(Sainte-Pétronille) In an unusual gesture, a municipality on Île d’Orléans renowned for its breathtaking landscapes and opulent houses has just sent a formal notice to around a hundred citizens, which represents around 10 % of its population.
Resignation of volunteers, stormy council meetings, bailiffs, formal notices… Nothing has been going well for several weeks in Sainte-Pétronille. The village located about twenty minutes by car from Quebec is the scene of a conflict which is degenerating.
“There is a kind of big cloud,” Senator Renée Dupuis, resident of the village, said on the microphone Monday evening during a municipal council meeting. “What advice are you going to do to de-poison the atmosphere? »
How was the air in the village “poisoned”? What is happening at the tip of Île d’Orléans, where a group of citizens and elected officials accuse each other of intimidation?
The arrival of a new general director in the municipality and a trivial conflict with library volunteers ignited the situation.
Every summer, volunteers from the municipal library used to organize a dinner at the municipality’s expense, wine included. It was a sort of small reward for services rendered.
But this year, the expense is raising eyebrows at city hall. The municipality announces to volunteers that they will not be reimbursed for alcohol drunk during dinner. She also tells them that from now on, they will no longer be able to buy books directly and get reimbursed. City Hall will take care of it.
“There are practices that are no longer adapted to the decade we are in,” explains in an interview the mayor of Sainte-Pétronille, Jean Côté, who says he wants to clean up several old practices.
Meetings take place between the mayor and volunteers. But they balked: the 14 volunteers resigned en masse.
“Harassment, intimidation and violence”
This resignation is the trigger. Citizens then became interested in the general director of Sainte-Pétronille, Nathalie Paquet, hired in May 2023. They filed a request for access to information from Val-des-Lacs, her last employer, and discovered several elements on his termination of employment.
It was then that 97 citizens sent a letter by bailiff to the elected officials of Sainte-Pétronille to inform them of their discovery. They are calling for an investigation and demanding that elected officials reconsider his hiring.
Believing that its director was being attacked and that confidential information was being shared, the municipality responded on December 20 with a formal notice to 97 of these citizens, whom it threatened to prosecute if they continued the “harassment, intimidation and violence “.
“Our client can only see these steps as retaliatory measures due to decisions relating to the management of the municipal library file,” writes the municipality’s lawyer.
The formal notices have the effect of a bomb in the small community of 1,055 inhabitants.
“It’s terrible what’s happening in the municipality right now. How do you want to promote a forum for discussion and exchange when 97 people have received formal notices from their municipal council not to investigate such and such a thing, not to say such and such a thing? », Launched into the microphone a former mayor of the municipality, Alain Turgeon, to the municipal council Monday evening. The former mayor said he was one of the citizens put on notice.
The municipal councils of last November and December were particularly stormy. The mayor did not digest being called a “dictator seed” by a citizen, in particular.
“A hundred people shouting, there is one who says something stupid like that, the others applaud, a citizen stands up in the room to say “what you are doing makes no sense” and he gets booed… It’s anarchy,” deplores Mayor Côté.
In an interview, the mayor argued that the formal notices were a sort of last resort to restore calm in the municipality and to protect their employees. Elected officials are shaken, he said.
“It’s an escalation made by this group, which set up people and transformed it into a public attack on an employee. But she has nothing to do with it because she carries out the wishes of the council, says the mayor. She has found herself the Turk’s head and we are going after her. I don’t know if these people know the difficulty of recruiting a CEO. If she resigned, what situation would the municipality find itself in? »
A muzzled newspaper?
The mayor of Sainte-Pétronille places this case in line with cases of harassment of elected officials that have been making headlines in Quebec for months. But several citizens to whom The Press spoke see the opposite: a municipality which hires a large law firm to muzzle its own population.
“The mayor, obviously, positions himself as a victim of intimidation. But the municipality refuses to see that there is a problem. So we can’t discuss, we can’t move forward. They don’t listen to what the citizens say,” says a citizen who was put on notice and asked to keep her identity secret.
During Monday evening’s council meeting, a journalist from the local newspaper Around the Island also suggested that the municipality had tried to cover up the affair.
“What do you say about the intimidation to which the newspaper was subjected? Around the island ? THE Newspaper also suffered intimidation from a lawyer who threatened the Newspaperto cut off funds if he publishes a certain article? », Launched journalist Normand Gagnon to the council.
“I have no comment on that,” retorted the mayor of Sainte-Pétronille.