Election Notebook

Plateau politics and other odds, sods and the
mob in the last installment before voting day

• Election Notebook found itself at the Plateau borough mayor candidates’ debate/presentation last Thursday. The venue was the National Theatre School on St-Denis and Laurier, and the audience primarily eager young cappuccino-sipping students.

On deck were Vision Montreal’s Guillaume Vaillancourt, a former v-p of the Commission scolaire de Montréal’s executive committee and Projet Montréal member; Union Montreal’s Michel Labrecque, a longtime cycling activist and current boss of the STM; and Projet Montréal’s Luc Ferrandez, a management consultant with a 15-year history of urban environment activism. Vaillancourt was self-deprecating and witty, Labrecque goofy and amiable, Ferrandez passionate and stormy. Line of the day: “When I leave my house with my kids, it’s not junkies, gang members or squeegees I’m afraid of; it’s cars,” said Vaillancourt. Best power point presentation, however, went to Ferrandez, who got the kids’ attention with drawings made by what appeared to be first-graders, all deers and rabbits and rivers, coloured outside the lines. Labrecque, meanwhile, focused on the current administration’s accomplishments, such as extending bike paths and introducing the Bixi. All three agreed that something had to be done about the number of cars clogging the Plateau’s streets, 85 per cent of which are driving through the borough without stopping in it.

All in all, there are worse ways to spend a dreary, rainy Thursday morning. But to get the pulse racing again, EN decided to stop by the anti-Bush demo on the way to work and watched the shoes fly.

• The weird thing about the debate was the similarity of the candidates’ priorities. They were all concerned about traffic; they were all concerned about social housing; they were all for improved public transit. So why are they at loggerheads? In an interview with EN, Ferrandez says he agrees with Vaillancourt’s statement about drivers. “The most dangerous person out there is a woman driving her kids to daycare in a 4X4. She’s the new gangster.” This wasn’t intended as a slight to women drivers—he spoke from experience about having almost been run over by a frantic mother trying to get her kids to daycare on time. He then slammed Labrecque for being overly timid when it came to limiting cars, accusing him of just wanting to slow down the pace of new car growth—kind of like how Conservatives want to focus on emission intensity reduction when it comes to fighting climate change.

• This election marked Marc-Boris St-Maurice’s first foray into municipal politics, and the veteran pot activist says it was a positive, eye-opening experience, even if he hasn’t “started measuring the drapes for an office at city hall.” Stepping out of his familiar anti-weed-prohibition stomping grounds and running as an independent for city councillor in the Plateau’s Jeanne-Mance district, St-Maurice was pleased to discover his call for public urinals become one of the most popular of the campaign. “It got a lot of media, and I personally was very happy to be able to talk about something non-pot related,” he says. He calls the idea a very media-friendly one, one guaranteeing coverage. “It appeals to the five-year-old in all of us, the pee-pee jokes,” he says. “It made a splash. It became a number one priority for me.”

Yuk yuk. St-Maurice also says his bright yellow campaign signs were ordered well before he was dubbed the “Whiz Kid” by his Facebook friends.

But his first dabble in local politics has made him realize that “it’s very hard to combat voter apathy…. The scandals have made people notice there’s an election on, but the danger is that it contributes to greater voter cynicism.”

• Remember the mayor’s Big Fat Greek Gaffe, aka trying to rename Parc Avenue after Robert Bourassa in 2006? He earned the lasting enmity of local merchants, in particular Chris Karidogiannis and Jimmy Zoubris. Having mulled the idea of forming a political party of their own, they have decided, for the record, to publicly endorse Projet Montréal.

Sleaze and the city

• Okay, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the whole mafia-runs-Montreal thing. Here’s a brief recap of the past week and change’s events: Benoît Labonté, erstwhile Union Montreal’s man to run the Ville-Marie borough, later head of opposition Vision Montreal then number two guy after Louise Harel parachuted in, is canned on Sunday, Oct. 18 after it’s revealed that he accepted $200,000 in cash from reputation-challenged developer Tony Accurso in order to finance his leadership campaign. Harel tries to take credit for firing him quickly, rather than dithering for months like the mayor did when his number two guy was found to have vacationed on Accurso’s yacht earlier this year. So no party has a monopoly on sleaze.

Labonté, no doubt feeling wronged, tells Rad-Can last Thursday that the whole city is mobbed up—and that he initially lied about the Accurso allegations for his and his party’s own wellbeing. Now free of obligations to protect what he calls a rotten system, he blows the whistle on the whole kit and caboodle: all the parties, at all levels, use shady financing, and a “Mafia-like system” runs the city, complete with kickbacks to political parties, politicians and bureaucrats. It’s a blatant, belated and self-serving accusation, but certainly plausible enough. Tremblay and Harel go into full deny mode (though Tremblay soon admits to Le Devoir that he’d first heard rumours about cash-filled envelopes and construction cartels in 2002). Former Bourque-era executive committee president Jean Fortier says the mob’s been paying off city officials for years, if not decades. He says fear and disbelief prevented any concerted action at the city and provincial level.

Our metropolis’s mucky politics becomes such an embarrassment that this week Premier Jean Charest declares hammer time: A police investigation dubbed Opération Marteau will look into the crooked construction industry and will be led by the SQ and the Mounties. But without any members of Montreal’s PD. That, suggests the Gazette’s Henry Aubin, may have something to do with Montreal police chief Yvan Delorme’s gleeful e-mail to his troops three weeks ago that the mayor’s party, if re-elected, wouldn’t cut any police jobs, and the appearance of endorsing one candidate over another.

Public pressure to launch a full-scale inquiry into the construction industry continues to grow, with the Quebec Order of Engineers and the PQ joining the fray this week.

Which is all well and good. Just don’t expect much to come of it. Corruption has a long and profitable history in local politics, and if the Tremblay administration has its fair share of nasty characters and questionable deals, it’s hardly the first, or the most egregious, abuser of the public trough. The construction industry’s mob connections have been winked at and ignored as business as usual for decades. To expect things to change dramatically is wishful thinking.

• Tony Accurso, meanwhile, announced that he’ll be suing Radio-Canada and journalist Alain Gravel over a Sept. 24 investigative report that made several allegations of corruption and palling around with politicians. He wants $2.5-million.

• Who is the scandal hurting most? Tremblay probably, but the shine is off Harel, and her new broom claims are now a joke. Projet Montréal, having never been in power and thus never having had access to kickbacks, still looks clean, which will probably help them. But since Labonté’s firing, they’ve almost disappeared off the media map, which could hurt.

And finally…

• A word on the also-rans. On voting day, you’ll find six names on the ballot. Aside from Tremblay, Harel and Bergeron, you’ll also find Louise O’Sullivan, of the Montreal Ville-Marie party, Michel Bédard, of the Fierté Montréal Party, and someone named Michel Prairie, independent. Of the three, O’Sullivan’s name is the most recognizable. She was a former executive committee member who split from Tremblay in December 2004 over governance issues and has been trying to take down the mayor since. Having run as a federal Conservative in Westmount in 2006, she’s a downtown businesswoman with experience working with downtown problems and is pro-investment. Her party is fielding 34 candidates out of a possible 103.

Michel Bédard is a political gadfly who’s been running for mayor since 1987. According to a 1998 Mirror story, he is a former tour guide who has some not terrible ideas about beautifying Montreal. His favourite vegetable is broccoli, and the animal he identifies most with is the African Elephant. He was last in election-related news in 2005, when he was forcibly ejected from a Tremblay-Bourque debate in the West Island to which he hadn’t been invited. There is very little other information about him, other than he sends out a lot of strange, rambling e-mails to media outlets. Despite his party’s politically loaded name, there isn’t anything especially gay about him or it.

According to Google and Wikipedia, Michel Prairie is a communist.

Happy voting!