By Graeme McNaughton/Active Senior’s Digest
When the mayor of Billings, Ont. made the call to run for re-election last fall, it was hardly out of the ordinary – it was something he had done plenty of times before.
In fact, Austin Hunt – known by the locals as Mayor Aus – has been in the political game for decades.
“Over half of my time was just as a local councillor. My position is the longest municipally-elected politician in, well I guess the country, I don’t know,” Hunt told Active Senior’s Digest by phone from Manitoulin Island. “At least that’s what the people who keep giving me awards tell me. I haven’t been tracing it.”
Hunt was first elected in 1953, but his start in politics came earlier than that when he was fresh out of high school.
“I was actually involved with (Lester B.) Pearson, our prime minister. This was his riding. He came to stay in a small hotel…during his campaign,” he says. “He met me – I just finished high school – and he asked me to drive him around. We became friends and had me do various jobs for him, winding up as his campaign manager for the riding.”
After this first brush with poltics, Hunt made the choice to run for local council, although he didn’t get his foot in the door on the first try.
“I had run before and wasn’t successful, but I ran again in 1953 and was successful and I (have been) on council consistently until now, except for one year because we used to do one-year terms,” he says, adding “it’s only fair” that he deserved a year off in the last 62 years.
In more than six decades, Hunt says that politics has simply become a way of life for him, although it helps living in a small community.
“It’s become a part of my life. It’s a small community, so it isn’t a full-time job but it takes up a lot of your time. Especially if you’re the mayor or reeve, then you become the complaint department. It’s a 24-hour service,” he says.
Hunt says he had originally planned to get out of politics 15 to 20 years ago, but he lost his wife. Now, politics, along with his other endeavours, keeps him busy.
“We have a small business too, and my son works (with me) at that. Incidentally, I was also the postmaster for a number of years and that kept me busy. My son was lucky enough to get the postmaster job too and he runs it in the same little retail store (the family owns).”
The changing, or non-changing times
While politics – and a way of life in general – may have changed in more than 60 years as a politician, Hunt says that that isn’t exactly the case for Billings and the rest of Manitoulin Island.
“We’re in a rural area, of course. We’re in a tourist area too, so as the whole province improves, so do we. But where we are on Manitoulin Island, there hasn’t been a great change,” he says. “I often mention the historical mark of the turn of the century in 1900 – I wasn’t here – Manitoulin District was 10,000 people; so was Algoma District and so was Sudbury District.
Today, Maintoulin is roughly the same with a 10,000 population. Algoma, which has (Sault Ste. Marie) is 130,000 and Sudbury District is 150,000, so we’ve definitely stayed pretty much the same.”
Well, maybe not everything has stayed the same, Hunt later added – there is a bit more money around.
“In the 1950s when I was first a councillor, we were practically working on provincial grants. Now we still need some provincial grants to survive, but not nearly to the same extent. We raise a good deal of our operations (funding) now.”
After more than six decades in poltics, Hunt says he doesn’t see himself stopping any time soon if only for the sake he has work to do.
“I’m interested in it. I’m interested in people, and I’m interested in my community. Everyone is, or they wouldn’t stay or get involved,” he says. “The reason I carry on in this type of work is because there’s always something very important to carry on with. These things, I guess, have kept me going. And people have put up with me for that long.”
