Internal tensions shake Projet Montréal
Radio-Canada has a sharp piece Thursday on internal tensions in Projet Montréal. It’s a sprawling mess, but the key problem seems to be that city hall is in disagreement with many boroughs over issues, wanting to impose uniform policies in order to maintain electability.
Just a thought: could the underlying problem be that the borough system is fundamentally flawed?
Also Thursday, a report on efforts to return a nominal borough structure to Ville-Marie, which lost its mayor and fully elected council after Gérald Tremblay had a spat with Benoît Labonté in 2007. As things stand, the city mayor is also ex officio mayor of Ville-Marie, whose council is also partly directly appointed by the mayor. That’s a lot of folks who don’t get as much democratic participation as other residents of the city.
walkerp 09:51 on 2020-10-29 Permalink
Interesting article. I appreciate the effort by the journalists. I wouldn’t say it is conclusive. Are we seeing a “when you gaze into the abyss/power corrupts” situation or just the normal growing pains as a grassroots party “matures” in power? My feeling is that it is more the latter, but some suggestions that Plante can be “hard” suggest that she may have leaned towards a bit of the former, which is worrisome. Also, the inner circle is not a good sign and I wonder how much influence (and which players) contributed to her incoherent position on Sue Montgomery.
A side note as well, is that while quite progressive, the article does make you remember that still most of Projet Montreal is educated white men over 50. It sounds like they are being fairly aggressive about changing that and I welcome that. It will cause some anger and backlash as it has everywhere else.
DeWolf 10:51 on 2020-10-29 Permalink
I don’t think the borough system is fundamentally flawed. It’s a bulwalk against the kind of centralized power wielded by Jean Drapeau because, in principle, boroughs allow for fine-grained local governance that addresses citizens’ needs more flexibly and more directly. The problem in Montreal is that City Hall still wields a lot of power so we end up with an awkward kind of Frankenstein’s monster in which the boroughs have a lot of power but City Hall also has a lot of power, and there’s a lot of overlap and waste and tension.
If we had a true City Hall-oriented system like Toronto, we’d likely have less conflict and waste within the civil service, but we’d end up with the problem of suburban areas holding disproportionate influence over central areas. If somebody wants to do traffic calming and bike paths and wider sidewalks in Parkdale, for instance, some councillors from Scarborough and North York will block it on principle. Imagine if Francesco Miele and Lionel Perez were able to block the Luc Ferrandez from all of his traffic calming and greening measures – the ones that have proven effective at reducing traffic and which got him re-elected over and over again.
The other alternative is London, on which our borough system is based, but the difference there is that the Greater London Authority only handles big-picture policy issues and all of the day-to-day governance, like social services, libraries, social housing, schools, parking enforcement, etc. are all handled by each individual borough – and they’re the ones that collect taxes, too. The city’s overall policies guide what each borough does, but the details of how that policy is implemented is up to them. It’s radically decentralized compared to what we have here.
DeWolf 11:01 on 2020-10-29 Permalink
Actually, I should say that our borough system is based on French arrondissements, which as far as I can tell have a similarly awkward relationship with the city government. But I don’t follow Paris politics enough to know the details of how it plays out.
Joey 14:20 on 2020-10-29 Permalink
Haven’t read it yet, but didn’t PM and Plante specifically make decentralizaiton a priority during the campaign?
nau 14:45 on 2020-10-29 Permalink
“most of Projet Montreal is educated white men over 50”
If that’s in reference to their elected representatives, it’s false. PM has 51 elected representatives: 26 are female, 25 are male. Perhaps they photograph young, but people over 50 don’t obviously dominate, though there’s no lack. They are overwhelmingly white, that’s for sure, and, I hope this doesn’t shock anyone, people with “French” first and last names are, shall we say, well represented. How educated they are isn’t readily available.
Chris 20:56 on 2020-10-29 Permalink
>still most of Projet Montreal is educated white men over 50
Trashing old white men is fashionable, I understand; but “educated”? Would you rather uneducated representatives/administrators?!
Michael Black 21:11 on 2020-10-29 Permalink
I think that line is about defining a monolithic group.
Going to university is still a new thing in terms of it being universal. And it still falls off if you’re talking diversity.
Yes, leadership should include some level of capability, but it doesn’t have to be defined as “gone to university”. And for all the people “left out” from making decisions, decision making often leaves them out too. How would decision making change if elected officials included the homeless, and people who never went to university, and everyone else who doesn’t fit that line?
Besides, “educated” comes to mean going to university, but not going to.university doesn’t mean “uneducated”.
Tim S. 22:07 on 2020-10-29 Permalink
A couple of thoughts about this article:
1) They should be very careful about getting rid of existing councillors; local councillors have their teams of volunteers and donors and are known in the community, and those allegiances aren’t easily transferred, even to someone of the same party. On election day, local candidates and volunteers will move more votes than a central party organization, I’m sure.
2) Quite simply, the majority of people willing to run for office, or get involved in politics at any level, are white males (I say this having made a few tries to recruit people into political orgs). Trying to change this is a worthy goal, but it comes with trade-offs. Prioritizing the recruitment of an individual because they tick certain boxes means sacrificing other aspects, like ideological agreement and personal compatibility. I’m pretty sure this is how Project got into trouble with Montgomery et al. Recruitment will be a little easier because they’re the incumbent party, but they’re really handicapping themselves for something with limited electoral resonance, especially among people who aren’t already their supporters.
3) I wish people who run political coms would stop spending so much time stressing over the opinions of traditional journalists/columnists. I thought Trump 2016 would have taught us once and for all that journalists, no matter how active on Twitter or how vehement the headlines, are not the opinion movers they may have once been. Let the candidates/councillors develop a personality and see what happens.
jeather 11:08 on 2020-10-30 Permalink
There are real and obvious reasons that white men are by far the most willing to run for office, and changing some of those reasons would probably help the ratio a lot.