The controversial remarks that Luis Miranda, mayor of the borough of Anjou, made on Tuesday during a borough council meeting to a 15-year-old young man, revealed the importance of the webcasts of such sessions, according to several Internet users. Anjou is also the last Montreal borough to have submitted to this practice, at the start of the pandemic.
The council meetings of all the boroughs of the metropolis, as well as almost all the big cities of the province, have been, for several years, webcast live, or filmed for community television or social networks.
It is thanks to this practice that the controversial interaction between Luis Miranda and 15-year-old Hocine Ouendi spread so quickly on social media.
Meeker Guerrier, journalist and host of the Le Devoir podcast, Pick up the onenotably shared on Twitter a video extract of this exchange, taken from the recording of the last meeting of the borough council of Anjou, which has been viewed nearly 300,000 times.
Like every Anjou borough council meeting since 2020, last Tuesday’s meeting is also available in its entirety on the borough’s YouTube channel.
The excerpt published by Meeker Guerrier, which aroused strong reactions on social networks, also generated many comments from Internet users grateful that such recordings are available online.
The role of the pandemic
City of Montreal city council meetings have been webcast since 2010. However, it was not until May 2020 that the borough of Anjou began posting recordings of its borough council meetings on its YouTube channel. .
Since 2010, the practice has taken hold in many municipal administrations. Thus, in 2017, an article in the newspaper Subway demonstrated that as of 2018, Anjou became the only borough in the metropolis not to webcast its borough council meetings.
According to Danielle Pilette, professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) and specialist in municipal administration, the pandemic has generated “a huge leap forward in the use of technologies” to “democratize” municipal administrations, such as this was the case in Anjou.
In March 2020, while all of Quebec was confined, the newspaper Subway reported that Anjou was holding its monthly borough council meeting behind closed doors, “without any form of citizen participation”. It therefore took two more months before the borough gave in to pressure and broadcast its council meetings online.
“The establishment of a virtual question period for citizens, like the one that was set up for the municipal council of the City of Montreal, is not mandatory and the boroughs have the freedom to make their own choice” , then commented Annik de Repentigny, communications officer for the City of Montreal.
In previous years, Luis Miranda had said, still according to Métro Média, that the webcast of borough council meetings was not a priority, while the opposition parties were in favor of this measure.
The mayor could not be reached by The duty at the end of the week to confirm these assertions, nor to comment on his remarks about Hocine Ouendi.
Towards greater transparency
Since the municipal general election of November 7, 2021 and the entry into force of Bill 49 led by the Minister of Municipal Affairs of Quebec, Andrée Laforest, the municipalities of the province must “either allow the public to record the meetings of the board, or broadcast free of charge on their website the recording of sound and images of the board meetings”.
A report published by the City of Montreal in 2010, at the end of the first pilot project for the webcasting of city council meetings, even reported that the experiment was imposed in a spirit of “greater transparency and with the aim of enable citizens to get closer to their democratic institutions”.
Ms. Pilette recalls, however, that simply live webcasting of municipal councils is not enough to promote access to information and to democratic life for citizens.
According to her, citizens are even more concerned “when community television channels broadcast council meetings live”, where citizens’ questions are withheld in advance, and when “reports made by citizens” can in light of the activities of the municipal councils.