by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

You people want some good old-fashioned knock-’em-down, brushback election entertainment? A surprising source for such action is Tremblay-ista Michael Applebaum, whose efforts to enthrall are usually limited to that offered by his unabashedly bad spoken French. But the mayor of NDG-Côte-des-Neiges has become a rare source of electricity in an otherwise snooze-inducing election. Last week, Applebaum’s Bourquefarian rivals put out a press release about the Great Picnic Table Incident of Sept. 15, in which three unadmiring West End Filipinos claimed that Applebaum approached them in a park and offered them a bribe of between $5,000 and $10,000 in return for their support.

Background here: Some local Filipinos have been sore with Applebaum for requiring clean-up deposits to hold events in local parks. One group recently skirted the rules by holding an ethno-fête on the front lawn of their apartment building.

So predictably, bad blood ensued when the A-baum approached a group of Filipino community leaders at a picnic table in Kent Park. Applebaum calls the resulting bribe story a “ridiculous allegation.” He says he was accompanied at the encounter by an aide who can attest that he “never mentioned funding” and he accuses his accuser of being “manipulated by Sonya Biddle,” the Bourque team’s borough mayoral candidate. Applebaum was earlier involved in a madcap stunt in which he and Marvin Rotrand were busted by sleepless rival Jeremy Searle, who groggily nabbed the duo posting Tremblay campaign sign outside his window at 3 a.m. The Searle-y one feigned—or perhaps truly felt—offense. Applebaum is unrepentant. “We were just playing around with him. You always put up signs in front of the opponent’s house.”

• You’ll recall that just prior to the 2001 mergers, in a stupefyingly narcissistic tribute to themselves, several Côte-St-Luc councillors renamed most of the city’s parks in their own honour. We can’t find a candidate that will promise to erase the insane gesture. Rookie council wannabe Mike Cohen cites indifference. “I’ve gone door-to-door for the past seven weeks. I’d say three of the 1,500 people I’ve met have brought up the names-of-parks question.” Cohen adds that since many of the self-celebrated councillors are likely to return to city council, any resulting vote could result in a standoff as the councillors protect their not-so-hard-earned immortality.

• It’s not only Côte-St-Luc’s politicians who provide offbeat entertainment. Questions posed by borough residents in recent sessions have included one from a certain Dr. Juris Kalnarvarns, who complained about his neighbour hanging clothes on a clothlesline “at an absurd frequency.” Aubey Laufer showed up to report being mistreated by a store manager at Cavendish Mall, and Dino Mazone wanted to know if the borough was planning on welcoming Karla Homolka. Nonetheless, Côte-St-Luc remains one of the few boroughs that actually post residents’ questions on the Internet. Other municipalities, such as NDG-Côte-des-Neiges, offer borough council reports on paper only, and others, such as Verdun—rather alarmingly—don’t make any record of the questions citizens ask at borough council meetings.

• Turnout is everything—that’s the mantra of city elections. Bourque was once master of turnout, thanks to a PQ machine ferrying elderly East Enders en masse to the polls. He’s lost that machine since his ill-fated dalliance with the ADQ, but both sides want that golden-age ballot. As a rule of thumb, according to one veteran councillor, students rarely vote, those with a house and kids vote about 60 per cent of the time, and the most likely to vote is the war veteran, estimated at about 80 per cent likelihood of voting in city elections. Black turnout is lamentably small, which may explain the too-few candidates of colour, which include Tremblay-ite Brenda Paris, now trying to supplant Bourque’s cutesy-and-delicious Line Hamel in the St-Henri-Little-Burgundy/

Pointe St-Charles. Paris, a Verdun-born, Montreal-North-raised St-Henri resident, has toiled in a cornucopia of government-related jobs and is the niece of local acting royalty Victor Phillips. “The people are talking about jobs, housing and access to nourishment,” she tells Election Notebook.

• They must be handshake addicts. That’s the only explanation we can fathom for the multitude of independent candidates campaigning tirelessly with little chance of winning. But winning, for many independents, comes in the form of bagging 15 per cent of the vote. Quebec government rules dictate that candidates who reach that magic number are refunded for half of their campaign expenses. Those who get less than 15 per cent receive zero bucks to soothe their wounds.