Fle photo: Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay on September 22, 2009.
Photograph by: Pierre Obendrauf, THE GAZETTE
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Enormous power is centralized in the office of the mayor of Montreal. So there's good reason to lament the cheerless choice Montrealers will make next Sunday when we elect a mayor to guide the city, the Island, and to a degree the whole metropolitan region, until 2013.
With reservations, The Gazette today endorses Mayor Gérald Tremblay, the least distressing candidate in an unprepossessing field. Later this week we'll have some thoughts about city council races across Montreal. Today, let's look at the race at the top of the ticket.
Tremblay's record earns our endorsement on the basis of Pierre Trudeau's old formula: "Don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative." The mayor has stood blinking in the headlights, all this year, as a landscape of corruption and cronyism has been sketched in around him by the city's media. After eight years in office, the best Tremblay can say is that he didn't know what was happening at city hall. It's not much of a campaign slogan.
On the other hand, Tremblay does have some meaningful accomplishments to his name after eight years. The city-hall labour situation has been acceptable. He played a role in winning some federal gasoline-tax revenue for cities. Montreal's credit rating has improved. Bus service is better. Bixi is a success. The Quartier des spectacles is under way. A whole range of essential infrastructure work was accelerating even before "stimulus" money started flowing. True, a number of urban projects have stalled, but in fairness our notorious immobilisme is not all city hall's fault.
Meeting our editorial board last week, Tremblay argued convincingly that he has made good progress in forging alliances with the city's neighbours. The proposed métro extension north and south, for example, might well bring a trade-off in which off-Island suburbs accept highway tolls around - but not on - Montreal Island. Tremblay has, it's true, treated the demerged municipalities on Montreal Island rather aggressively, but claims that things will be better now, because the whole Island has much in common.
Managing the web of relationships with other jurisdictions - Quebec, Ottawa, and the suburbs on- and off-Island - is an important part of the job, and here Tremblay has expertise other candidates cannot match.
Now look at the alternatives. Richard Bergeron's Projet Montréal has a few impressive candidates, but the leader is alarming: His belief that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were a U.S. government plot alone reveals a man far removed from reality. His obsessive enmity toward private cars is excessive and unrealistic. Bergeron's platform is fantastically detailed (subsidies for washable diapers, anyone?) but he is clearly not ready to govern.
Louise Harel of Vision Montreal has the opposite problem: She did govern, as a Parti Québécois minister, and her record is downright alarming.
We do not reproach Harel for being a sovereignist; plenty of Montrealers are sovereignists - including Diane Lemieux, another ex-PQ minister who's running for Tremblay's Union Montreal. We are only moderately unhappy that Harel is unilingual; the city's numerous anglophones, after all, can punish that failing, if they want to, on election day.
But Harel's claim to be a unifier is preposterous. Nothing since conscription has divided Montrealers more than sovereignty, a dream she plainly still cherishes. At the practical level, she wants to promote francisation of small business; this isn't a municipal issue and even PQ governments have steered around it, since it would demand thousands of inspectors and could cripple thousands of small businesses. This is zealotry, not common sense.
Also, Harel is alarmingly cosy with the city's blue-collar union, which has all but endorsed her. Montreal can't afford pampered employees.
Further, Harel is still fighting the restructuring wars. As minister of municipal affairs she ushered in the forced mergers; now she wants to weaken Montreal's boroughs and centralize power even more. That would certainly be a betrayal of the boroughs that chose to stay in Montreal on the basis of the current power-sharing arrangements. Harel's undiminished ardour for centralization also threatens us with endless, sterile new squabbles over structure.
Faute de mieux, it's got to be Tremblay. If re-elected he will, we hope, come back to office chastened, resolute, and vigilantly ambitious to do better. In this field, that's the best hope we have.