Sue Montgomery has been suspended as borough mayor of CDN-NDG till the election. If she can get re-elected it will be lifted.
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Kate
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Kate
Radio-Canada has an excellent piece Monday unmasking a woman who claims to be collecting money for the homeless, but has been known to put the funds instead toward an anti‑vaccination conspiracy movement. Top-notch investigative work by the three journos on the byline.
walkerp
Probably not related at all, but had a guy come to our door claiming to be collecting donations for a plaque honouring Pops Dans la Rue. His clipboard and stapled business cards looked awfully sketchy.
Randall Blackstone
Mireille Chery and her then-boyfriend, a white pony-tailed guy, hosted regular loft parties at an art gallery on Bleury just above Viger (east side) in the 1990s. They were the it couple, attractive, clever, likeable and friendly. The parties, I guess technically art exhibits, were top-notch.
Ephraim
Who has cash anymore? Ask to pay via Interac and see them run.
js
Randall Blackstone – you mean Stornaway Gallery? I attended several events there. I think her boyfriend’s name was Patrick something.
MarcG
Stornoway was at 1407 St-Alexander just north of St-Cath (perhaps it relocated sometime).
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Kate
Canada Post is experimenting with delivering parcels by electric trike in the Village and Point St-Charles.
Ephraim
Purolator already does this… and it’s the same corporation.
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Kate
Monday morning there was a new smog warning because of forest fires in Ontario and Manitoba, but as I post, the warning is no longer up.
MarcG
The sunlight has had that weird orange glow since yesterday evening.
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Kate
Little Burgundy, Sunday evening: a woman was injured by shards of glass when someone shot out the windshield of a parked car in which she was sitting.
walkerp 17:41 on 2021-07-26 Permalink
Wow! How powerful is the bureaucracy that they can basically fire an elected official?!
This has got to be a witch hunt. I have yet to see any actual substance of the bad things she did.
CharlesQ 18:21 on 2021-07-26 Permalink
@walkerp there’s a 71 page PDF that details the decision at https://www.cmq.gouv.qc.ca/fr/tribunal-administratif/ethique-et-deontologie-municipales/citations-et-decisions
walkerp 19:55 on 2021-07-26 Permalink
That is some painful reading. God, lawyers. From what I can gather, she is suspended for not taking action to create an environment free from harassment and that the actual harassment was done by the directrice de cabinet, but what was the actual harassment?!
ant6n 19:56 on 2021-07-26 Permalink
It’s funny that the CBC doesn’t actually say what she supposedly did, but ask the politicians except Montgomery day they are happy she’s finally gone and that it’s somehow good for the citizens somehow, when this happens just weeks before the election.
ant6n 20:09 on 2021-07-26 Permalink
*but all the politicians except Montgomery herself say
walkerp 20:15 on 2021-07-26 Permalink
So this civil servant was supposedly spoken to strongly by Harris and gets himself designated as a victim of psychological harassment by the city’s HR department and put on paid leave. What Montgomery got in trouble for was trying to suspend him without pay (for not showing up), which normally she would have the power to do. The punishment here seems more about a power struggle between the city and borough powers. I still can’t find what Harris actually did.
walkerp 20:20 on 2021-07-26 Permalink
She also gets in trouble for spazzing out on the city’s investigators when they meet and blindside her with the report that there is an atmosphere of harassment in her office. She shakes and trembles and calls the investigators incompetent and lazy. One gets the feeling of smug bureaucrats smiling thinly as she loses her cool.
walkerp 20:31 on 2021-07-26 Permalink
Well I’m not a lawyer and my french sucks, but this report feels like a lot of arguing over angels on the head of a pin and makes no mention that I could find about the actual substance of the conflict. It really feels like many established politicians and civil servants do not like her and wanted to make her go away. Marvin Rotrand is in there every chance he can get to vote against her.
I am still not convinced there is not more behind this. Though it could be as simple as she did not know how to play the game and got taken out by pros.
Kevin 22:07 on 2021-07-26 Permalink
It’s not a bureaucracy, it’s a Tribunal for cities and towns.
The articles from June, when Montgomery was found guilty, went into more detail. (ideally those articles would have been referenced today).
In a nutshell: Montgomery was found guilty of insulting employees, attempting to withhold pay, and other ethics violations.
Part of that was revealed when the comptroller general investigated the borough two years ago and issued a report saying that Montgomery’s chief of staff should be fired.
Montgomery objected to firing the chief of staff *without seeing the report*. A judge agreed that Montgomery should have access to the report– but the judge also said that Montgomery shouldn’t be trying to suspend the borough’s director, and shouldn’t have tried to limit contact between the director and other elected officials in the borough.
David775 10:31 on 2021-07-27 Permalink
This is so insane. It’s insane if you’re a close observer – she had an intransigent and obstructionist borough staff who played the situation like a fiddle and won. It’s insane if you’re a casual observer – she didn’t do any crime, so why can an.elected official be removed?
Justice for Sue Montgomery! I hope she wins and somehow manages to clean house there.
walkerp 10:40 on 2021-07-27 Permalink
Kevin, the tribunal seems to be upholding the bureaucracy and it seems inherently bureaucratic itself, focused entirely on form and excluding any actual political or municipal substance. What is the work that needed to get done that caused the conflict between Harris and the civil servant in the first place?
David644 11:43 on 2021-07-27 Permalink
Administrative law judges aren’t really judges in the sense we understand. I could be appointed one tomorrow, for instance. The judge in this case was . . . You guessed it, a former city hall bureaucrat!
It gets worse too. The linked article notes how this joker defended hammering her by pointing out that her attitude indicated a high likelihood of recidivism! Basically, once she had be judged guilty of these idiotic charges, her failure to show contrition at her so-called violations damned her. The fix was in, of course, but how openly absurd the whole charade is has to be underlined. She’s lucky there’s no award for emotional distress on her, but I guess they realized it was enough to sideline her, and that open revenge would probably make some of the coup participants a little queasy.
Hopefully it all comes out in discovery during the civil case. As I’ve said before, ideal for us in the peanut gallery is if she and Coderre are both reelected, so that and to play nice and kick PM while they’re down, he orders city hall to maximally cooperate with her team.
Montgomery does have an apology in her though: “I genuinely feel ashamed of about how the bureaucracy masterfully stitched me up.”
Tim S 11:44 on 2021-07-27 Permalink
I admit I haven’t read the whole document, but trying to deny pay to someone sounds pretty serious.
I’ve said this before, and will probably say it again: apart from her own hired chief of staff, no one is on Montgomery’s side. Not the people from the party she was elected with, not the people from the opposition parties, not the civil servants, not any of the various judges who’ve looked at the case. Maybe it’s not a vast conspiracy and she simply isn’t good at what she was elected to do?
Tim S 11:47 on 2021-07-27 Permalink
Having said that, I do think there should be a high bar for a court – any court – to remove someone who has been democratically elected. For all my dubiousness about Montgomery, I’m not sure if this merits it. On the other hand, a mayor can’t be removed by a vote of the other elected councillors, the way a prime minister can, so there needs to be some kind of check.
David74 12:13 on 2021-07-27 Permalink
I’m on a train, but in a nutshell, Montgomery and Annalisa Harris went hard at the borough bureaucrats who had been running the show for years and refused to carry out various directives. Two of these went ahead and filed harassment reports against Harris, and got some hand-picked kook to declare that they had been psychologically harassed. Based on this, city bureaucrats convinced Plante’s team to order Montgomery to 86 Harris, while refusing to allow Montgomery to review the harassment report. Montgomery refused to fire Harris without cause, and was booted from PM. The city also put restrictions on Harris. Harris sued the city alleging these restrictions constituted constructive termination, and Montgomery sued to get access to report – the city countersues to for misconduct. Montgomery and Harris prevail, but so what? Plante’s gang and the bureaucrats continue to isolate Harris and rigging up these ethics charges against Montgomery. Both Harris and Montgomery have filed suit against Plante.
The withholding pay allegation arose because one guy stopped coming to work, because he refused to work with Harris. He considered it abusive that she’d criticize him when he didn’t do his job
Montgomery has no support because she’s a PM person now without a party, the mayor and her crew have been captured/come to a governing arrangement with the bureaucracy, and nobody wants to cross bureaucrats or the mayor. Simple as that.
walkerp 12:26 on 2021-07-27 Permalink
That’s pretty much my reading of the history as well. Well summarized for being on the train!
That is why I am so curious about what the directives were they wanted to get done and why were the bureaucrats blocking?
David765 12:42 on 2021-07-27 Permalink
They stitched up Montgomery but good – no changes in bureaucrats’ power, completely captured PM, ousted an opponent with resultant chilling effect on future challenges by electeds to their power, and did it all within the procedures they invented and control, and anonymously. They managed to make Plante the face of the entire scheme. The only mistakes they made were in countersuing Montgomery (meant the city paid her legal bill instead of her), and underestimating Montgomery’s sense of justice.
Then again, if the defamation lawsuit is dismissed or the judge orders limited discovery for some reason I can’t fathom, or the whole process is slapped with a protective order, then I guess their victory will be complete.
It’s chilling.
walkerp 15:11 on 2021-07-27 Permalink
Now I think you’ve gone a bit far.
Jack 16:37 on 2021-07-27 Permalink
A real judge already looked at this case.https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/judge-sides-with-sue-montgomery-saying-city-crossed-the-line-of-whats-reasonable
The Municipal Tribunal judgement is Civil Servants log rolling for each other. I find it very sad and it erodes my confidence in PM. Does PM have what it takes to make fundamental change in how the city operates?Will they be able to make our city operate for its citizens or does it run for the municipal employees, that don’t even live in Montreal. Anybody know anything about Holness.
Joey 16:58 on 2021-07-27 Permalink
@Jack are you familiar with Piper Huggins? The groupthink among the PM leadership is nothing new.
https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/borough-councillor-piper-huggins-bolts-projet-montreal-1.1459495
su 17:13 on 2021-07-27 Permalink
I seem to recall there was great indignation on the part of one of the unelected bureaucrats when Montgomery had the gall to request a proper financial accounting of something or other.
H. John 02:09 on 2021-07-28 Permalink
I’ve had a really difficult time deciphering this story. I don’t seem to be alone.
Kate, Jack and walkerp have been paying attention, and, genuinely helping to clarify things, and help me to sort them out in my mind.
I was surprised when walkerp congratulated another poster for a comment written while “being on the train!”.
I’m a senior; and, I’m guessing “being on a train!” is something I should look up in the urban dictionary, or the product page of the SQDC.
Talking about city employees the poster wrote “[t]wo of these went ahead and filed harassment reports against Harris”.
The problem is that what makes this case so very difficult to sort out is that no employee complained.
Montgomery met with the City to complain about a city/borough employee. The City opened an investigation (or two) into the workplace atmosphere in the borough.
When Montgomery met to discuss their findings she was astounded to find that rather looking into the employee she had complained about, the City had decided Harris was the problem.
In his decision Superior Court Justice Synnott was clear. The City investigators had asked two employees if they would like to file complaints. Both employees declined.
The plot of this story could have been written by Monty Python.
Some of the “facts” that have to be clarified:
When is an employee not an employee? Is the employee an employee of the borough, the mayor of the borough, or the City of Montreal?
It’s important to distinguish.
It seems one of the employees was on loan from the City to the borough. Clarifying who the employer was, the City had said the employee’s pay was the responsibility of the borough; until the City reversed and decided they were wrong. So understanding who worked for who was murky from the start.
In January, the City put the employee in question on paid leave. They did not inform Montgomery.
Even more bizarrely when the employee’s paid leave ended, the City moved the employee to another job and didn’t inform Montgomery or her lawyer.
She only found out when the City told Judge Synnott in court.
Synnott’s comment was he couldn’t think of anything the City could have done to make the situation more difficult. His reference was throwing oil on a fire.
H. John 02:13 on 2021-07-28 Permalink
A real judge? A real politician?
I think most of us can understand there are different levels of responsibility.
Borough, municipal, provincial, federal. Choose your adjective, they are reall politicians.
Administrative, provincial, superior, federal, appeal, supreme are a number of adjectives used for judges and courts.
They are all real. Each have different defined responsibilities.
H. John 02:15 on 2021-07-28 Permalink
I’ve only read the first 30 pages of Me Roy’s decision so far. I will continue.
The man clearly has an impressive C.V..
B.A., M.A. (history); LL.B. (law degree) U de Sherbrooke; LLM. (Masters in law) from U de Montreal.
His masters thesis (2009) was:
ÉTHIQUE ET GOUVERNANCE LES RÈGLES QUI RÉGISSENT LA PRÉVENTION ET LA SANCTION DES CONFLITS D’INTERETS CHEZ LES ELUS MUNICIPAUX
As an administrative judge his decisions have to be much more detailed – in the evidence considered, and how he arrived at his decision.
He lost me at page 30.
I’ll continue tomorrow but I’m guessing Superior Court Justice Mark Phillips will rule before I’ve finished with Me Roy.
walkerp 07:52 on 2021-07-28 Permalink
Keep it coming, H. John. I am open to any and all interpretations at this point. My train comment was simply that I assumed it meant he was typing all that on his phone in a distracted, crowded situation rather than a laptop at home.
H. John 16:41 on 2021-07-29 Permalink
@walkerp I meant absolutely no disrespect towards you. I apologize. if my rant read that way.