Lunch with: Shaun Cameron

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/10/2011 (5420 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What is the best gift you’ve received?

By far, my daughter. She’s a great teaching tool and she’s just an awesome person to have around. Her and my wife are my life.

Kids are amazing for allowing you to see the positives and engatives in your own personality. And kids are so receptive to anything their parents do, and they take it all in and spit back some of the best stuff, I think.

Which hobby would you pursue if you had more time?

Writing. I’m an amateur playwright, and if I had more time, absolutely I would pursue that, pursue more writing opportunities.

I’ve been involved with an upstart theatre company we have in Brandon here, and a group of us have put collaborative works in Act Festival Manitoba — it’s a theatre festival every year, held in various towns throughout Manitoba. [It’s] all comedies, all farces, which plays well to my sense of humour, I think.

If you could have any superpower, what would it be?

I would think the ability to read peoples’ thoughts a little. You quite often run into situations where you’d really like to know what people are thinking, but it’s not always the case. The ability to know what people are thinking.

What would you do if you won the lottery?

I’d pay off a lot of bills, that’s for sure.

It’d be a mix. You want to make sure that your family is looked after, and you want to make sure your community’s looked after. It’d be a mix of where the money goes from there.

First of all, you’ve got to make sure your family’s looked after, but everybody should have a certain level of philanthropy. It just makes the overall community experience better.

What do you love most about your home?

we’re right in the heart of the city. We live downtown, we have a nice, old, two-storey home — close to the Liquor Mart, which my friends always joke with me about — but it feels like home. I grew up in a very good household with a very good family, so it feels like home being there.

What’s you favourite family tradition?

Just togetherness. Having lots of people around, with my wife’s family and my family as well. It’s great because when you get together at Christmas, you get together at holidays, you have lots of people around and you can kind of share that fellowship of family.

Our families are together for a lot of instances, and get along together well, which is great.

What is your chief characteristic?

I would hope people would say honesty. I mean what I say, and I don’t like to beat around the bush, or be someone who plays a lot of games. I hope I come off as being an honest person, and a person that people can believe in and believe when I’m saying something, I mean it.

I think it does (come across). I think people have to get to know you to really feel that they can trust in you. Definitely you learn, through events like the election, you want to make sure that your true character is coming across, and I hope in that case, it did for me.

If not yourself, who would you like to be?

First of all, I’m content being who I am. I think that’s probably a blanket answer you get a lot. I’m content being who I am. If not myself, probably my father, just because I admire how ard he’s worked all his life, for our family, and I have a true admiration for him, for that.

Which fault in others do you most easily tolerate?

That’s a good one. I don’t know. I woudl think probably time management. I’m a relaxed individual, so I can tolerate if people run late, or are not the best as far as time management. It’s an easy thing for people to get over. Some people have a lot of difficulty with it, but I’ve always been okay with it.

Which fault in yourself do you most easily tolerate?

I would say probably the fact that I’m so relaxed. I’m sure it drives some people nuts, but i’ve never been somebody to get too wound up into something, or to get too reactive. I like to let life happen, and you learn from it as you go.

What is your most memorable birthday?

It would be probably my 30th birthday. In the same year as my 30th birthday, my daughter was born — double whammy. And I actually have a unique thing where I share my birthday with my nephew, who was born two years ago, and our daughter shares the same birthday as his father, my brother-in-law, in the same year.

Describe your first job and how you landed it.

My first real job would be working for the Brandon School Division. I worked as an EA with at-risk youth. And as far as how I landed it, I went to my first panel interview, which was nerve-wracking. But you be who you are, and don’t try to pretend to be something you’re not. They received it well, and the rest is history.

I worked there for eight years before I moved on to CKX.

If you could choose any profession, what would it be and why?

Basically, any profession with helping people. I like what I’m doing now because I feel at the end of the day you can make a difference — you can make a difference in someone’s life. I truly enjoy working with people with disabilities, because you can see a large growth, daily, in assisting them.

And that’s where Career Connections is good, because at the end of the day, I can see, ‘Okay, I’ve made a difference,’ or ‘This person has a job now,’ or ‘This person has the skills to get a job,’ and you can see real tangible changes that in other jobs you quite often can’t see.