A key figure in the Institut du Nouveau Monde (INM), in Montreal, its director general, Julie Caron-Malenfant, has agreed to leave her post to become president of the future Office de participation publique de Longueuil, a flagship election promise of the mayor. Catherine Fournier.
The announcement will be made Monday after a vote by the elected officials of the Longueuil municipal council during a special meeting, learned The duty.
Mme Caron-Malenfant, who has worked for 13 years at the INM, of which she has been general manager for 5 years, will first be appointed head of the City’s Public Participation Department. A transitional function that she will occupy from May 9 pending the official creation of the Office of Public Participation of Longueuil (OPPL). This is scheduled for mid-June, if the administration of Mayor Catherine Fournier succeeds in having her private bill to modify the Charter of the City of Longueuil adopted by the National Assembly before the end of the parliamentary session. .
“It would be presumptuous to say that it is cast in stone, but we have had discussions with all the parties in the National Assembly”, affirms to the To have to the Mayor of Longueuil, Catherine Fournier, who claims to have had “the guarantee” from Quebec that the vote on this bill will take place “by the end of the parliamentary session”. “It meets all my expectations. »
Mme Caron-Malenfant will then officially become president of this office, which will be the second of its kind to be created in Quebec, after the Office de consultation publique de Montréal. “I have been doing public consultation since the very beginning of my career. It’s my expertise. I have a lot of interest in public participation, particularly in the municipal sector,” explains the 46-year-old manager, who confirms that it was indeed this job offer that prompted her to announce her departure from the INM, an independent organization that leads citizen consultations on various issues, ranging from land use planning to waste management. “The challenge seemed really interesting to me. »
“We could not have hoped for better at the head of our public participation office,” said Catherine Fournier, visibly delighted to have convinced Ms.me Caron-Malenfant to seize this job offer.
An office to be built
This office, an independent body, will have the objective of carrying out consultations “on various sensitive or contentious subjects”, in order to then issue recommendations “to guide the City in its decision-making”, indicates a press release obtained under embargo. The first two files that the OPPL will deal with in the coming months are the development of the Saint-Hubert airport and the thorny file of the supervision of outdoor fires in the woods on the territory of Longueuil.
Mme However, Caron-Malenfant will first have to draw up a strategic plan to more clearly define the structure of this future office. She will also have to hire people to train her team. The OPPL will also have a budget of $750,000 this year, indicated Mayor Catherine Fournier, who made the creation of this organization her first commitment in the municipal campaign that led her to head Longueuil on November 7th.
“Establishing as a city a model of public participation, in my opinion, is essential to rebuild the confidence of citizens in our municipal institutions,” she notes in an interview.
Julie Caron-Malenfant does not believe that the fact that she remains in Montreal will affect her ability to serve the population of Longueuil, where she intends to go several times to meet with citizens and various organizations in the coming weeks. “I don’t live in Longueuil, but that said, it may give me an emotional distance from its issues,” she comments in an interview. “It may be an asset rather than a handicap. »