Motions of censure rejected at council

Only the dead seemed to come out on top at Montreal’s city council meeting on Tuesday.

With lots of suspicious glances across the aisles in the wake of damning allegations at the Charbonneau Commission, the mostly bitter council session featured two opposition party motions reprimanding Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay for alleged corruption at city hall. The motions were ruled inadmissible by the council speaker.

On the brighter side, councillors across party lines graciously agreed to rename squares in honour of late Yiddish publisher Hirsch Wolofsky and late political activist Pierre Bourgault.

Speaker Harout Chitilian ruled that the council was not the appropriate forum to deal with a motion introduced by the Vision Montreal party censuring Tremblay and another by Projet Montréal to voice non-confidence in Tremblay.

“The powers of the council are defined and limited by the (Quebec) municipal code and none of its numerous sections … appears to authorize councils to turn themselves into courtrooms to judge and censure their members, whether it is the mayor or anyone,” Chitilian said, referring to legal jurisprudence set in court cases about council powers.

The motions are “not only unjust and injurious, but illegal.”

Such complaints about councillors or the mayor should go to Quebec’s Municipal Affairs minister, he added.

Réal Ménard of Vision Montreal, who is mayor of the borough of Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, replied, somewhat stunned, that the rejection of the motions was an affront to free speech and council members’ abilities to criticize.

“I feel bullied in my role as an elected member,” he said.

The council also voted 44 to 15 to quash a Vision Montreal motion to bring in a series of measures to fight corruption, such as the appointment of an ethics commissioner and a wider mandate for the contracts review committee.

“There’s a saying that fear is the beginning of wisdom,” Vision Party Leader Louise Harel said, about a committee that would be empowered to review not just some, but all, contracts.

“A sword of Damocles over all contracts” would make them more likely to be fairly priced, she said.

Lionel Perez, a councillor with the ruling Union Montreal, said Harel’s ideas are politically opportunistic.

“They are vague, nebulous ideas,” Perez said.

“They give the impression of doing something, but there’s not much substance there.”