Robert Doucette is anxious to get on with the job at hand.
Over the weekend, he won re-election as president of the Metis Nation – Sasktchewan.
He defeated five other candidates to win the election, collecting about a third of the total votes cast.
Doucette welcomes the opportunity to continue building on what he started when he took office five years ago, and wants to re-engage and re-invigorate Saskatchewan’s 80,000 Metis residents.
But he will have his work cut out for him.
Voter turnout was only about 3,000 — down 2,000 from the last election in 2007.
Still, Doucette is not discouraged by the low turnout:
“Well, no. You know what, actually, it’s a number that we can build on. It tells us that we need to get into our communities and our locals and work even harder now. And just by the mere fact that Metis people came out to vote shows that they still believe in this organization, and I look forward to the hard work ahead.”
One of the first orders of business for Doucette is to figure out how the MN-S will be affected by federal funding cuts. The FSIN will see its funding cut from $1.6 million to about $500,000 over the next two years — but Doucette says he hasn’t seen a letter from Ottawa detailing how the cuts will affect his organization.
Meanwhile, Doucette says voters have been telling him that health, education, employment and housing are their main areas of concern.