Twenty years ago, referendums on demergers allowed 31 Quebec municipalities to regain their autonomy, after a brief marriage that lasted only three years. In Montreal, Longueuil and Quebec, divorces have plunged the cities into sometimes acrimonious quarrels. Two decades later, the dust has settled, but a kind of bitterness remains among demergers and defenders of big cities.
Even if Quebec was one of the places where the defusionist movement was most mobilized and loud 20 years ago, few traces remain today of this fight now confined to the courts.
You have to reread the press review of the time to remember how tense it was. “The defusionists vent their rage”, headline The sunthe day after the referendum, June 21.
Only the towns of Saint-Augustin-de-Desmaures and L’Ancienne-Lorette had voted for demerger, while the movement was counting on at least victories in Sainte-Foy and Sillery.
In his text, the journalist Alain Bouchard (now deceased) recounts how certain defusionist leaders attacked journalists like him in view of the results.
“After furiously summoning the journalist from Sun to leave the premises of this team, in the basement of the Sainte-Ursule church, Bergevin [Jean-Marc, président du comité défusionniste de Sainte-Foy] called the police to remove him. One of his deputies, for his part, asked the journalist to Sun to “shut his mouth and shout his camp”, by threatening to take him out himself, if he did not deign to comply. »
The referendums sounded the death knell for a political battle lasting four long years. In November 2000, 5,000 people demonstrated in front of parliament to urge the Bouchard government not to move forward with the mergers. Wearing a crown bearing the coat of arms of Sainte-Foy, Mayor Andrée P. Boucher loudly launched a “Long live free municipalities!” “.
However, the “Yes” vote for demerger only received 28% of the votes during the referendum, while it was necessary to pass the 35% threshold to win. The participation rate necessary for a victory (50%) had also not been reached.
In Sillery, where the mobilization was very strong, the results were tighter. The “Yes” vote had collected 33.5%.
Nostalgia in Sillery
But twenty years later, the mayor at the time, Paul Shoiry, believes that the referendums played their role. “The population had the opportunity to regain a certain autonomy in a new context. »
Since then, people have moved on, he observes. “The people of Saint-Augustin and L’Ancienne-Lorette are happy and, elsewhere, people have ended up accepting. »
Mr. Shoiry himself has turned the page in his career as an elected official. From 2001 until 2017, he served as a municipal councilor for the Sillery district in the newly amalgamated city.
He often wondered what his professional life would have been like if Sillery had demerged. “I spent roughly the same number of years in Sillery as I did as a councilor in the City of Quebec,” he notes. “Yes, it would have been very different. »
“People still talk to me about it,” he said, adding that some residents are “nostalgic” for the old days because “elected officials are closer to their citizens” in small towns.
Paul Shoiry is one of the rare mayors from the defusionist camp of Quebec to still be alive. Ralph Mercier (Charlesbourg), Jacques Langlois (Beauport), Émile Loranger (L’Ancienne-Lorette) and Andrée P. Boucher (Sainte-Foy) are all deceased.
The unexpected role of Andrée P. Boucher
According to Régis Labeaume, Quebec owes a lot to Jean-Paul L’Allier for the success of the mergers. But it was perhaps Andrée P. Boucher who, despite herself, helped legitimize the new structure by becoming mayor of the new city in 2005.
“By her mere presence at town hall, she crystallized and made this fusion a reality in everyone’s minds,” he notes.
“It is fortunate that Jean-Paul [L’Allier] did it, but that the mayor was also elected. Because if it had been someone from the old City of Quebec, they would have continued to chew rags […]. »
Thus, when Mr. Labeaume took power in 2007, other subjects unleashed passions. And he himself presents himself more as “a guy from the suburbs than from the old city”. “As I was in the line of Mme Boucher, that solved the problem,”
The memory of the demergers certainly reappears at the time of the budget when we measure what remains to be paid from the deficit of the former City of Quebec or in the debates on local services and the boroughs.
But it is above all in the courts that the demergers case will remain alive. Considering itself the victim of an injustice in the calculation of the share, L’Ancienne-Lorette took the City of Quebec to court in 2011.
In 2018, the Superior Court ordered Quebec to pay $38 million to L’Ancienne-Lorette as well as Saint-Augustin-de-Desmaures. A decision confirmed by the Court of Appeal in 2021. Everything is not settled otherwise because the judgment only covered the years 2008 to 2015.