Gatineau campaign had no standout issue
Mayoral candidate says fixing roads also a priority for Gatineau’s voters
For Gatineau voters, this fall has been the election campaign that couldn’t pick an issue.
Taxes? Culture? Floods? Paving side streets? Condo towers? Economic growth? Pick any.
They have all floated in and out of debates and headlines, even the $79-million decision to build a new hockey arena, long after that decision was supposedly in the bag.
But none of them became a big, standout issue that dominated debates or public discussion.
In the absence of a big issue, incumbent Maxime Pedneaud-Jobin has been rolling along smoothly in a Jim Watson-style campaign, a road without a lot of bumps.
And without an obvious fiasco left over from the past four-year term, his competition doesn’t have any apparent weak point to exploit.
In fact, the only real controversy occurred in a council race when reports surfaced late in the campaign of alleged “inappropriate behaviour” by Plateau ward candidate Patrick Doyon from unnamed women who worked with him over the past 15 years.
Doyon strenuously denied the claims, but withdrew from the race, leading to the acclamation victory of Maude Marquis-Bissonnette, a 29-year-old Carleton doctoral student running on Pedneaud-Jobin’s Action Gatineau ticket.
This election’s mayoral field is unusually large, with the incumbent, two veteran councillors who have been his frequent critics, and two newcomers all vying for the post.
The number of opponents also seemed to have the effect of splitting any anti-Pedneaud-Jobin vote that was out there.
Denis Tassé, one of the veterans on Gatineau council and the polling frontrunner among the four challengers, had been expected to be a major critic of incumbent Pedneaud-Jobin.
He has in fact accused the mayor of not being transparent.
But mainly he has focused on a topic that took many by surprise: paving side streets.
He wants to borrow $100 million to pave 108 kilometres of side streets.
That’s the kind of local issue that voters want to talk about, he explained. The polls are open Sunday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Driving along Hurtubise Street in Gatineau, mayoral candidate Sylvie Goneau points to her neighbours’ homes, recalling the flooding in April and May. Some of the houses look fine from the outside, but their lingering emptiness tells a different story.
According to the municipality, 2,214 homes in Gatineau were impacted by the spring flooding and 1,407 people were affected by evacuation orders. Goneau was among them.
Over the summer, the Quebec government drafted new rules that stipulated homes in high-risk flood zones would have to be demolished and residents would receive financial assistance from the province to rebuild elsewhere.
In September, Goneau’s home was torn down. A few weeks later, she received her permit to rebuild.
The home had been in her family for generations. Goneau and her husband, Rob Clarke, raised their two children on the second floor. Her parents lived on the ground floor.
“We fought to save the house. We lost against the water,” said Goneau, who has been the city councillor for the Bellevue district since 2009.
Goneau, who announced her mayoral candidacy in 2016 and opted to continue campaigning despite losing her home, often thinks about what her home meant to her.
“My brother passed away ... 15 years ago this year and it’s been five years that my mother passed away. For me, personally, that house represents them,” Goneau said.
Goneau, who is fluently bilingual, got a taste for politics in 2007 while working as an assistant for Ottawa city councillor Georges Bédard. She decided to run for the city council seat in Bellevue in 2009.
“She came up with a flyer and went door to door on the last eight weeks and we knocked on every single door at least once,” her husband recalled.
Goneau won by a slim margin — so few votes, in fact, that a recount was done.
“Was she surprised that she won? I think so, but I wasn’t,” Clarke said. “I understood that she had done everything she could do.”
Before she entered politics, Goneau, a graduate of Algonquin College’s events management program, worked in catering. She also volunteered with St. John Ambulance, experience that was useful during the flood: Two days after being forced from her home, Goneau set up a coordination centre for flood victims, with the help of her former boss at St. John Ambulance, Jean-Robert Gagnon.
“We organized shuttle (buses) to evacuate as many people as possible to assist local authorities,” said Gagnon, who is now retired from St. John Ambulance.
“After (evacuating those in need) we were there to provide comfort to those who were still in their homes.”
For 41/2 days, the centre’s staff shuttled flood victims, helped distribute food, helped get the lone water pump from one house to the next and helped alert police to potential safety incidents and thefts, Goneau said.
“People had a place to call and that’s something that they didn’t have before.”
During that time, Goneau sent out a news release about the coordination centre on City of Gatineau letterhead.
Her colleagues at city hall criticized her efforts as being politically motivated, since, as Le Droit reported, this was a personal effort and not an initiative backed by the city.
While Goneau said she has no regrets about setting up the coordination centre, she nonetheless found the comments hurtful.
Goneau had been preparing her mayoral run for several years before officially announcing her candidacy.
“When I decided I’m running for mayor it was a renewed commitment. It was done with certainty,” Goneau said.
But since the flooding, Goneau has become a voice for those affected by the floods even though on the advice of the city’s legal department she was blocked from voting on council about decisions that impact flood victims — because she lost her home.
“I was kept from voting on a lot of important issues that related to the floods because of a potential conflict because I’m a flood victim and kept from speaking out on those issues, which I think was a loss.”
She said that when the change in provincial flood-zone regulation was announced over the summer, Pedneaud-Jobin wasn’t forthcoming about the impact it would have on constituents. Goneau said she is the one who spoke out about it.
But Goneau faces an uphill battle, despite her outspokenness on the flooding. It’s not the only municipal issue, and most of Gatineau’s residents weren’t affected by the flood.
Anne Mévellec, Quebec municipal politics expert at the University of Ottawa, said that Maxime Pedneaud-Jobin, the incumbent, will be hard to beat.
“It’s extremely rare that mayors running for re-election, who have not faced major problems during their mandate, are not re-elected.”
To many, Pedneaud-Jobin handled the crisis well, being visible during the flood and not making promises he couldn’t keep, said Mévellec.
Goneau, though, has other issues on her mind, in addition to the flooding. Driving carefully along one of the worst roads in the Bellevue district, avoiding as many potholes as possible, she says she’s been trying to get the street repaved for eight years.
“When people say ‘Oh, you’re making paving a priority?’ I go ‘Yeah because I know my city.’”
Sunday’s election has five candidates running for mayor. In addition to Pedneaud-Jobin, Gatineau city councillor Denis Tassé, Rémi Bergeron and Clément Bélanger all have their hats in the ring.
Recent polling by Le Droit has Goneau in third, with the support of 13.7 per cent of would-be voters.
“Right now I’m determined to be mayor,” Goneau said. “Most people won’t run because of the fear of losing and I don’t permit that for myself. You can’t know if you don’t try.”