Four questions for Denis Coderre
TACKLING CORRUPTION, eradicating municipal parties, government reform among the issues presumed mayoral candidate faces
D ear Denis Coderre, You could announce your candidacy for mayor of Montreal in the next several weeks. Since saying last fall that you have your eye on that job (at which time a poll made you the front-runner), you have been coy about revealing what you hope to do for this troubled city.
Here are four early questions for your candidacy.
No bigger challenge exists for Montreal than the need to cleanse city hall of corruption and its contractors of collusion. What makes you, Mr. Coderre, the person to do these things and help restore Montreal’s reputation?
Your 16-year record as an MP boasts few credentials as a reformer.
And financial contributions to your federal campaigns have sometimes come from business interests that are part of the problem. (A construction company owned by Lino Zambito, who told the Charbonneau Commission of how he helped rig contracts, contributed $2,500 to one of your election campaigns. Another company, which is owned by Charbonneau witness Giuseppe Borsellino and is the subject of a police probe for a land deal, donated $898 in another campaign. As well, Elio Pagliarulo, a loan shark who told the commission he was a conduit for a contractor’s payoffs to former executive committee chief Frank Zampino, once donated $472. Controversial engineering consulting firms like Dessau-Soprin and SNCLavalin also contributed thousands of dollars to your riding association.)
To be sure, all these donations are legal (corporate donations to federal politicians were lawful at the time), and candidates often don’t know their supporters personally. Still, what these donations suggest is that you’re popular in less-than-fragrant circles. Voters will want to know what steps you would take to make yourself unpopular.
The most encouraging thing about your presumed candidacy, Mr. Coderre, is your statement last fall that you might run as an independent. I’ve written that most municipal parties have the effect of a Denver boot on local democracy — they’re obsessed with raising money from business interests, they inject undue partisanship to debates, they prevent councillors from voting according to their consciences (because of bloc-voting imperatives) and, as a result, they help thwart Montreal’s ability to adopt well-reasoned policies. But I’m not ready to applaud your idea until you explain more.
Presumably, you’ll run with a slate of council candidates — a more informal arrangement than a party. But how relaxed would it be? More precisely: What role would money have in your brand of electioneering? Would members of your slate be able to vote independently? Would you try to make city council a truly deliberative body?
(Incidentally, councillor Marvin Rotrand, who is planning to run a separate slate of independent candidates, has made the interesting suggestion that, once elected, they would be free to vote as they pleased except on five or six core issues that would define what the slate stands for. It sounds like a way to get good candidates for council: Good candidates don’t like to vote as marionettes.)
Montreal has the largest and most complicated structure of governance of any North American city. Do you have any idea on how to reform this?
More specifically, would you want to seriously downsize Montreal’s 64-member city council or its 38 borough councillors? Do you have any proposals for either shrinking or expanding the powers of the 19 boroughs? For making the Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal more effective on regional issues?
It may well be premature to ask you, as a newcomer to city politics, to have wellconsidered ideas on such matters. But would you, then, set up a advisory panel of experts to explore these matters?
Let me get back to corruption and collusion.
I’m oversimplifying, but essentially there are two ways for a mayor to deal with those diseases.
One way is to do as you suggested last October and appoint a new bureaucratic unit to oversee contracts. You called this unit the inspector general’s office.
The problem with this is that city hall already has enough watchdog “generals” to scrutinize city business — the three-year-old comptroller general’s office, with more than 20 employees, and the auditor general’s office, with more than 30. (Plus, there’s a committee of city councillors that’s supposed to review contracts.) Dealing with problems by adding new government appendages is an old Quebec reflex. It has given Montreal the country’s largest municipal payroll per population.
The second way to deal with the gangrene costs nothing.
It is to apply the adage that is old hat in many places but that is, in city hall’s case, jarringly exotic: It is that an organization’s ethical climate is defined at the very top.
That’s true for a level of government, a corporation, a sports team, a club or even a family. The leader sets the tone. Subordinates notice. Former mayor Gérald Tremblay and a series of his appointed city managers have been oblivious to this principle.
Do you have the character to take this to heart?
This might well turn out to be the defining issue of this campaign.
Not public transport. Not taxes. Not services.
But character.
haubin@montrealgazette.com