The mayor of Laval is uncomfortable with the purchase of an electric car for nearly $100,000 and he met yesterday with his police chief to set the record straight.
• Read also: Laval police purchased a dozen high-priced electric vehicles, including a luxury model costing nearly $100,000
“This morning, I had a good conversation with the police chief so that this doesn’t happen again,” Stéphane Boyer said yesterday in a telephone interview.
The mayor reacted for the first time to a report from our Bureau of Investigation published last week, which showed that the Laval City Police Service (SPL) had spent more than $1.5 million to buy 13 cars electric and 48 charging stations.
“It’s not an image we want to give, I’m not a spendthrift by nature,” assured the mayor.
Pierre Brochet, director of the Laval Police Department.
Photo Pierre-Paul Poulin
The director of the SPL, Pierre Brochet, drove, for four months, the most expensive model purchased by the City, a Ford Mustang Mach-E GT which cost taxpayers $94,000.
Meanwhile, for months, Laval has been asking the Legault government for more money, particularly for police operations.
Image caption: Production of the Ford Mustang Mach-E will increase substantially in the second half of 2023, as Mexico’s Cuautitlán plant has undergone renovations to support increased capacity. Delivery times will be shortened, but to what extent remains to be seen. Photo credit: Ford
photo provided by Ford
Not just for executives
For the mayor, it is not so much the purchase price that poses a problem, but rather the fact that it was Mr. Brochet who benefited from the luxurious vehicle.
“If someone had told me that [cette voiture] was for the police director, things would not have happened like that,” said Mayor Boyer.
Twelve other vehicles at $78,000 each were also acquired, and have still not been put into circulation. According to our information, they were to be used for executives, but Stéphane Boyer assures that this orientation will be reviewed.
The Laval police have ordered more than a dozen Mustang Mach-E electric vehicles for members of management. Photo taken at the headquarters of the Laval Police Department, in the Chomedey district, in Laval, on Friday, December 22, 2023. MAXIME DELAND/AGENCE QMI
Photo from Archives, AGENCE QMI
“These cars must be for the entire service, period,” he insisted.
The mayor recalled that the expensive vehicles, which will not be used to respond to emergency calls, were acquired as part of a broader electrification project of his administration.
He said they were expensive because there weren’t many electric cars available in the months after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Could the City have waited a bit for prices to drop? The mayor did not want to answer this question directly.
Lack of transparency
Yesterday, the opposition party Action Laval denounced that the mayor had not answered questions from the media about electric cars for almost a week.
“Its lack of transparency and accountability raises many questions,” said the party’s interim leader, Achille Cifelli, in a statement.
Mr. Cifelli announced that he would ask the City’s Auditor General to investigate these purchases, a proposal with which Mayor Boyer said he was “completely in agreement.”