Tremblay mayoralty built on deceit

HE BROKE THE PROMISE that brought him to power, and now has lost credibility and any claim to the benefit of the doubt

Mayor Gérald Tremblay wants Montrealers to believe him when he says that he never turned a blind eye to illegal financing in a 2004 byelection and, for that matter, that he never wilfully ignored corrupt or unethical practices that flourished at city hall during his 11 years as mayor.

But Tremblay does not deserve to get the benefit of the doubt.

His mayoralty is built upon deceit.

It’s easy to lose sight of how Tremblay and his party originally came to power 11 years ago — no one talks about those circumstances anymore. But these circumstances are relevant as one now tries to assess the man’s honour, integrity and truthfulness.

Let’s go back down memory lane.

The 2001 election campaign between Gérald Tremblay and Pierre Bourque was fought on the issue of the Parti Québécois government’s forced merger of Montreal Island’s 29 municipalities, which would take effect Jan. 1, 2002. Because of the suburbs’ intense resistance, the provincial opposition party, the Liberals, said that if it won the next election it would give them the opportunity to demerge in referendums.

Bourque championed the merger, Tremblay, on the other hand, said that if elected he would strive to make the megacity a success and thus win the skeptics over, but that in the event a future Liberal government were to allow demerger referendums he and his party would not stand in their way. As he put it at a meeting with The Gazette’s editorial board, “If they (the Liberals) want to undo a merger in a city that has voted in a referendum, we’re saying, ‘For us, democracy is very important,’ in the same way that we’re respecting the law that forced the mergers. If the government decides that, then we’ll respect the decision of the government.”

Tremblay beat Bourque in the election by a 49 per cent to 44 per cent margin. There is no question that Tremblay’s non-interference promise was the decisive factor: Suburbanites voted massively for him and his party. (Examples: St-Laurent voted for Trem- blay by a ratio of 3 to 1, Town of Mount Royal 4-1, Dorval 7-1, and Westmount, Côte-Saint-Luc, Hampstead and Montreal West by 13-1.)

In the 2003 provincial election campaign of 2003, the Liberals duly pledged to permit the referendums. It was then that Tremblay broke his promise.

He did so in two ways. First, he urged Liberal Leader Jean Charest to renege on his referendum promise. Second, during the subsequent referendum campaigns he fought tooth and nail against demerging.

The question here isn’t whether demerging was a good idea or not. What matters is whether or not one can trust the mayor’s word. I can’t. Yes, I know, politicians often don’t deliver on campaign promises. But it’s rare — extremely rare — that politicians break the promise that brought them to power. What Tremblay and his party (which is now called Union Montreal) did would be akin to the PQ government rejecting sovereignty and zealously embracing federalism. Imagine sovereignists’ sense of betrayal.

Tremblay could invoke no new, extenuating circumstances to justify his action. His attempt to abort demergers represented a breathtakingly cynical disregard for the same democratic process for which he had expressed such respect when making his pledge of neutrality.

A witness before the Charbonneau inquiry, Martin Dumont, says Tremblay explicitly indicated he did not want to know about illegal financing of the St-Laurent byelection. I don’t know if Tremblay is telling the truth in disputing this.

But I do know the record clearly shows that, in the preceding general election, Tremblay did much more than passively witness the existence of a fraudulent monetary attempt to win votes: He personally committed a larger moral fraud: He deceived hundreds of thousands of voters about what his mayoral candidacy stood for.

Whether or not this undermines the very legitimacy of his administration is debatable. What’s not debatable is that it torpedoes his credibility.

What goes around comes around. Today, Tremblay needs the public’s trust.

Sorry. He’s forfeited it.