The creation of the Town of Brome Lake

From the moment they set up and took control of the Town of Bromont in 1964, Roland Désourdy and his brother Germain began casting covetous eyes on Brome Lake.

In 1917, the recently-formed Southern Canada Power Co. had acquired the dam at the outlet of Brome Lake from the Brome Electric Co., operating it until the nationalization of electricity in Quebec by René Lévesque in 1963. This dam controls the volume of water flowing into the Yamaska River, and thence downstream to Bromont. With their vast ambitions for Bromont, the Désourdy brothers knew that they would need an assured water supply, both for the new industries they were attracting, and for eventual snowmaking activities at their Bromont ski resort. So their first step was to have Bromont buy the dam from Hydroquebec, right under the nose of the sleepy Village of Foster where the dam was located. This then gave Bromont the power to alter the water level in Brome Lake as their needs required, regardless of the interests of the property owners surrounding the lake.

The Désourdys also had visions of creating a lakeside resort on Brome Lake in the Bondville area, not far from Bromont, which was then in the territory of the Township of Brome. Having already gobbled up West Shefford, they were familiar with the legal procedures for annexing neighbouring land into Bromont, so they began to chomp off bits of Brome Township that adjoined Bromont, rather like Pac-man eating up the dots in its maze.

Their modus operandi was quite brilliant. A Bromont emissary would call on a farmer in Brome Township who owned land near the municipal boundary. He would offer the farmer $1,000 cash for an option to buy his farm, usually at a high price, but always subject to the farmer’s subsequent agreement, provided the farmer agreed in exchange that his land should be incorporated into Bromont. Of course the Désourdys had no intention of ever exercising their options. The canny local farmers saw this as free money, as it committed them to nothing, and many of them never saw that much cash from one year to the next. Most of the local farmers were anglophones whose families had been there for generations. If one of these was particularly recalcitrant, Roland Désourdy himself would turn up in his kitchen, and do a masterful sales job in his very serviceable English.

As soon as the Désourdys had persuaded a few landowners, they would organize and easily win a vote among them as required under the law, and then apply to the Quebec minister of municipal affairs to have their territory transferred from Brome Township to Bromont. The consent of Brome Township was not required. They did this successfully several times with no fanfare, until eventually the mayor and councillors of Brome Township woke up and realized that their territory (and tax base) was gradually being absorbed by Bromont. Moreover, the new citizens of Bromont soon learned that their property taxes would be much higher in Bromont than they had been in Brome Township.

Finally, several Knowlton-area residents such as Peter Kerrigan, Marc Decelles, Peter Wade me were becoming very concerned about the deteriorating water quality in Brome Lake, and the amount of relatively untreated sewage that was entering the lake from many lakeside cottages. In 1961 we had formed the Brome Lake Conservation Association to address this problem. But we were up against the fact that the shoreline of Brome Lake was under the jurisdiction of three separate municipalities – the Village of Knowlton, the Village of Foster, and the Township of Brome.

The solution to these three problems – control of the lake level, loss of territory to Bromont, and regulation of sewage disposal – seemed obvious: combine the three small and relatively powerless municipalities into one bigger one with the much greater legal authority of a town – a town that would then have jurisdiction over the entire Brome Lake shoreline, if not its entire watershed.

In 1965, Pierre Laporte had introduced a new law, the Voluntary Amalgamation Act for Quebec municipalities, which I had carefully studied. It provided that two or more municipal councils could make a formal agreement to combine their municipalities into a single larger one. No referendum was required, simply the consent of the minister.

So as manager of the Brome County Rural Development Association, I began a discreet campaign to persuade the local mayors and councillors of the merits of this plan. Initially I had hoped to include the municipality of West Bolton, which contains most of the Brome Lake watershed, and also the tiny Village of Brome, location of the Brome Fair grounds. But these two bodies expressed no interest, largely out of understandable suspicion over a loss of autonomy to their somewhat larger neighbours. They included no lakeshore land, and neither were they under any immediate threat from Bromont.

My activities, although fairly well received by the three municipal councils most directly concerned, soon attracted the attention of the Désourdys. A full-scale war then erupted along the frontier of Bromont and Brome Township, with rival teams from each combatant lobbying the local farmers for their support. I recruited James Walter Wathen Brack, a 300-pound activist from Granby to whom my uncle Hank Rotherham had introduced me, and we gradually began to turn opinion in our favour. Some farmers renounced their options to Bromont, and others swore everlasting fealty to Brome Township. There was undeniably an element of French-english rivalry in the contest. We eventually fought Bromont to a standstill, and that is the explanation for Bromont’s very odd serrated eastern boundary today.

I got myself appointed as a councillor of Foster to fill a vacancy. Soon Foster and Brome Township were on side with the proposed amalgamation. We then had to seal the deal with Knowlton.

I arranged a crucial meeting at the Knowlton Court House of all council members of Knowlton, plus the mayors of Foster and Brome Township, as well as their permanent secretary-treasurers. Dr. C. Lorne Church, a dentist, was mayor of Knowlton, George Mizener mayor of Foster, and George Johnston mayor of Brome Township; another key player was Stanley Quilliams, secretarytreasurer of Foster.

Roland Désourdy turned up at the meeting unannounced, smiling and genial as always, and before the final vote of the Knowlton council he asked to address them in private – in other words with me out of the room. I was able to convince the council that this was another Désourdy ploy to seduce them with his honeyed words, and they turned down his request. So Roland had to sit there and watch the Knowlton council vote five to one in favour of the amalgamation agreement. The lone nay vote was by Roméo Brouillette, long-time owner of a store opposite the Bank of Montreal, who was perhaps acting in solidarity with his co-linguist Désourdy.

The Town of Brome Lake officially came into existence on January 2, 1971. The law firm that guided us through the process was my old Montreal firm of Lapointe, Rosenstein. The first