TRENT shines light on city hall
Had the megacity been created by a true merger — the joining of equals — Montreal’s penchant for scandals might have been dissipated, or at least diluted, Westmount Mayor Peter Trent writes in his new book, The Merger Delusion
Had the megacity been created by a true merger, Montreal’s penchant for corruption might have been dissipated, Westmount Mayor Peter Trent writes in Merger Delusion.
The Merger Delusion: How Swallowing Its Suburbs Made an Even Bigger Mess of Montreal By Peter F. Trent McGill-Queen’s University Press 700 pages, $39.95
The media made much of [Gérald] Tremblay’s unregenerate naïveté. I would rather have an uncorrupt mayor who was naive than a corrupt mayor who was wise in the ways of the world. From the comfort of their keyboards, it was easy for the media to sermonize and call for Tremblay’s resignation. In my view, it is unfair to place the blame for the spate of scandals squarely at his feet. Yes, to some extent he was the architect of his own misfortune, but as the megacity is ungovernable, its administrative and political structure is a petri dish in which corruption can breed. The media take on it was that if Montreal had an effective mayor, these scandals would never have happened. Even if that were possible, history shows that Montreal has never had an effective mayor. Why, after Montreal annexed its suburbs, would anything change?
Had the megacity been created by a true merger — the joining of equals — Montreal’s penchant for corruption might have been dissipated, or at least diluted. But the megacity was created by annexation: the methods, management, and morality of the old City of Montreal were the norm. Corruption grew from a well-entrenched foundation. Yes, there was evidence of sporadic corruption in some of the former suburban municipalities or current boroughs, but it was not uniform. It did not have Montreal’s massive base. The corruption in Saint-Laurent in 2002 had to do with bribes for a zoning change; the scandal later in Outremont was a matter of small-time fraud. The raft of scandals that shook the megacity in 2009, however, were more systemic and had to do with the awarding of contracts made juicier and plumper by the fact of the merger.
Regardless of who happens to be
in power, the thing that strikes me is the persistent glaring amateurism of Montreal’s political class, and the relative professionalism (not unmixed with lethargy) of the administration.
Now on to solutions. If the Montreal megacity had been a good idea, but one that was done for the wrong reasons, or done in the wrong way, it would make sense to leave it alone. But the megacity was a bad idea that compounded municipal problems rather than solved them. The first step in the remediation of the overlaid governance of the Montreal Metropolitan Region is to admit the megacity was indeed a mistake.
While ... the status quo before 2002 was definitely an option and a far better one than mergers, even I don’t recommend we simply replicate the status quo ante. While the current situation is far worse than what we had, what we did have was not devoid of problems.
The Montreal merger debacle teaches us that urban mergers do not bring savings, fiscal equity, or a solution to urban sprawl. The whole sorry story of the mergers and the downloading of the last twenty years has also taught us that urban local and regional governments need more autonomy — existential, fiscal, structural, and operational autonomy — to function properly and, indeed, to attract elected officials of high calibre.
Existential autonomy: Any proposed municipal merger or annexation must be legitimized by the formal acquiescence of the citizens of each individual municipality involved. Quebec should adopt a Charter of Municipal Rights, taking its inspiration from the World Charter of Local Government.
Fiscal autonomy: Urban sprawl should be slowed by local, regional, and provincial fiscal regimes that would require property owners to pay the full cost of their decision to move to the exurbs — in other words, to shoulder the cost of new highways, hospitals, or schools in their area. This could be done though such measures as special school property taxes, development charges paid to Quebec, and a regional sharing of property taxes from new development. Off-Island suburbs should also contribute to metropolitan costs currently assumed by Montreal Island propertyowners. Municipalities should employ user-fees intensively, making property taxes a minor component of their revenues. Mass transit should be funded not though property taxes but by increasing the tax on gasoline and car registrations, and by a return to substantial government operating subsidies. After all, highways are not funded through property taxes, and school busing, outside the Island of Montreal, is paid for by Quebec. Lastly, any new responsibilities shifted to municipalities must be accompanied by sufficient and permanent new revenues.
Structural autonomy: Quebec must create a Department of Metropolitan Montreal, with its own minister. The Montreal conurbation should have nothing to do with the Department of Municipal Affairs, Regions, and Land Occupancy and its uniform treatment of Quebec municipalities rural or urban, big and small. Rather than the two full and three partial administrative regions through which all government services are channelled, the Montreal Metropolitan Region should revert to being just one administrative region. All the other government structures cluttering up the region should be dissolved and their budget envelopes given to local or regional governments. Urban municipalities should have the power to structure themselves as they see fit, as decentralized as possible. They should be able to establish the size of their own councils, and subsidies for municipal political parties should cease, although independent candidates should continue to be supported.
Operational autonomy: It must be acknowledged that the biggest problem facing Montreal municipalities is the fact they pay their employees 30-40 per cent more than the rest of the province’s public sector. Quebec must devolve onto the Montreal Region some legislative power to fix this longstanding problem, including complete freedom to contract out for blue collar and white collar work to bring the discipline of the marketplace into the equation. Back in 2003, the OECD produced a necessarily rather sketchy study on the Montreal megacity at that point. They concluded their analysis with “skepticism that amalgamation will be able to achieve the desired efficiency and equity goals and maintain public satisfaction … The amalgamation process substantially reduced citizen access to city representatives in other cities.” Overall, they wrote, “We find it difficult to imagine a satisfied public in Montreal in the following years.” They also recommended, almost with a note of desperation, “The municipal government must ‘sell’ amalgamation to the people. Not only should a public relations campaign occur before amalgamation but also it should be ongoing, and continue for five or ten years after.”
The present web of structures is untenable. We know it costs hundreds of millions more than the former structures that served us reasonably well. The temptation will be to centralize the current megacity of Montreal. It won’t save money and will poorly serve its citizens. The only right thing to do is to boost the power of the borough administrations, get rid of the central bureaucracy, and slowly move towards something approximating individual municipalities. Since Montreal cannot exist under such a constant threat of disaggregation, going all the way in the short term would not only be extremely unlikely but unwise.
Such a change would take incredible political courage, of a stamp we have not seen of late. But if a Quebec government screwed up enough courage to merge 212 municipalities against the will of the people, surely a future government can find the strength to admit a past mistake and go in the other direction — this time with popular support? I live in hope.
But things go deeper than that. The reason for Montreal’s continued decline is not the mergerdemerger serial fiascos — although they did not help — but Quebec’s long-standing fixation on its regions and the unrelenting, pernicious, and wilful neglect of its only metropolitan region. The solution lies not with Montreal but with Quebec.