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Nancy Wilhelm-Morden

Top of her game
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What's one thing people would be surprised to learn about you?

 How about two things: being a squatter for four years in the '70's and the fact that I love to bake, can, preserve and just generally enjoy being in the kitchen.

What world leader would you most like to go for dinner/drinks with, and why?
 President Barack Obama hands down. It would be fascinating to catch a true glimpse of a day in his life.

What book do you recommend everyone read and why?
 Aside from Walter the Farting Dog and Love You Forever , anything by Margaret Atwood - fiction, non-fiction and poetry. She's thought-provoking, controversial at times and is just a great writer.

Give an example of a difficult situation you have overcome?
 Professionally - every single trial I've ever run is difficult in its own way. Plus being a woman in a career still dominated by men. Personally - surviving my daughters' teenage years.

What are your favourite sports to watch on TV? Hockey, of course - go Canucks go - and the Canadian Football League -roar you Lions, roar.

Twenty-one years ago, Nancy Wilhelm-Morden was almost mayor of Whistler.

But a few dozen votes - a mere 35 or so - went against her and so Ted Nebbeling assumed office. Both former councillors under Mayor Drew Meredith's watch, Wilhelm-Morden and Nebbeling had different ideas for the future of Whistler; he campaigned on a business platform, she was a community-minded young mother appealing to the family vote.

"I was very much a believer in the fact that we had spent most of the eighties building facilities for the resort side of our town and we had to pay attention to community facilities - they were virtually non-existent," she recalls.

The community held its breath over days as the votes were recounted by hand. It did not go as she had hoped.

The loss was a terrible disappointment, admits Wilhelm-Morden, and a blow to her ego.

It's easy to tell Nancy Wilhelm-Morden isn't used to losing. In fact, she seems like the kind of woman who can do it all - balancing being a busy lawyer at her law practice, hitting the campaign trail with vigour, giving back to the community through volunteerism, being a mom and wife - while making it all look easy.

A loaf of bread sits on the counter of her Alpine home, freshly baked by her that morning. She offers cream cheese and homemade onion jam with go with it - her own homemade jam, a recipe she invented after tasting the sweet/savory spread in Montreal earlier this year.

She glances at the clock - late enough, she decides, to have a well-deserved glass of white wine. Her campaign team has just left, a plan of attack formed to get through the final stretch of the campaign.

For her day job she is preparing to go to mediation for one of the biggest cases she's ever taken on - the controversial Gilles Blackburn lawsuit - a case that could have ramifications in Whistler and other ski resorts. Blackburn was stuck in the Golden backcountry for nine days, and watched his wife die there, before he was rescued. He is now suing RCMP, Golden Search and Rescue, and Kicking Horse Resort.

It hasn't been an easy case. In fact, she calls it her toughest case to date.

Wilhelm-Morden, who is representing Blackburn, had a death threat over it.

"It's a very emotional case and of course it attracted huge amounts of negative publicity," she says.

When asked if she wished she hadn't taken it on, she delivers an immediate "no."

"I don't shy away from fighting the big boys on behalf of my clients."

Wilhelm-Morden admits she likes keeping busy.

It's not just lip service when she says she believes in giving back to the community. In addition to her four terms on council, Wilhelm-Morden was instrumental in starting up the Community Foundation of Whistler more than a decade ago.

She describes it as the community's savings account. It has $3.6 million, growing interest by the day. That interest has been dispersed to the tune of $850,000 by the end of this year, creating mountain biking trails, community greenhouses, professional development, to name a few of the spin off effects.

"I feel like it's my baby," says Wilhelm-Morden of the fund.

Though she is not involved in the day-to-day aspects of it, getting it off the ground took countless volunteer hours.

"I personally feel a tremendous amount of pride because this organization is doing so much good in the corridor."

So how does she manage to do it all?

It helps to be very organized, she smiles. She keeps notebooks for different things - a campaign notebook, a household notebook - to write down her lists of things to do and her brainstorming ideas.

"I'm a perpetual list-maker," she says.

She remembers the juggling act of being a working mom, often times on council, certainly volunteering in the community one way or another and raising two little girls.

"I like to be on the go and I find the time. I won't lie... there were times when I'd be up in the middle of the night baking or whatever it was that I needed to do to get the girls ready for school the next day."

She shrugs: "Mums do what they have to do."

With the benefit of hindsight she said that loss in the race for mayor was perhaps a blessing in disguise. Her girls were four and two at the time.

Still, she can't help but wonder what Whistler would have looked like if she had won.

"I think our town would have looked quite a but different had I been the mayor in those days," she says from the comfort of her kitchen table. Under her watch she believes she would have successfully pushed for a community sports facility (ice rink and/or swimming pool) anchoring the village in Lot 1/9 where Olympic Plaza is now, rather than the Meadow Park location, which was the cheaper choice at the time. And she would have tried to slow down the development of Village North over a 10 to 15-year period.

In a couple of days she may finally get that chance to shape Whistler in the ways she and the new councillors think best. She's excited and nervous and up for the challenge. Sometimes, the thought of the scope of the job keeps her up at night. She's been giving serious thought to what needs to be done first on the long list of things to do, how will she pull the team together as its leader, how will she relate to the senior management, how will she motivate the employees in the hall to regain the pride in the work they're doing, how will she build up trust again between the municipality and the community.

"I'm not kidding myself that it's going to be a cakewalk," she says.

"(But) when I saw what didn't happen at municipal hall following the Olympic Games, and when I saw who was stepping up to run for office, and also taking into account the number of people who approached me to run, I decided that it came under the heading of 'life is too short' - life is too short to take this job but life is also too short not to take this job."

Like the job, the campaign has had its share of highs and lows. A high point this weekend when she was in Marketplace and a car drove by with kids in the backseat yelling, "Hi Nancy. It's Nancy Wilhelm-Morden!"

The low point was, of course, the challenge to her nomination paper. She didn't sleep much during those four days when there was a chance she wouldn't be able to run.

The career lawyer, who is as comfortable speaking in her long black robes in the Vancouver law courts as she is baking bread in her kitchen, admits she's nervous campaigning. She hides it well, behind a measured voice and a confident message. But there are little tells. She plays with the end of her light scarf as the questions turn to the personal.

"Are you kidding? Oh yeah, I get really nervous. I'm uncomfortable talking about myself. It's not natural for me. I can stand up in a courtroom and I'll wail away about my clients' case but to stand up and talk about... I mean, even right now I'm nervous. This is not something that I'm comfortable doing."

Get her in front of judge and jury and it's another story.

Wilhelm-Morden set her sights on a legal career when she was just a child. She never wavered from that goal, even if it meant travelling up and down the highway to Vancouver to go to school and studying by kerosene lamp in her squatter's cabin in the Whistler woods.

She decided to become a lawyer when she was just ten years old because in part she wanted to do "something that girls didn't do."

She still does.

Hesitant to play the gender card, the fact remains she's a woman, like many others in Whistler, who are at the top of their game.

"Yet in many ways this still feels like a man's town," she says.

"It would be very thrilling to be the first female mayor here."

 

 

 



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