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Quebec Premier Charest's Mockery of Democracy

Compiled by The Canadian staff

 
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A new municipal Liberal administration under Gerald Tremblay came to power in January 2002 in the "One Island, One City" that had been somewhat ironically created by the PQ government. Tremblay's organization was recently accused of engaging in corruption during the Quebec province-wide municipal election campaign.

Montreal is where a new administration under Gerald Tremblay came to power in January 2002 in the "One Island, One City" that had been created by the PQ government.

The Tremblay administration was soon confronted with changes following the 2003 provincial election campaign, in which Jean Charest's Liberal Party promised to submit the mergers to the people directly concerned for their approval. The changes took the form ol a law, Bill 9, which opened the door for old municipalities to revert to their former status as separate, independent entities, albeit with much reduced powers, and set out a series of stages through which it could take place, the last being a referendum. As a result of the June referendums, opponents of the Montreal mega-merger managed to carve out a large chunk of their new island-city, including a huge crescent-shaped piece at its south-western end, comprising 28 per cent of its land area and 15 per cent of its population.

Observers stress different motives as driving the déusionisfe (i.e. demerger) forces. Martin Horak and Andrew Sancton see the opponents of amalgamation in Montreal (as in Toronto) as middle-class residents with a strong sense of local identity.2 Julie-Anne Boudreau agrees the opposition is middle-class-based but views Montreal as primarily a territorial struggle over cultural identity propelled by the desire of anglophones to protect life in English in Montreal.3 Heather Murray sees these movements as part of a general desire to assert and exercise urban autonomy4 expressed, for example, in the current struggle to use proceeds of the federal gasoline tax to finance urban infrastructure.

Demerger: A difficult process

Bill 9, adopted by the Quebec National Assembly in December 2003, created a complex process for boroughs to regain their former independent status as separate municipalities. First, the government hired "independent" consultants to assess the costs, impacts on services, and advantages and disadvantages of demerger in Montreal, the other seven megacities and 34 other recently created smaller agglomerations. A summary of their findings, distributed to residents eligible to participate in the two-step demerger consultation, made it clear that demerger would not yield a return to pre-merger status and that the powers of demerged cities would be much narrower than they were prior to the forced mergers. In the case of Montreal, some responsibilities (such as police and property assessment) previously managed by the old Montreal Urban Community (or MUC), abolished in the merger process, would remain centralized under an "agglomeration council." So would other services (such as firefighting and municipal courts), which had belonged to the municipalities before the merger transformed them into boroughs. Montreal will have a controlling vote in this new council (scheduled to hold its first meeting in the fall of 2004), where the lightly weighted votes of demerged suburbs will, for all intents and purposes, be meaningless. The evaluation summary also stated that, in almost all cases, if a borough demerged its residents would be taxed more heavily for the same services.

For a demerger referendum, once requested by 10 per cent of the registered voters in a pre-merger city, to succeed, Bill 9 required its results to be clear, meaning a simple majority (i.e. 50 per cent plus one) of those voting. But the bill added a further hurdle for the défusionistes: to take effect, a Yes majority would have to comprise more than 35 per cent of the registered voters. Hence, if 65 per cent of them stayed home, demerger could not take place; with a turnout of 50 per cent in municipal elections, the demerger forces would need over 70 per cent of the ballots cast to win. At a 70 per cent turnout, a 50 per cent plus one vote was all that would be required since it would satisfy the 35 per cent rule.

Put succinctly, the government scheme made it costly merely to call for a referendum which, in the event, would require an extraordinarily high voter turnout, given traditional citizen indifference to local matters. Worse still, the government saw to it as well that, compared with merged boroughs, demerged cities would enjoy only slightly greater control over local matters, but at increased cost to ratepayers.

This reflected the government's overall attitude. In a Radio Canada interview, Jean Pierre Fournier, the Minister of Municipal Affairs, stated that the government was opposed to coerced mergers and was honouring its promise to restore municipal democracy. Yet Fournier's claim strikes us as disingenuous - at best. From the very outset, Premier Charest issued orders that Liberal ministers were neither to sign the registers nor to campaign for demergers, although he didn't prohibit public endorsements of One Island, One City. Yves Séguin, the Minister of Finance whose riding includes the borough of Outremont (home of one of the authors), did precisely that. Charest himself, while refraining from campaigning, made known his intention to vote against the demerger in the Montreal borough of Westmount where he resides (arranging, however, to do so in an advance poll, away from the glare of media attention). To cap it off, on the referendum ballot the term in French for demerger was the brutal démembrement (dismemberment) rather than the widely used and well-understood défusion (demerger). In English, the gentler "dismantling" was the term used.

In addition, the government resorted to questionable campaign tactics designed to discourage demerger. For example, a flyer from the provincial Ministry of Municipal Affairs informed residents of Outremont that if more than 10 per cent signed the register, ratepayers would be billed an alarming $140,194 collectively. For the few who bothered to calculate, it worked out to less than $8.55 per voter. The same flyer assured residents that the municipality would disseminate information as to where and when they could sign the register. This was never done, although a full-page advertisement in a neighbourhood newspaper would have cost a trifling sum compared with the public funds spent to promote and defend the mergers. Not surprisingly, only 2.6 per cent signed the register in Outremont, so no referendum was held.

In other merged boroughs where prodéfusion movements were active, proponents of demerger faced a concerted effort by Tremblay's supporters to discredit their efforts, including innuendo and even intimidation. For example, among the "Top 10 reasons to say No" listed in a flyer distributed to residents of the Town of Mount Royal (TMR) by the Comité Mont-Royal pour Montréal, number 3 was "Because I don't want to be in an isolated community that withdraws into itself," and number 8 "Because I don't want to experience an 18 per cent increase in my taxes" (emphasis in original).

It is clearly a significant achievement that despite these hurdles and inconveniences, at the end of the registration period (Thursday, May 20, 2004), 22 of the 27 forcibly merged municipalities on Montreal Island recorded more than the minimum 10 per cent of signatures required - many comfortably so. In all, 51 of 86 former municipalities in the merged megacities managed to obtain enough signatures. On June 20, referendums were held in six of the eight megacilies.

The Charest government's complicity in re-affirming municipal democracy

  Jean Charest

Many voters in middle-class suburban cities feel cheated and betrayed by the government's at best half-hearted efforts to undo the forced mergers. Indeed, in the September 20 byelections, despite Charest's highly publicized "success" in negotiations with the Martin government over health care (the first faced by his government), the Liberals lost two seats, including a traditional multiethnic Liberal Montreal seat to the Parti Québécois. They did, however, manage to hold onto their West Island stronghold of Nelligan against a pro-demerger independent. Thus it remains to be seen whether by dissembling on demergers, the Liberals have jeopardized their natural constituency. While suburban discontent on this issue is in itself not enough to bring down the government, it could combine with others to cause its downfall. Owing largely to its disregard for local grassroots democracy, the Charest administration could face a fate similar to that of the Landry Parti Québecois government, which it defeated in 2003.

It is apparent that Jean Charest social austerity policies are being designed to complement "Free Trade" interests, contrary to principles of social justice and democracy.

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