Peter F. Trent: How the demerger battle was won 20 years ago

After the referendums of June 20, 2004, Montreal municipalities that were reconstituted have fared better than those that remained boroughs.

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From 1999 to 2001, many of us battled the Parti Québécois government’s forced municipal mergers. After we lost in court, all the former Montreal Island suburban cities were reincarnated as impotent boroughs within the new megacity of Montreal. It was Jan. 1, 2002.

I was therefore “de-elected” because I refused to have anything to do with the megacity. I started work as a self-appointed unpaid “mayor in exile” determined to undo this travesty of democracy. The forces of demerger slowly picked up steam.

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Eventually, I came up with the pretty obvious idea of an in-depth report to explain why and how we should demerge. I succeeded in getting it written by a former chief justice of the Superior Court of Quebec, Lawrence Poitras.

I then had a second idea: Why not have Justice Poitras present his report, La Défusion municipale au Québec, at a press conference during the provincial general election in spring 2003? It would promote demergers, but it would also remind voters all over Quebec just how angry they were about having mergers forced on them with zero consultation.

Immediately after this press conference, demergers became an election issue. The Liberals’ then-leader, Jean Charest, had no choice but to confirm he would honour his party’s almost-forgotten demerger promise. Bernard Landry, who led the PQ, wrote four years later that his party “lost the election essentially because of the mergers. We’re talking of the loss of over 20 ridings.”

The Liberal win resulted in the holding of 90 demerger referendums on June 20, 2004 — 20 years ago today. Thirty municipalities demerged, half of them on the island of Montreal.

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Before the mergers, all Montreal Island suburban cities contributed to regional services such as mass transit, police and wastewater treatment. With demerger, the agglomeration council was created for this purpose, unfortunately adding further services such as firefighting and municipal courts.

In 2001, the city of Westmount contributed 45 per cent of its total spending to pay for such regional costs. Today, it contributes 52 per cent. As a group, the demerged suburbs contribute 47 per cent of their total budgets to the “agglo,” over which they have admittedly no control. On the other hand, they have complete control over local services, the 53 per cent that remains.

Not so the remaining Montreal boroughs. They started off in 2002 handling 32 per cent of all city of Montreal spending, but are today down to a derisory 17 per cent. And three-quarters of that spending is funded by unreliable handouts from the central city. Since they have no legal status, borough councils cannot contest this constant erosion in the range of services they deliver or their funding — a helplessness I predicted 20 years ago.

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In fact, since their reconstitution, the demerged cities have gained powers while the remaining 19 Montreal boroughs lost them: arterial roads, parking, snow-removal policy, building management, zoning, purchasing and hiring.

Forget the relatively cuddly term “merge.” Montreal annexed its suburbs. Montreal’s bureaucrats and executive committee members run everything, with the city council-cum-parliament serving as a democratic fig leaf. The boroughs have become an afterthought, an irritation — in fact, they’re ripe for being uniformized by merger.

Had Westmount, Pointe-Claire or Beaconsfield remained as boroughs within the megacity, as well as suffering a diminution of power over local services, they would be faced with an even more serious problem. To oversee all the other services — centralized or regional — they would have first to be members of the ruling political party (today Mayor Valérie Plante’s Projet Montréal) and then pray to be anointed to sit on the all-powerful executive committee. Compared to that, the agglomeration council is almost straightforward. Almost.

Thank heavens the reconstituted cities seized a one-time opportunity to demerge 20 years ago.

Peter F. Trent, a former inventor and businessman, served five terms as mayor of Westmount and led the Montreal demerger movement. His Merger Delusion was a finalist for the best Canadian political book of 2012.

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