Third consecutive win for President Audrey Poitras

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Audrey Poitras, the newly re-elected president of the Alberta Metis Association (MNA), grew up in northeastern Alberta in the community of Elk Point in a family of eight with a school teacher mother and a father who was a farmer.

Married for 36-years, (she has one son, a daughter-in-law and two grandchildren) she credits her husband for her decision to run for a third straight term for the MNA.

"I have a very supportive husband who has supported me for the past six years that I've been the president, and continues to support me," she said. "Prior to deciding to run in this election, we sat down and went through this decision because it definitely does affect your family life. My commitment to the Metis Nation has been a very full commitment and a lot of times there are family things that I do miss out on because I'm in Ottawa or I'm in some part of Alberta or just busy doing things.

"I guess if anybody doubted if I should run again it was me and not my husband. His comment was 'why would you stop now? You haven't finished the job yet. Why would you stop now?' So we are in this together," she said.

Poitras has been involved in politics since she was first elected as provincial president in 1996. She was re-elected in 1999 and had a three-peat on Sept. 3.

"I don't think that I ever thought that I'd be the president of the Metis Nation, or be involved in politics of any kind. I never thought that it would be a part of my life. At that time we'd never had a woman elected as president before. The men were the political leaders then, and that is the way it was so I didn't think that I was going to ever be the president," she said.

Poitras and her husband closed down their dry cleaning business, and in 1991 she got a job at the Metis Nation in the finance department. She is an accountant by trade. Her role as director of finance took her to each of the regional offices, which gave her an opportunity to get to know a lot of people in the communities. During this time Poitras realized a lot of things were not being done that could've been done. She came to re-evaluate her employment there.

"I felt that our organization was not moving ahead. During that time we had a lot of internal fighting, a lot of dissention within the nation and from there I decided that I would move on. It was an idea that I wasn't going to stay there with the way things were, because I just felt that we were not moving forward and it was not a nice place to be. It was only when I mentioned that I was going to move on that people asked 'why are you leaving? If you don't like what is happening, why don't you do something about it?' I guess that is where the thought came from. So I agreed with some of the people and said 'OK, I will give it a try and see what happens from here.'"

Shortly after Poitras' first election, the organization got together in a board development workshop to talk about their visions, their views as a council, and what they thought they needed to do.

"Our first job was to clean up and stabilize the Metis Nation, to establish credibility with our partners, the government, the industry, and with the people we knew we needed to work with, and that is what we basically did. And after the election in 1999, we also got back together to do some more planning. What we did there was put a plan together to say where we wanted to be in three years and where we wanted to be in five years, and where wanted to see the nation at in 2010.

Poitras' plans for this term is to focus on several issues the Metis people in Alberta are facing, including accessing provincial or federal government programs, the recognition of Metis rights and the promotion of Metis culture through an interpretive centre.