click for Trent's last Letter to Westmount

Sunday Jun 15, 2003
To the barricades, again The cry of separation is being heard across the island of Montreal once more this summer But this time, it's the Anglos of Westmount
...Their leader is Peter Trent O.W.N., a pleasant and always nattily dressed fellow who fluffs expensive silk handkerchiefs into the breast pocket of his exquisitely tailored and perpetually well-pressed club jacket. Born in England, educated at McMaster and an émigré to Quebec in 1968, you might say he is the modern Westmount man: connected, mellifluously bilingual, staunchly Anglo and proud to be a Quebecer.

"Je suis un séparatiste," declares the silver-haired Trent, speaking in a waspish tone that bespeaks of good breeding, a stiff upper lip and all the other attributes of empire. "I'm a separatist. I'm a sovereignist. I can tell you, when I first said that, it really got the Parti Québécois' attention."

..."The two sides have traded places," Montreal humorist Josh Freed recently wrote, observing the old enemies have flipped their logic.

"The new Anglo separatists are geared for a neverendum battle until they win back their old towns. Meanwhile, francophone anti-separatists say we must stop talking about a referendum because it's hurting Montreal's economy. As if they ever worried about that before. "In short, the separatists have become federalists and the federalists have become separatists, with Westmount leading the crusade for independence."

MegaMontreal:
It’s not just the captain, it’s the ship.

But this is not the whole picture. The francophone media, after being rabid cheerleaders for the megacity, are now forced to blame everything on the mayor, rather than even suggesting that some of his gaffes might have something to do with the megacity itself. And this will be more and more the case as the megacity gets up to speed.

So it’s not just the captain, it’s the ship. MegaMontreal is top heavy, costs a fortune to operate, and rolls in heavy seas. The ship is steered, not really by its captain and his 55 aides, but by thousands of bureaucrats who serve as crew, all operating without benefit of charts or compass. Tremblay himself has never set foot on a boat: he is like an army staff officer who got up one morning and decided to become a ship’s captain. He has some junior officers who have served on much smaller, nimble craft and who were press-ganged into coming aboard. In spite of their handsome pay packets, will the officers mutiny? Will the crew go on strike? Will the ship hit an iceberg? At least Jean Charest has promised to re-float some smaller craft to off-load passengers who were forced into coming aboard in the first place. This nautical saga continues.

So Tremblay – the mayor - might not be the man for the job. But who is? Tremblay is probably too decent and naïve. He truly believes, in his professorial way, that this megacity can be run democratically. But it can’t. It is the nature of large cities that they are inherently undemocratic and therefore tend to be run by autocrats. Bourque, with his servile councillors and contempt for consultation, is more the norm – and he ran a smaller city. Bourque’s idol is Drapeau – hardly the incarnation of a democrat. Jean Doré, a rather weak but decent man who originally tried to open up City Hall, ended up becoming a control-freak. Whether it’s Lastman in Toronto, or Guiliani in New York (before his ascension to sainthood), or the other American big-city mayors, autocracy is the rule. You can’t run a mega-city any other way.

In the past, we had checks and balances: the mayor of Montreal had to share power with the MUC and other mayors. Now the mayor’s power extends unfettered over the entire Island. On top of this, he will always be the chairman of the Montreal Metropolitan Community, which covers the whole Greater Montreal area. That means wielding power over half the population of Quebec. In some ways, we’re lucky to have Tremblay. Imagine if another Drapeau got elected to the mayor’s chair? Compared to a future mayor’s fiscal deliriums, the Olympic débâcle might then seem like a prudent investment.

The key word in local government is local. Democracy flourished in most of the suburban cities because they were small. Sure, they didn’t have to put up with the glare of the main media - and the local media were often pretty tolerant - but people could get through to their elected representative and have a say in policy.

A city and its citizens form a pyramidal structure: the greater the population, the greater the distance between the served and the servers; that is, between the council and the citizens. The distance in between is made up of increasing layers of bureaucrats. Provincial and federal governments are far more diffuse. A premier, for example, does not directly run a hospital or a school. The link is much more tenuous. When a bacterium was found in the ventilation system of a hospital, did anyone call the premier about it? When your kid was sent home from school, did you call M. Landry, or even your MNA? But if the toilets don’t work in the arena, or if the snow stayed around too long, or if there’s a spate of break-ins somewhere, the mayor’s office is the first to hear of it.

This direct responsibility is unknown in other levels of government. Importing the parliamentary style – with which M. Tremblay, incidentally, is most familiar – won’t work. So it is local government’s immediacy, accountability, and direct democracy that limits the effective size of cities. But we have a megacity designed by people who have never even run a small city – Mde Harel and her Quebec City bureaucrats. Imagine the reaction if a mayor had the effrontery to revamp the operations of the National Assembly?

So why not just decentralise? Well, if you decentralise, you have to do it in such a manner as to ensure the local elected officials have direct control over the delivery of services, personnel, and costs. You also have to have taxation at the same level as representation. You have to decentralise both the input and the output. This arrangement is called a city. In other words, the end state of any true decentralisation process is a series of small cities - which is what we had before the megacity.

As the former suburban cities are slowly integrated into the megacity, service quality will drop. Centralisation will set in, and the population and the media will begin to focus on poor services, rather than on M. Tremblay’s current miasma of personal oversights – some of which clearly have to do with his inexperience. He will be frustrated by citizen complaints, the megacity’s complexity, and competing forces within his caucus. Like all big-city mayors, Tremblay will then resort to a centralised, uniform, command-and-control approach, which will make the problems even worse.

Tremblay’s innate sensitivity – a desirable attribute were he running a smaller city – will be regarded as a weakness in big-city politics. And his carapace may not be thick enough to withstand the constant onslaught of the media.

The fans of the megacity are saying Tremblay (and his party) are just going through teething pains. The problem is much more profound than that. It will become more and more evident just how grotesque a structure Quebec has foisted on us. Its first victim just might be a fundamentally decent man.

Peter F. Trent O.W.N. May 13, 2002

December 20, 2001

Dear Fellow Citizen:

Subject: The battle against annexation – 6th report

This is the last letter I shall write you as mayor – at least until the possible restoration of the mayoralty and the restitution of our city when (one hopes) the Quebec Liberals are elected. For, come January 1, the City of Westmount is no more. 128 years of history will be wiped out by a spiteful and stupid law, Bill 170. Without consultation, without parliamentary debate, without even an electoral mandate, the PQ government decided to ignore the most elementary principles of democracy, and, at the same time, dump Quebec’s varied and rich municipal heritage into the ash-bin.

The legal battle

Now, while there are many reasons to be against Bill 170 in particular and forced mergers in general, the only argument that had a chance before the courts was linguistic in nature. Ironically, the same day and hour we were turned down by the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal in Ontario upheld the decision of a lower court in the francophone Montfort Hospital case, which was almost the mirror image of what we were arguing. The judges even invoked our own lawyers’ argument that the Canadian constitution’s unwritten principles guarantee, as a fundamental structural feature, the respect for and protection of minorities.

At least now, as the battlefield becomes political rather than legal, and as we move from an anti-merger stance to a de-merger position, we no longer have to play just the language card.

The political battle

With the legal avenue closed, we are counting on Jean Charest’s Liberals to permit the consultation on municipal restructuring that was so brutally denied us by the PQ government In those ex-cities where sufficient support exists for de-merger, the Liberals will allow it to happen, after informing citizens of the implications of such a move, and after a formal referendum.

But be warned: de-merger won’t be easy. Even assuming the Liberals get in and enact the appropriate legislation, in most places outside Westmount, the anti-merger fervour could easily deliquesce into passive acceptance of the megacity of Montreal:

1) Already, the Transition Committee, working for the PQ government, has published misleading figures suggesting the ex-suburban cities will get much more money for local services than the ex-Montreal boroughs. They conveniently ignore in their calculations the local costs buried in the costs of running the centre city, along with the $3.8 billion debt of the former city of Montreal.

2) The francophone media, one of the biggest promoters of the megacity, will inveigh against de-merger and the “dismembering” of this new city. The absence of democracy in the process of its creation seems to bother them not one jot.

3) The former suburban mayors now ensconced in the megacity’s Executive Committee have already shed their anti-merger rhetoric.

4) The most pernicious effects of the megacity will not be felt for a year or even more. While the suburban cities are merged de jure come January 1, de facto, it will take many months or even years for integration to occur. The impenetrable bureaucracy, the viciousness of the party system, and the extortion guaranteed by “one city one union” will take time to set in. In fact, in the beginning, many people will say, “it’s not so bad, after all”. This false honeymoon also happened in the Toronto megacity.

Why shouldn’t Westmounters just sit back and accept the megacity? Well, for one thing, your taxes will increase by 50% over the next five years or so. Even next year, taxes on the average single family dwelling will increase by 9%. Services, such as snow removal and public security, will slowly diminish. Facilities such as our library, designed for a city of 20,000, will have to accommodate a much larger population. Montreal’s standards will become the norm. In short, you can expect the highest common denominator to apply when it comes to employee wages, and the lowest common denominator when it comes to services. In that sense, equality means everyone gets equally bad services. But, above all, the megacity will cost much more to run and will be unresponsive. It will be the triumph of bureaucracy over democracy.

And so we will soldier on. I will become a kind of mayor-in-exile. In fact, the existing City Council, transformed into a “de-merger” committee, has already scheduled its first public meeting on January 23 at 8:00 p.m. Please come. In the meantime, I wish you a happy Christmas and/or holiday season.

PFT:mja Peter F. Trent O.W.N. Mayor

Links to our past
which will be here as long as Wednesday-Night.com lasts

• Une ile Une Ville?
• His Order of Wednesday-Night OWN
• BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES French
• Westmount
• Menu of Trent Stories from 1 jan 1996
• RCAF 401 Sdq
• The man behind the mayor
• GAZETTE EDITORIAL by Peter Trent 11 February, 2001
• The battle against annexation – 5th report
• other reports
• 21 May 2001 Persisting in their folly & Yves Boisvert Who will be the mayor
  
  
  
  3 Feb 2003 letter 16 July 2001 5th report