With the Manitoba Provincial Election coming up on October 3, MLA Eileen Clarke has just a few more weeks ahead of her before her retirement becomes official. While she feels like now is the right time to leave politics and is looking forward to less stress in her life, she says she also feels a small amount of remorse about leaving, if only because she won’t be a part of what comes next.

Right now, Clarke says she has no specific plans post-retirement other than to enjoy being at home for a little while and focus on her personal life. Unlike MLAs from Winnipeg ridings, MLAs from rural areas of the province are required to live away from home while serving and Clarke says she has a large to-do list that has accumulated.

Clarke will be officially finished after the appointment of new cabinet ministers following the election but has been asked to come back to help orient new members, and so expects to actually start her retirement closer to the end of October.

While she’s known largely for her work with Indigenous and Municipal Relations over the course of her time in office, Clarke also talks about her interest in the financial side of government. It was actually what drove her into politics in the first place, and she served on the treasury board both at the beginning of her political career and also for the past couple of years. She talks about the mental and physical labour that goes into making difficult decisions, and the weight of that decision making during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Anybody who says they could've, should've, done things differently did not sit in our seats,” says Clarke, “and they did not see what we had to deal with and the decisions we had to make."

Clarke also touches on some of the big provincial projects that have come to her Agassiz constituency over the last few years, including the new hospital which is currently under construction in Neepawa as well as the new vocational high school which was announced earlier this year. A lot has been said about the hospital already but the school, she says, she also be highlighted for being available not just to Neepawa and area students but also to students from nearby First Nations and Hutterite colonies who can now come to learn trades while still living at home.

She also mentions that once an MLA is serving in government, they are serving the province as a whole and not just their constituency. This includes all 137 municipalities, over 130 Hutterite colonies, 62 First Nations communities and 52 unincorporated communities across the north. Her proudest moments, she says, are in bringing people together. All of her titles as a cabinet minister had the word “Relations” in them and she takes that to heart in the work that she’s done

Clarke thanks the people of Agassiz for trusting her for these past eight years and NACTV and Lyle Watson for giving her the opportunity to share her work with the Agassiz constituents. She also thanks the two Premiers she served under, Pallister and Stefanson, and the many colleagues she worked with through the years. Most of all she thanks Jodie Byram, her assistant since she first started her journey in 2015 and now her successor as the PC candidate for Agassiz in the upcoming provincial election.