Randal Macnair - A Mayor for the Times
By Pierre Alleyn
January 8, 2004
This is Fernie: You are out for a stroll along one of Fernie’s many elegant avenues…here in the heart of a timeless Canadian Rockies wilderness. Tonight, dinner will be an imaginative fusion creation. Later, you will meet with locals and European friends for dancing and bar hopping. The big fat flakes tumbling from the sky promise another powder day.
 There are so many reasons to come and play here. And so many more to come and live here. Fernie – a Canadian Rockies town soon to celebrate its first 100 years – appears to have just been discovered by the world. Yet it has drawn Slav, English, Italian and Chinese immigrants for well over 100 years. Together, they forged a deeply rooted coal and timber culture founded on tolerance, hard work, and love of nature. People the world over continue to be drawn here, surprised that the modern world can be lived at a less frantic pace, on a more human scale.
Mayor Randal Macnair, Macallan malt in hand, peers out the window at the snow on the Three Sisters. Further west, the sun plays an intricate shadow game amid the steep bowls of the Lizard Range. He is generously giving of his time – this man is also the father of young Mira and Kieran – for he is passionate about life in this mountain community.
 Macnair – a relative newcomer to our mountain town – spent his early years amid the rhythms and smells of the sea, in the company of the Kwakwaka’wakw aboriginal nation of Alert Bay, on northern Vancouver Island. Summers were spent with other kids collecting abalone at low tide, fishing for halibut with traditional hooks, and collecting cedar bark for mask dressings and baskets. The whole Macnair clan was soon adopted into a native family, through the fabled potlatch ceremony.
The Macnair dinner table in the 1970s was a focal point for an eclectic set of museum curators and exhibit designers, and First Nations elders and artists. Macnair recalls “just being there in the carving sheds, the rich smell of cedar hanging in the air, watching carvers like Henry Hunt.”
Cultural anthropology and art history studies at the University of Victoria – combined with the camaraderie and teamwork of rugby – led to a successful career with various museums and cultural centres. When not “mayoring”, as he puts it, curator Macnair freelances from Fernie, managing projects for cultural and interpretive organizations, and researching and designing museum exhibits.
 It was love for a young physician that drew Macnair to Fernie six years ago. Macnair and Lisa Tessler’s friendship, kindled in Victoria at a friend’s house, eventually led to their starting a family of their own in Fernie.
They are well grounded here, their small miner’s cottage nestled in a community that Macnair describes as “having an incredible strength of character.” He came here for the lifestyle reasons, and then realized that, “yes Fernie is a great place to ski and mountain bike, but it is also a great place to bring up children.”
With very young children, the appeal has shifted from mountain biking to walking Fernie’s trails along the river. Passionate about his family, Macnair wants his kids to grow up “in a place where everybody knows everybody, in a small enough community that when you are walking down the street, people know your kids.” He is excited that “Fernie offers all of those things to our children both from an environmental perspective – the air and water are so clean – and from a cultural perspective.”
That culture is pervasive. “For a community of 5000 people,” smiles Macnair, “the dining and cultural experiences are exceptional. I was at a concert the other day at the Arts Station, one of some 40 concerts planned for this year.” He emphasises “there’s a half-dozen or so restaurants that I would say would hold their own in any community in this country.”
 For Macnair and his family, it is truly about community: “When I talk to people who are visiting for the first time, they talk about the people, they talk about how warm the community is.” Much of this, of course, has to do with the human scale of a place where, he explains: “We live our lives amongst friends and neighbours, and the openness and smiles that people are so accustomed to giving to their neighbours are passed on to the visitors in our community.”
Indeed. And many visitors catch the Fernie spirit. Macnair recalls an instance when this warmth of community was returned: “It was a snowy day, and this young Australian guy helped an older woman, a lifetime member of our community, giving her and her groceries a lift in his beat up van. Here was this kid from Australia, here to hang out for the winter. He obviously understood that he was here to be part of this community.”
Macnair feels that Fernie is very positively positioned for the future. At a recent conference, he spoke of “how fortunate Fernie is that we’ve got the very solid coal mining industry…and we’ve got forestry…and we’re adding to that another industry if you will, that is recreation and resort development.”
Our Mayor loves to read. When ‘Goodnight Moon’ has lulled the little ones to sleep, he reaches for books such as ‘Balancing Nature and Commerce in a Gateway Community’, “a book that is relevant to what is happening here.” He particularly enjoyed reading about Scottish distilleries, a story whose premise “is that single malt scotches are formed and created by the environment they come from.”
As you wander about our community, please savour that which we treasure and are glad to share with the world.r
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