With his tie gone and his top button undone, Lou Sekora looks like a man who can finally relax.
Voters in Coquitlam handed the 83-year-old mayoral candidate his walking papers on Saturday after 42 years of public service - and he says he has never slept better.
"I feel like there is a few tons taken off my back," he told The Tri-City News, a line he has been repeating all week to supporters and reporters. "Now that I am not in there, I just feel so good The minute I lost, I went to bed and slept like a baby."
Sekora is best known for his time as mayor of Coquitlam from 1983 to 1998. But he has also served as a councillor, a school trustee, a federal member of parliament and a councillor again, before losing his last mayoral bid on Saturday night.
From the wheel of his silver Nissan Altima on Wednesday afternoon, Sekora points out the changes that he has witnessed during his four decades in public life.
When he was first elected, he said, the population of the municipality was about 40,000, less than a third of what it is today. City hall was in Maillardville and what is now the bustling City Centre neighbourhood was a forest and rock quarry.
"None of this was here," he says often as he careens down the streets of Coquitlam. "The city was bare."
HIS HISTORY
Sekora grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan, the second youngest of 15. When his father set aside a parcel of land for the children to get involved in the family business, none of them took him up on his offer.
"Farming is not for me," says Sekora. "My father and my brothers would plant a whole field. My dad would say, 'We are going to have a big crop and we are going to make a lot of money.' Three days later, the hail would come along and you are done."
Instead, Sekora and his younger brother headed west, arriving in the Lower Mainland in 1947. The pair found work at the Bay Lumber sawmill on False Creek, where BC Place Stadium now sits, but that work wasn't to Sekora's liking, either.
He preferred the restaurant industry, taking a job with the Aristocratic restaurant chain in the late 1940s, where he learned to cook and butcher meat.
In 1956, he got into the hotel business and eventually took a partnership at the Avalon Hotel in North Vancouver in the early-1960s. Never one to sit still, he launched the Flame supper club and took up a contract to offer concession services at the Hastings Racetrack, even owning a couple of race horses himself.
THE BEGINNING
Through all of his business ventures, Coquitlam was home.
He attended his first council meeting in the early 1970s, a time when the city was mostly residential.
When McDonalds and Denny's wanted to open restaurants in the city, they were thwarted by city bylaws regulating the size of signs and billboards on shops and businesses. To Sekora, it didn't make sense.
"I said, 'Change the bylaw' and I topped the polls," he says of his first foray into politics. "I even beat out the incumbents."
He was sworn in to office in 1975. Eight years later, he was mayor, a position he held until he made a decision that prompted one of the few regrets he has: giving up the office to become a Liberal MP.
Ottawa was depressing, he says, and if he could do it all over, he never would have left Coquitlam.
In 2000, Canadian Alliance candidate James Moore (now a Conservative MP for Port Moody-Westwood-Port Coquitlam) made Sekora's decision to return home easy, defeating him in the general election.
But Sekora wasn't done with elected office. He returned to city hall in 2005, when he won election as a councillor, a position he will hold until the new council is sworn in next month.
HIGHLIGHTS
Sekora has been in politics for so long, he has difficulty pointing to one accomplishment of which he is most proud. A few he suggests: Moving city hall to its new location on Glen Drive. Incorporating Mundy Park. Helping to bring Douglas College to Coquitlam. Buying the land that is now Town Centre Park.
It all happened on his watch, he says, as the city grew from a predominantly residential suburb to British Columbia's sixth largest community. He also forged many relationships with prominent B.C. politicians, from Mike Harcourt and Gordon Campbell to Bill Vander Zalm and W.A.C. Bennett.
But after 42 years, Sekora said he won't miss being a politician.
Since his defeat Saturday night, he says the phone has stopped ringing and he has shut off his computer, relying only on a cellphone and fax machine to stay in the loop.
Sekora has more time on his hands and he is coming up with new ideas on how he would like to spend it.
He is adamant that he will not get back into politics and said he and his wife Sylvia are busy looking at property in Palm Springs.
"I have a few things to wrap up here and then we are taking a holiday," he said.
And for anyone looking to follow in his footsteps and get into politics, he has one piece of advice: "See a psychiatrist." He added with a chuckle: "Even then, get another opinion."
@GMcKennaTC
