years in office, Emond said the greatest lesson he has learned is people in office have the power to effect change in their communities.
“People who stand for public office can actually make a difference,” he told OrilliaMatters. “You can actually, if you have a sense of what you’d like something to be, and you can work collaboratively with your colleagues, you can build consensus and you can move it forward.”
During his time in municipal politics, Emond and his fellow council members made numerous decisions that shaped Orillia into the city it is today.
He points to his term as mayor as being particularly influential.
“Three things happened during that term that I think had a huge impact on our city,” he said.
Emond said the greatest accomplishments of that 1980s council include beginning the process to bring OPP General Headquarters to Orillia, annexing the land that would become west Orillia from the former Orillia Township, and making the decision to double the capacity of the city’s wastewater facility.
“If you look now, we’ve got 1,000 people employed in the general headquarters … we’ve got the regional OPP headquarters here,” he said. “We have Georgian College, Lakehead, offering programs to support police services in a variety of ways. It’s become a huge contributor to our community.”
He said expanding the city’s wastewater capacity allowed for the growth brought through the OPP headquarters and the gradual expansion of homes and businesses in west Orillia.
“By doing that, we, in effect, allowed the growth that has occurred in west Orillia and within the rest of the city,” he said. “We've still got capacity to grow the rest for the next 25 years or so.”
When asked about his longevity in politics, and his decision to continue serving the community on council until age 82, Emond said he was not the type of person to simply engage in leisure activities following his retirement from consulting.
“What happens when you work full time and dedicate a lot of your energy and effort to what you’re doing, when you stop doing that? I'm not a golfer. I wasn’t into those kinds of things,” he said of his return to office in 2014. “I started looking around, saying, ‘What am I going to do?’”
“When I ran in 2014, I said, look, if I can do anything for our community, it will be to try to replicate in the future what we did when I was the mayor, which is to do some things that will have a positive impact on Orillia going forward,” he said.
One such positive impact, Emond said, is the city’s recent deal with Hydro One to bring a regional control centre and provincial warehouse to the city.
“Hydro One had approached the city on several occasions over the last 10 years, 15 years, and we had rejected until they came to the city this time,” he said.
He noted council had rejected Hydro One’s offers until they could strike a deal that would bring predictable energy costs and jobs to the area.
“By the time we finished those negotiations that took 18 months, we had a deal that had wonderful benefits for Orillia,” he said.
Although Emond has enjoyed serving the public, he said it has not come without challenges.
He pointed out the rise of social media and the city’s decision to close its worn-out, former recreation centre in the 1980s as two of many challenges he has faced while in office.
“I don’t mind people being opposed to my point of view — in fact, I enjoy the debate. You’ll see that I’ve changed my mind on a number of issues because, you know, information comes to light, and that’s good, but social media, I think, has harmed us in many ways,” he said.
“The vileness, the absolute inconsiderateness of some of the people who comment is something that I’ve found very hard to deal with.”
The closure of the Orillia’s old recreation centre cost the city a number of opportunities in athletics, Emond said.
“As a result, the Mariposa Skating School left Orillia to move to Barrie, and folks like Brian Orser, who trained here with the school and skated here, were global athletes and, you know, gave Orillia a cachet in that whole area, we lost,” he said.
Emond said Orillia faces a number of challenges today, as well. Notably, he pointed to the need for the city to expand and balance urban sprawl with intensification.
“The biggest challenge we face immediately is that the province has laid out a growth plan in which we have no option. It’s not within the municipality’s power to say, ‘Sorry, we’re not going to grow,’ nor is it morally right for us to do that,” he said.
“(The challenge is) balancing that very legitimate concern for stopping urban sprawl with intensification, but balancing that against the fact that there are neighbourhoods within our community that, every single time an intensification project gets close to them, they are raised up in arms.”
However, Emond has decided to pass the torch to someone else.
He and his wife now have plans to spend the colder months of the year in Mexico, following decades as professionals.
“My wife closed up her law practice this past year at the end of the year, and she’s now fully retired,” Emond said. “As long as our health maintains and we feel good about it, we’ll probably spend three or four months (per year) in Mexico, when it’s cold here.”
