How to get people talking about your part of the country for the better? According to the statements of Sébastien D’Astous, the mayor of Amos, you just have to imagine, to begin with, that his very personal notoriety is confused with the best interests of his municipality.
Mounted on this individualist illusion, the mayor set off at full gallops on the small paths of television. He informed the snow of Abitibi-Témiscamingue that he could only find glory for his people under the Philippine sun. So here is the mayor of Amos leaving for an island transformed into an operetta theater, according to the globalized recipe of a reality show called Survivor Quebec.
“I want to talk about my region. I want to get people talking about my city,” explained Sébastien D’Astous in an official video relayed, as if it went without saying, by his municipality. For two weeks or two months, depending on his performance on television, he will be replaced as mayor by a substitute. In the MRC of Abitibi, where the mayor occupies the seat of prefect, it will be the same thing. There too, he is replaced at short notice, while being offered pats on the back, no one apparently seeing in this any deep contradictions with the nature of the functions in question.
So here is the brave mayor diving head first into one of these shows voyeurs designed so that viewers open their eyes so wide that they end up blinding themselves to the nature of their own life in society.
“You know me in my role as mayor. In the show, you will get to know me much more intimately,” the mayor continues. Big deal ! But what is the point of a mayor who has gone to monkey around so far away, knowing that the destiny of his community does not depend in any way on an accumulation of pirouettes abroad, but on concerted efforts on the ground with his own people?
It would not be surprising if Mayor D’Astous doubted, in his soul and conscience, that in this whole circus something was wrong in terms of reason. Listen to him carefully. He tells anyone who will listen that he undertakes, upon his return, “to provide a certain amount of compensation as a donation for my community”. Who says compensation usually means that there has been a loss of something, right?
Mayor D’Astous thinks in any case that by going to play in the backyard of a televised imitation adventure, he will bring back the dividends of a newly created notoriety. He obviously confuses notoriety with credibility, of which he is supposed, as mayor, to be the worthy representative. However, one is not the equivalent of the other.
Notoriety readily gives hand to the popular. And the popular, when it thus takes the bit in its teeth, willingly slides to the neck of populism. He kisses her on the lips as you wish, without ever succeeding in creating credibility.
There are several ways to give notoriety to a municipality. Finding yourself on a remote island in the Philippines for a game show, with a tremendous expenditure of energy and resources, is not one of them. How could such an affair have appeared to elected officials as a way forward capable of lifting the City of Amos into the air? Who could have thought that the credibility of a city was prepared like instant pudding?
It is difficult to explain why the Minister of Municipal Affairs of Quebec does not take the opportunity to publicly remind everyone, to all mayors to begin with, that there is a basic rule within the State. Something old which ensures its maintenance: the duty of reserve. When it comes, in particular, to the function of mayor, this unwritten rule invites at least one not to engage in personal commitments which could undermine the credibility of the entities for which he is responsible.
Of the approximately one thousand one hundred municipalities in Quebec, practically half of the mayors are elected by acclamation, in a simulacrum of democratic play. Several appear thus attached for eternity to their small boat, like zebra mussels, without anything or anyone threatening to take them off. Municipal life deserves to be revived. And it deserves to be done otherwise than through shows.
Jacques Ferron, one of our greatest writers, once read that in Brazil, in São Paulo, voters preferred to vote for a big beast from the local zoo rather than for the candidates who presented themselves to them and to whom they did not like granted no credibility. No more stupid, Ferron wanted to make his people, too often speechless, understand the political comedy that was being played out under their noses. In the company of a few friends, he launched the Rhinoceros Party for this purpose. Perhaps today he would send a herd of rhinoceroses to Amos to better emphasize that reason is happily trampled underfoot there.
By Jacques Ferron a book has just been published that is both unexpected and prodigious. It concerns his correspondence with Jean Marcel, an improbable scholar from the working-class district of Saint-Henri. The country is always right, the first volume of this incredibly rich correspondence, is not for everyone. It’s as dense as possible. You have to love the twists and turns of erudition that burst forth like fireworks. A solid basic knowledge of the political and cultural history of Quebec is a prerequisite for this reading. The fact remains that it is undoubtedly the most astonishing correspondence ever published in Quebec. I weigh my words. And I would be very stupid myself not to point out this extraordinary paving stone to you.