Mine Is Really a Love Story: Zoe Royer's Story

Zoe Royer came to Port Moody in 2004 and quickly found herself building a life here.

“Mine is really a love story,” she says. “I fell in love with the guy and the community, pretty much simultaneously.”

That guy was her future husband, who was Port Moody’s City Manager at the time. Royer went on to raise her two daughters here, build three businesses, make lifelong friends, and become deeply rooted in the community.

Over the years, the people of this community elected her five times to serve them in different roles.

Those roles included eleven years on Port Moody city council, where she worked on two Official Community Plans and chaired committees on land use, arts and culture, and seniors. What stays with her from that time isn't a single project. It's watching an idea travel from a committee table into something people can actually experience.

"Municipal government is very close to people," she says. "You can have a conversation with someone at the grocery store, bring an idea to City Hall, and later see that idea become part of the city around you. I love that."

Her fierce advocacy for the arts goes back to childhood. “From the time I was very little, people told me I was good at art. I loved to make things for people. It was my love language,” she says.

One of her earliest memories is winning a Mother’s Day portrait contest in Grade 2 with a drawing of her mum. What stayed with her was how special the portrait made her mum feel, and how happy that made her.

“Even as a little girl, I think I understood that art could make someone feel something profound.”

In Port Moody, that childhood instinct became civic work. She chaired the Arts and Culture Committee, co-founded The Art Shuffle, started KaBoom! The Port Moody Art Explosion, served as council's representative to PoMo Arts, and eventually opened Silk Gallery, where she showcased professional and emerging West Coast artists.

Through it all, she came to see the arts as more than decoration. "The arts are an economic engine. They bring people into a community, support artists and small businesses, create jobs, and help give a city, our city, its identity."

But she is just as quick to name the human side. "Creating is good for our mental health, and so is experiencing someone else's work. A painting, a performance, a piece of music or a photograph can make us stop, think, feel, remember, or simply see the world differently." She has always believed that being the City of the Arts is an expression of our community’s heart, soul and character.

In 2020, she and a council colleague spent months working on what reconciliation could mean at the municipal level, bringing their report to council in January 2021. The work meant listening directly to Indigenous leadership, including Kwikwetlem Chief Ed Hall, and focusing on the five of the 94 Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action where municipalities have a direct role.

One recommendation was a Blanket Exercise for council and the city's senior leadership, a walk through centuries of history that makes the impacts on Indigenous culture, families and communities deeply personal. “What stayed with me most was the importance of listening first,” she says. She keeps a Stephen Covey line close for that: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”

Parliament sits about 28 weeks a year, so many of her weekdays are in Ottawa. That makes her squeeze everything she can out of her Port Moody weekends: community events, festivals, art openings, doors to knock on, and the organizations that quietly hold the community together, from Share Society and the Legion to the Men's Shed and the Rotary Club.

Since 2004, she has lived in several Port Moody neighbourhoods: Newport Village, a passive solar home she and her husband built in Pleasantside, then Moody Centre since 2021. There was one eight-month stretch when she temporarily lived outside the city because she couldn't get back into the market, and even then she commuted into Port Moody every day for work.

"After more than 20 years, there are pieces of my life everywhere here," she says. "A five-minute stop can turn into three conversations. Someone remembers my girls when they were growing up. Someone else knew me from council, my career in dentistry, an Earth Day event in our home, or an art opening at my gallery."

What does she wish longtime residents noticed more? The geography. A city of this size, in a region of more than three million, with rapid transit to Vancouver, where you can walk the Shoreline Trail, watch salmon return through the Port Moody Arm to Mossom and Noons Creeks, and quite possibly spot a beaver or a bear. "Sometimes when you live somewhere for a long time, the extraordinary can start to feel ordinary. I hope we never stop noticing where we live!"

Asked what she'd tell a newcomer about why she loves it here, she doesn't hesitate. "Give it a little time and you will understand. For me, my love of Port Moody is about belonging. After more than 20 years, I still look around sometimes and think how lucky I am to call this corner of the world my home."

*Photos courtesy Zoe Royer.*