This text is part of the special publication Public consultations
Since 1er January 2010, the right of initiative allows the population of Montreal to obtain a public consultation on mobilizing subjects that are the responsibility of the City or a borough. Since then, three consultations on issues affecting all Montrealers and led by the Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM) have come about in this way. They are among the most significant in the history of the Office.
“These very important consultations were born out of the desire of citizens to force a debate on something that is close to their hearts,” underlines the secretary general of the OCPM, Luc Doray. Three global themes were promoted by the office at the initiative of Montrealers: urban agriculture in 2011, reducing dependence on fossil fuels in 2015 and systemic racism and discrimination in 2018. “What characterized these three consultations, it’s diversity and spontaneity”, summarizes Luc Doray.
An inclusive right
To be admissible, requests for public consultation must collect a minimum of signatures in three months: 15,000 when the subject concerns the City (they can then be carried by the OCPM) and 5% of the population aged 15 and over ( up to a maximum of 5000) when it concerns a district. “All persons aged 15 or over who reside in the territory can be claimants, regardless of their status (from asylum seeker to Canadian citizen), and signatures can now be collected electronically. This right is therefore very inclusive,” emphasizes Luc Doray.
For Laurence Bherer, full professor at the University of Montreal and expert in public participation and local democracy, this right of initiative “creates a collective of citizens who will be attentive to the consultation and will even be able to continue to mobilize in the time “. The Mobilization 6600 Parc-nature MHM group, for example, was born from a right of initiative exercised in 2017 at the level of a borough to propose other options for industrial development in the Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district in Montreal.
Significant progress
“The right of initiative often requires the City to prepare a file. This made it possible to bring out information that we did not have before,” emphasizes Laurence Bherer. The consultation on systemic racism and discrimination, for example, forced the City to document its practices in this area.
This right has also made it possible to put certain subjects on the agenda. “When the consultation on urban agriculture was requested in 2011, we hardly talked about this subject. It had the effect of creating a momentum and to organize the actors together. And today, this theme is omnipresent”, observes the professor. This initiative, which had collected 29,000 signatures, had made it possible to discover an anthology of citizen interventions that were already taking place in Montreal, indicates Luc Doray. “There were community gardens, but also other interesting local initiatives. I remember, for example, a group of young citizens who proposed to elderly residents with a garden to harvest their fruits to give them a portion and distribute the other to food banks in order to avoid the waste,” he says.
For the Secretary General, these large consultations of citizens’ initiatives are very interesting, because they are carried out in association with the requesting citizens and generate varied and spontaneous participation. “During one of our consultation sessions on reducing dependence on fossil fuels, a group of grandmothers, called the “ Montreal Raging Grannies” came to sing their despair at seeing these energies take up so much space in our daily consumption. Children had also designed solutions,” recalls Luc Doray.
For Laurence Bherer, the use of the right of initiative has reached a certain maturity after 12 years of existence. He has sometimes gone beyond Montreal to bring files before the National Assembly (such as the controversial Cité de lalogistique project in the Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district, abandoned for a greener project in 2018).
“The right of initiative would benefit from being even better known to citizens, because it opens interesting windows in terms of discussions, mobilization and decisions,” she believes. Restrictions on the Publisac (public consultation on the distribution of circulars) and the appointment of a commissioner for the fight against racism and discrimination are among the decisions recently obtained thanks to this right.
A crucial consultation on a delicate subject
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