Mayoral Debate Held at Concordia

Candidates Discuss How to Tackle Corruption and the City’s Financial Situation

NewsMichael Wrobel — Published October 29, 2013

The English-language “town hall meeting” was hosted by The Montreal Gazette and radio station CJAD 800 AM. The questions asked during the debate were based on submissions, and some were read by audience members.

Montrealers will cast their ballots to elect the city’s next mayor, city councillors and borough councillors on Nov. 3.  

Cleaning Up City Hall

Côté, the leader of Coalition Montréal, said he’d bring about “major reforms at city hall, a quiet revolution.” An economist and co-founder of SECOR, a management consulting firm, Côté touted his experience in the business sphere.

“Montreal needs help,” he said. “What happened at city hall should never have happened, and I joined the mayoralty race to ensure it will never happen again.”

Côté said that “the best defense against corruption is a well-managed organization” and that the city’s administration is currently poorly organized. He said that more checks and balances must be introduced and the concentration of power in the hands of a few city officials needs to be eliminated.

“We have to eliminate the bureaucratic silos at city hall, and there’s a lot of them,” he continued, adding that the city needs an ethics commissioner.

Coderre, the leader of Équipe Denis Coderre pour Montréal, said he would change “the culture of management” at city hall and put in place a zero-tolerance policy for corruption.

“I want to bring [in] an inspector-general who will be kind of a police of contracts who will be there, totally independent, to de-politicize the procurement process,” he said.

Joly, the leader of Le Vrai changement pour Montréal—Groupe Mélanie Joly, said, “The most important problem […] is that only certain people have access to information, and information is power.”

She said she would make sure that all of the data held by the city’s administration is made public.

“To do that, we [propose] a chief digital officer, a person who will be in charge of transferring all that information through the web, through social media, and that way, there won’t be only one inspector-general, like Mr. Coderre is saying, there will be 1.2 million inspectors-general in Montreal,” she said.

Bergeron, the leader of Projet Montréal, said that his party “was open and transparent before it became fashionable, and that will not change.”

He said the party has demonstrated 10 years of integrity since the party’s founding.

“I have come to know Denis Coderre, and I confess he’s not a bad guy,” Bergeron said.

“But Denis Coderre chose to surround himself with the very politicians who brought shame to Montreal, 25 in all, politicians who may not be corrupt, but who nonetheless didn’t hear anything, didn’t see anything [and] didn’t say anything,” he continued, referring to the fact that some of the candidates running with Coderre are former members of the now-defunct Union Montréal party.

Union Montréal has been the subject of allegations at the Charbonneau Commission, the public inquiry examining possible corruption in the awarding of public construction contracts.

“That’s a recipe for another four years of business as usual,” Bergeron said.

On Montreal’s Finances

The mayoral candidates also expressed differing opinions on how to tackle the city’s financial situation.

Côté said that “there has been no CEO in this shop for over five, six, seven, maybe 10 years, nobody really in charge of the purse strings, so all the members of the executive committee are pushing for their own pet projects.”

“We have to put discipline there, and then gradually there will be a budgetary margin freeing up,” he added.

Côté said money that is freed up could later go towards the Société de transport de Montréal, the city’s public transit corporation, or towards repairing Montreal’s streets.

Bergeron said the city’s overly complex operational budget requires “simplification.”

“We have too many high-ranking civil servants, not enough engineers,” Bergeron said, jokingly adding that he’d hire Côté to rethink the city’s administration. “When we [streamline the administration] with Mr. Côté, we can save more or less $100 million a year.”

Bergeron also said he’d discuss how to better fund the city’s transportation system with the provincial government.

Meanwhile, Joly called Montreal “a property tax junkie.”

“Seventy per cent of our revenues come from property tax,” said Joly. “When you compare it to other big cities, Toronto is 39 per cent and in the U.S., major cities [are] around 18 per cent. It’s time that Montreal gets a special status from Quebec [in terms of funding].”

She said it’s “clearly the only solution” and that her party is “the only one talking about it.”

Côté said asking for a special status for Montreal “will not work, you won’t get it.” He said that Joly’s suggestion that she could persuade the provincial government to give Montreal 0.5 per cent of the Quebec Sales Tax was “totally politically impossible.” The city has to be realistic and clean up its own administration, he added.

Coderre said the first step is to take a closer look at Montreal’s budget once elected, adding that he believes people are mad “rightfully enough” about tax increases.

“Yes, we need a fiscal pact eventually, we need to negotiate, but we need to clean our own house first,” he said.

Improving the Economy

Bergeron said a major economic concern is the migration of young, middle-class families towards the suburbs outside Montreal’s city limits.

“Year after year, in the last 12 years, we lost 22,000 people—that means between 6,000 and 8,000 young families,” he said. “The result of [this migration] is that $2.5 billion a year is invested by Montrealers outside of Montreal.”

Bergeron said that retaining families is a priority for Projet Montréal and that the public transit system needs to be improved to encourage families to remain in the city. He added that examples from around the world suggest that “attractive cities attract new companies, companies of the 21st century.”

Coderre said he’d bring the Old Port back under the city’s jurisdiction. Currently, the federal government manages and develops the site through the Old Port of Montréal Corporation, a subsidiary of the arms-length and self-financing Canada Lands Company.

“I’d like to create a cruise ship port [on the site] and a fair exposition with a duty-free area,” he said, noting how important the historic site is to tourism in Montreal.

Joly said she’d improve Montreal’s economy by eliminating corruption through greater transparency, improving traffic congestion on the city’s road network by investing in a bus-based rapid-transit system and reducing “red tape” by clarifying procedures for obtaining permits and authorizations from the municipal administration.

Côté said he’d make sure the city is well-managed in order to inspire greater investor confidence.

“Investors and private entrepreneurs will be the ones rebuilding our economy if we don’t disrupt [investors] with one of our biggest problems [in] Montreal—our recurring battle on nationalism and on language,” he said.

With that remark, Côté tried to put a controversy about comments by one of his candidates behind him.

Louise Harel, a former Parti Québécois minister now running for a city council seat with Coalition Montréal, said last week that the party would make one of the members of the city’s executive committee responsible for the promotion of the French language. She also expressed concern about the number of English-language signs in stores.

At the debate, Côté said Montreal should get involved in the language issue in this way so that the provincial government doesn’t have the sole responsibility for handling it, which it has done “clumsily” in the past.

“We have to manage our linguistic duality,” he said. “We have to live with it and manage it, and the mayor has an important leadership role in that regard. […] This city will be built on creativity and knowledge.”