After a year of making headlines for several reasons both good and not so much, the News editorial team has chosen Mayor Linnsie Clark as the 2025 Newsmaker of the Year.--NEWS FILE PHOTO
zmason@medicinehatnews.com
The year 2025 ends as it began in Medicine Hat, with Linnsie Clark as mayor.
It wasn’t always an obvious outcome.
In 2021, Clark won decisively over incumbent Ted Clugston. But her victory in 2025 was harder fought, winning by a margin of only about 750 votes over her closest competitor, former three-term MLA Drew Barnes.
In fact, that Clark would run for re-election at all was hardly a sure thing.
“I needed to make sure for myself that I had the energy to start with a new council and do all the things that are necessary for new council to be successful and for our community to benefit from the new council,” Clark told the News in a year-end interview.
“And certainly, I needed to ensure that my family was supportive of the idea, or at least not dead set against it, and that took some time.”
The Medicine Hat News editorial team has chosen Clark as 2025 Newsmaker of the Year.
Running once again wasn’t exactly an easy sell. In her first term, she had already weathered significant controversy, been subject to punitive sanctions (later deemed unfair and disproportionate by judicial review), and spent thousands on legal fees that, in August, council voted against reimbursing.
But in the end, Clark says she decided she still had value to add.
“I didn’t want things to just rubber band back to the way it was in 2021,” she said. “I think it would have been really easy to, as I said in the election, just drywall over the mould that we found in the last term. And I didn’t want that to happen. I don’t want that to happen.”
Her experience with this election was very different from her last one, she says, with council continuing to meet right into October.
Clark had to balance her continuing mayoral duties with the demands of the campaign. Several of her council peers were similarly divided, with three incumbent councillors running for re-election and a fourth challenging Clark for mayor.
It was an unorthodox election, with new provincial legislation requiring hand-counting and fewer poll stations leading to long lines. Results took 48 years to trickle in. When the dust settled, Clark was the last one standing.
“I’m very grateful that the citizens of Medicine Hat have put their trust in me for a second term,” she said.
Leading up to the election, voters were preoccupied by the drama of the recent past. Clark doesn’t blame them.
“I wasn’t surprised it was something that people were captivated by,” she said.
It was, after all, difficult to ignore.
There’s an old adage that says all publicity is good publicity. But when Medicine Hat made national headlines for the provincial audit that called the city’s working environment “rancorous,” “suspicious,” “improper” and “untenable” in July, it was hard to find a positive spin.
“I think even this type of controversy, anytime that Medicine Hat is making national news, we should really look for the opportunity to turn that into a positive,” said Clark. “We already have the national attention – how can we use this story to show the rest of Canada who we are and what’s amazing about Medicine Hat? The amazing businesses and landscapes we have, the amazing community we have?
“That was, you know, not done in this case.”
But from Clark’s perspective, the end of 2024 and the year 2025 were not characterized by discord but by alignment.
“I felt like 2025 really started to be the year that we started gelling, and the rest of council started to question some of the things that I had been questioning. Maybe the shoe dropped for them on some of the things that I had been frustrated by or concerned by.”
When council started sharing the mayor’s requests for information around executive expenses, salary bands and other HR metrics, Clark says she felt heartened.
“Coming into the last year of our term, it did seem like we were making progress on the transparency piece and the accountability piece,” she said.
Clark says it was one of the main reasons she decided to run again.
Leading up to the election, Clark’s legal fees were finally reimbursed and city manager Ann Mitchell, who had been at the centre of the last term’s scandal, was dismissed. It appeared to be a vindication of the mayor’s place in the controversy.
Clark says she wouldn’t use a word as emotionally evocative as vindication, but she took a practical comfort in the indication that her and her council had finally come to see eye to eye.
In her second term, Clark wants council to get to that place of agreement much faster. She says she’s learned some lessons from the last go around, and chief among them is the importance of team building.
It was a concept thrown around throughout the election, and it rings of the trite insincerity of a campaign catchphrase. But Clark says her last term is proof that team building is more than just lip service.
Clark says the whole group is investing more in laying the groundwork early to mitigate miscommunications like those. Much of the group attended the Alberta Municipalities Conference mere weeks after the election, which Clark says was a great way to break the ice.
“This council has spent quite a bit of time together. We socialize a bit more together, which I think is great. Even just that, socializing and being vulnerable with each other and building that trust, it’s so important.”
It’s also plainly pragmatic.
“We have a lot of catchphrases in municipal government. Things like, we need economic development, or we need transparency and accountability. These words are so often used in a rather meaningless way,” she said.
“I think it’s really important for us during strategic planning to dig down into, what do you mean when you say economic development? What do you mean when you say transparency? We need to ensure that we’re speaking the same language and we’re not just using the same buzzwords.”
What does Clark mean by those buzzwords?
“When I think of transparency and accountability specifically, I’m thinking of them as the pillars of good governance.”
Clark says she wants to make sure the public is receiving enough information to meaningfully participate in debate over the issues that affect them. She also wants to tell them where their tax dollars are spent.
Clark says there are concerns about access to information requests piling up, but she sees them as symptoms of a deeper-running mistrust that she wants to combat.
“The more information we can voluntarily release, the better,” she said.
Clark says one issue-specific town hall is already in the works, and in the new year she’s interested in making town halls a more regular part of the function of city governance.
As for economic development, Clark says business attraction tends to get the most attention, but she’s much more focused on business retention and workforce development.
“Having that first piece of a successful business environment where it’s easy to do business is itself a way to attract external investment,” she said.
“I’m all for if an industry wants to come here. I’m super excited about that. But you can’t forget the fundamentals of creating a business environment that leads to success for our businesses in Medicine Hat first.”
Clark is happy to take those lessons forward into her second term. Still, she’s reluctant to characterize the conflicts of the first term as missteps.
“I’ve reflected on all the events quite a bit. But I am not sure that in that context, there were many options,” she said.
“Sometimes you just have to do the right thing. It’s not always to your own advantage to do the right thing. But I would say that’s our job as leaders is to make hard choices, sometimes choices that aren’t necessarily advantageous to ourselves, but we believe that they’re the right thing for our community.”
Looking ahead to 2026, Clark says her council has two goals that rank above the rest: hiring a new chief administrative officer and strategic planning.
The first is straightforward – though, as Hatters know, significant. As for the second, Clark has big changes in mind.
Clark wants the next budget, which council starts work on in February, to be priority-based. Typically, creating a new budget entails adjusting existing line items and adding a handful of new operational and capital costs.
Clark wants to overhaul it entirely.
“You start from scratch and identify what our priorities are as a community, and then budget according to those priorities, rather than by department or division,” she explained. “You’re not focusing on specific line items. That should come after you’ve decided what your priorities are.”
It’s a more time-consuming process, but Clark thinks it’s worth the effort.
Overall, Clark says she left her first term trending in a positive direction, and she is looking forward to collaborating with the new group to pick up where they left off.
She’s got four more years to clear away that mould.
