Towns in Quebec that have elected six councillors have received permission to reduce council size to four in the next election because so few people want to run for office. The lack of interest is blamed on low salaries, job challenges, little enthusiasm for community involvement – and the online abuse they have to cope with.
Updates from September, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
La Presse says public transit use is up to 90% of pre‑pandemic numbers in the city.
DeWolf
Pretty impressive considering that service is significantly worse than it was in 2019.
Now’s the time to start ramping up frequencies… if only we had a provincial government that wasn’t hopelessly anti-transit.
steph
impressive considering the amount of employees that have transitioned to hybrid or WFH.
Jonathan
This unfortunately doesn’t tell us much. I would love to know what the capacity/use is… In terms of what the capacity is of our current offer, what is the percentage that is being used. Why do we care what the pre-pandemic numbers are if we live in a completely different context.
Orr
Bring back the ten-minute frequency 80!
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Kate
People from the Maghrebi community gathered in St‑Léonard Saturday to express distress about gangs recruiting their kids and to demand a formal investigation into the situation.
Meanwhile, people with family and friends in Lebanon held a demonstration downtown to express their worries about their home country.
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Kate
La Presse’s Isabelle Hachey recounts the history of the developer and landlord who has singlehandedly closed down La Tulipe.
But in the department of balance, La Presse also found residents unhappy about the Plateau’s recent adjustment in its noise bylaw.
GC
Sounds like a real asshole, but the best part is that he’s violated the noise bylaws himself. You couldn’t make this up.
DeWolf
Not only that he’s violated noise bylaws, but he’s a classic scumbag landlord who has engaged in a lot of illegal behaviour.
Blork
This bit is priceless:
“Joint au téléphone, Pierre-Yves Beaudoin a refusé de me donner sa version des faits, sous prétexte que je préparais une chronique « sensationnaliste » sans lui permettre de me donner sa version des faits…”
jeather 09:10 on 2024-09-30 Permalink
I had no idea that there was a minimum number of municipal councillors as decided by the provincial government.
PatrickC 09:22 on 2024-09-30 Permalink
Is there a reason for having an even number (whatever it is)? Isn’t it more usual to have an odd number on boards of various kinds to make majority votes easier?
Nicholas 09:50 on 2024-09-30 Permalink
PatrickC, the even number of councillors doesn’t count the mayor, who makes it odd.
jeather, you sort of need a minimum of three in any legislative body, as having one is not really a democracy and having two is a recipe for gridlock. Since at least 1987 the formula for the minimum and maximum number of councillors, not counting the separately elected mayor, is found at section 9 of the law. It varies from 6 to 90, not counting Montreal which has its own law.
Overall this seems like a good move, but honestly some of these municipalities are too small to do what is now expected of a municipality, with all the paperwork. More and more, things will be uploaded to regional county municipalities.
jeather 10:21 on 2024-09-30 Permalink
I’m not saying that it doesn’t make sense to have at least 3, just that I had no idea this was provincial law. (Is this true in other provinces, with possibly different numbers?)
Yeah small municipalities will need to band together somehow though I see the drama coming from far away.
Nicholas 14:11 on 2024-09-30 Permalink
Sorry if I was unclear, I understood what you meant. But it is common to have minimums (or maximums) set by the province. In BC and MB it’s 5 to 11, while in AB it’s set based on the municipal type. ON it’s minimum of 5 with no maximum. Provinces love controlling their municipalities.
Fun fact: municipal council districts in Quebec can vary by 15% from the average population quota per district, but the MNAs that set this variance set it at 25% for themselves, with further deviation for exceptional circumstances. But even in the general case, a riding can be 67% larger than another, and difference can expand over a decade of population shift.
jeather 15:32 on 2024-09-30 Permalink
Yes the MNA variance is insane, give physically larger ridings more money for travel/offices/staff rather than make them artificially physically smaller. You can’t do anything about the decade of population shift, but you could limit the beginning range much more. It’s bothered me for ages.
The range in federal ridings is . . . also not ideal, though I believe Quebec gets around the actual average number (as it gets more from one of those complicated formula things), and Atlantic Canada (and, of course, the territories) have smaller population per MP, while Ontario/Alberta/BC have higher. But I don’t follow those numbers closely.
Nicholas 12:47 on 2024-10-01 Permalink
I like the idea to give more money for staff/travel. And you can look at ridings that are growing and make them, on the margins, slightly smaller than average, and vice versa. Instead, the National Assembly just postponed the redistribution by another few years, and I guess no one will sue and we’ll be stuck here. And though the eight least populous ridings are rural ones far out there, the next ones are urban, like Viau, PAT, HM, downtown east, Anjou and Gouin. The ones with too many people are mostly the Couronne suburbs.
Federal is a mess because of historical reasons and constitutional guarantees that keep changing for political reasons, but even within provinces it’s a mess: when the districts were drawn in 2011, Kenora had less than half the population and voters of the largest ridings, and there were huge differences in normal ridings in NB, QC, etc. It consistently surprises Americans when I tell them One Person, One Vote isn’t a thing in Canada, and that Americans consider the system Canada has today as a key tool of Jim Crow when they used it.
jeather 16:19 on 2024-10-01 Permalink
I am not a fan of our system by any means but it’s still better than the electoral college and different voting rules for federal elections by state.