It is important to talk about what is happening in Trois-Rivières. Very important.
The mayor has just retired temporarily from the municipal council to rest from a climate that he describes as unhealthy. Indeed, the accusations against the Trois-Rivières council are multiplying: inability to work as a team, allegation of lack of transparency, breaking of closed doors, favoritism in the allocation of the functions of elected officials, etc.
This kind of chaos happens at one time or another in almost every major city. Remember Longueuil in recent years, a dysfunctional board. Sherbrooke, same type of issues.
Similar to Gatineau. Saguenay, Rimouski, Saint-Jean, etc., many cities have experienced, each in turn, similar difficulties.
No, this is not part of a normal political cycle. Cities are faced with a profound problem of governance, a problem that will have to be solved one day.
The perpetual confrontation
It is sometimes said that politics is the “institutionalization of conflict”, a method of settling differences, of making choices, other than by violence. We are therefore talking about continuous confrontations, sometimes very respectful, sometimes less, but confrontations all the same. It is therefore always humanly difficult.
In the National Assembly, to debate and settle the debates, there is a government, oppositions and bodies where everyone plays their role. The government manages the state and must be accountable during question period, during debates in the Blue Room and in committees. The chosen ones therefore often clash, but at very specific places and times.
There is also a clear separation between the executive (the Council of Ministers) and the legislative (the National Assembly). Some govern, others evaluate their work. This is not the case at the municipal level where everything is more confused… and more difficult to live with.
In the cities, with the exception of Montreal and Quebec where municipal political parties have existed for a long time, all these functions are mixed. In a council like that of Trois-Rivières, where all the elected officials are theoretically independent, there is no clear separation between the government and the opposition: with each vote, the elected officials can support or denounce the mayor.
There is also no clear division between the legislature and the executive, with the council partly playing both roles. Elected officials sit on municipal committees whether or not they agree with the municipal orientations and whether or not they defend the program for which the mayor was elected.
To give some consistency to all this, apart from his power of conviction, the mayor has very few tools. Even if he is the only one to have a program supported throughout the city, he has the same vote as each of the other elected officials. It is not even he who appoints the elected officials to the various committees, it is the council.
So everyone is competing everywhere, all the time. It is easy to arrive at an “unhealthy” climate.
Previously, the system without a political party worked. The cities had a very limited role, it was possible to agree and “work as a team”. Today, political divisions are multiplying at the same rate as the role of cities is increasing: public transport, environment, citizen participation, taxation, economic and social development, land use planning, etc. Gone are the days when the only real debate was about the tax hike. Gone are also the days when the mayor managed his city alone, he now has too much to do and the other elected officials want and must participate.
This explains the chaos in cities where the mayor, for lack of a majority or a strong ascendancy on the council, cannot ensure a clear direction.
Other perverse effects of this flawed governance:
Everyone has access to all instances. So those who are part of the formal or informal opposition, systematic or occasional opposition, have access to privileged information. They want to make it public quickly, denounce scenarios they don’t like, alert partners, often even before the proponents of the project have determined what they want to submit to the board. Camera breaks are not uncommon. If an elected official is not invited to a meeting, he denounces favouritism, the civil servants no longer know who is the boss, the citizens do not understand what is happening, and so on. Exhausting.
The solution ? Do as at the other levels of government: separate the functions of each and only then seek to work collegially. The most effective tool to achieve this is to have well-established municipal political parties, as in Montreal and Quebec City: they structure exchanges, clarify governance and make everyone’s allegiances much more transparent.
In the municipal world, promising an end to chicanery is a classic. They will not disappear, neither will the debates, the very objective of politics is to manage them. But vague governance can make people sick, and that’s a problem that can be solved. It will have to be done one day.
Corrigendum
I made an important error in my last column entitled “De happiness et de PIB” which renders a significant part of my text inaccurate. To compare the 15 happiest countries, according to the World Happiness Report, those with the best Human Development Index (HDI) of the UN, with the richest, I took the total GDP of the countries and not the GDP per inhabitant… which I obviously should have done and what makes all the difference. We are no longer talking about the same countries! When we take the GDP per inhabitant, 10 of the 15 countries are the same in all three lists, while there was only one using total GDP. GDP remains an indicator that does not say everything, which is why its use is declining. But if it does not bring happiness, it is not as foreign to it as I was asserting. You see me sorry for this error.