Diversity deficit was avoidable
Crafting an executive committee, the municipal equivalent of a cabinet, is a delicate exercise.
It’s a political balancing act that must weigh representativeness against competence, reward loyalty and provide inclusiveness. It’s a bit like assembling a giant jigsaw puzzle, except the image that emerges is the face an administration wants to put forward to the public. It offers a message about its vision, ideals and priorities. Courage is sometimes required and compromises must be made to get all the pieces to fit.
As such, Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante’s newly minted executive committee tells us she is deeply committed to equality.
The city’s first female mayor made good on her promise to share power positions equally between men and women, a first for Montreal since the early days of the Jean Doré era. And she has struck an equilibrium between energy and experience among the members of her fledgling Projet Montréal brigade.
But what her inner circle has in energy, enthusiasm, ideas and expertise, it is lacking in diversity. To her credit, Plante is the first to admit it, calling the shortage of cultural, religious and racial representation “disappointing” and one of her fledgling team’s weaknesses.
A look at the new power brokers at city hall shows a group that is overwhelmingly white and francophone. A sprinkling of anglophones here and a Montrealer of Italian descent there doesn’t cut it in 2017 as representative of the racially and religiously diverse metropolis that is Montreal.
Plante says she was only playing the hand she was dealt. But that rings a bit hollow given the circumstances.
While it’s true most of the candidates of different ethnic backgrounds Projet ran didn’t get elected and there are only a handful of visible minorities on council as a whole, all in opposition, Plante doesn’t seem to have tried hard enough to bring any of them on board.
Plante reached out to at least half-a-dozen opposition councillors to join her, on the condition that they withdrew from their own party’s caucus. Lionel Perez, who is now leading the remnants of Équipe Denis Coderre, said six of his group’s councillors were approached but were told they’d have to resign from their party if they wanted to sit on the executive committee. Diverging accounts, but same difference.
By demanding such a steep price, Plante seems to have put affiliation ahead of representation.
Only one opposition member took her up on her invitation: Verdun borough mayor JeanFrançois Parenteau, who is now in charge of services to citizens, procurement and the environment. He will sit as an independent on council.
Which raises another issue about Plante’s inner circle: save for Parenteau, all are members of Projet Montréal. She would hardly be the first mayor to stack her executive committee with loyalists who march to the same drum. But Plante promised to govern differently.
During the campaign, she vowed to give independents and other parties a bigger voice in an increasingly partisan and divided city council. In doing so, she won the endorsement of Jean Fortier, who was running for mayor as a third option under the Coalition Montréal banner, among others. He withdrew from the contest to back her.
Coalition Montréal, led by veteran city councillor Marvin Rotrand, was pushing the idea of a more collegial council in its doomed bid to seek the balance of power at Montreal city hall. Voters instead handed Projet Montréal a majority and hence a mandate to move forward with her party’s vision for the city. But in putting their faith so strongly behind Plante, Montrealers didn’t necessarily absolve her of the pledge to play nice with others.
Thus the requirement that opposition councillors abandon their party’s caucus to be part of her executive committee seems like an unnecessary stumbling block to greater inclusivity. The stated reason is to maintain confidentiality, but cabinet secrecy didn’t preclude members of rival factions from holding decisionmaking roles in the past.
Coderre’s executive committee included members of Coalition Montréal — and even former Projet leader Richard Bergeron, although those appointees eventually joined his party.
Plante may have the luxury of demanding more from those she is calling on to serve in her administration. She has a majority on council whereas Coderre did not, which made reaching across the aisle a necessity for him to get his policies adopted.
But the excessive secrecy requirement has ended up being one more reason there are so few minorities and only one party outsider around the decisionmaking table — and it’s an entirely avoidable one. Plante put the onus on the councillors she tried to recruit to pass what sounds an awful lot like an obedience test. She can now say she tried, yet leave the reins of power in trusted and like-minded hands.
In this regard, it seems like business as usual at city hall. Projet is a grassroots party with a detailed platform and an ambitious agenda that it is no doubt eager to put into action. However, it may not be the big-tent party it was recently professing to be.
So, more women will have a chance to put their stamp on Montreal during the Plante era, a long overdue step that should not go unheralded. But minorities will have to wait.