How transparent is Coderre?
The mayor’s forceful personality might also be his kryptonite
Unless a Montrealer has been absent or asleep for the past two years, they’ll have noticed that the city has a new celebrity action hero.
His name, of course, is Denis Coderre. And he has been a ubiquitous figure since winning the Nov. 3, 2013, municipal election, whether it’s dashing to burning buildings wearing his special mayor’s firefighter hat, attending a slain taxi driver’s funeral or visiting his counterparts around the province like a plenipotentiary stepping onto “foreign” municipal soil, all the while tweeting cheers for the city’s beloved Montreal Canadiens and hamming it up on his mayoral TV talk shows that air regularly on French-language LCN and within English-language CTV’s news cast.
Adding to that are a constant barrage of TV images of a toughguy who’s not scared to take on the city’s unpopular municipal unions over their pension funds, who’s ready to force spiffy outfits and proper manners on city cab drivers and who’s willing to wag a finger at federal and provincial authorities when they try to eliminate home delivery mail service or issue a charter of values.
And therein lies the paradox of Montreal’s action hero at the midway point in his mandate.
By most reckonings, including those of his admirers, Coderre’s strength as an I’m-in-charge leader is also his liability.
What’s more, there appears to be a consensus that being the most visible mayor in recent Montreal history does not also make him the most transparent. Far from it, in fact.
“The future of the democratic experience is not as bright and hopeful as it once was,” said Montreal publisher and political activist Dimitri Roussopoulos, a founder of the local think tank Institut de politiques alternatives de Montréal (IPAM) and a longtime municipal observer.
Indeed, one of Coderre’s first acts after becoming mayor was to kill the city’s Chantier sur la démocratie, an independent advisory group of citizens that was created following the 2002 Montreal Summit and that in 2006 gave Montreal its Charter of Citizens Rights and Responsibilities, which garnered international accolades from such bodies as UNESCO and UN-HABITAT.
Roussopoulos, who presided over the Chantier for all of its existence as an appointee of former mayor Gérald Tremblay, notes that Coderre also laid to rest work begun by the Chantier to set up a municipal observatory on democracy that would have had a mission to promote transparency and invite public interest and participation in municipal administration — major planks of Coderre’s 2013 election platform.
Roussopoulos says that IPAM is working to launch such an observatory on its own.
It’s reminiscent of a previous Montreal mayor, he said. Pierre Bourque’s first act upon taking office in 1994 was to ask the province to amend the city charter so he could abolish all of the city’s committees that held public consultations, ostensibly to “simplify” the consultation process.
(The National Assembly rebuffed Bourque’s wish in part. He was required to keep some standing committees of council.)
City hall under Coderre has also introduced a limit on the number of citizens who are permitted to attend monthly public city council meetings at city hall, officially for security reasons to prevent a repeat of a riotous municipal union protest during a council meeting in 2014.
However, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, Roussopoulos warns of limiting the public’s access to city hall. “They’re going to stop going.”
If there’s a singularly telling aspect to the mayor’s style, it’s that he’s alone at the top.
He was elected as a minority mayor, his Équipe Denis Coderre having garnered less than half of the council seats. But his influence looms large over council.
He often repeats the slogans “vivre ensemble” and “let’s live together.” And that’s true — as long as it’s done on his terms.
“He’s not just gregarious, he actually likes to pull people together,” said Westmount Mayor Peter Trent, who counts himself as an admirer and says Coderre is the first Montreal mayor in decades to extend a hand to the island suburbs as well as reach out to off-island suburbs.
On the other hand, “if you refuse, then you’re out,” Trent said. “He understands people almost intuitively. So if you decide not to come into his ambit, then you’re really out.
“Which is fine. That’s a quality I think a politician should have. You don’t really have time for fussy diplomacy in the political game.”
Coderre’s forceful personality has changed the dynamic with the Quebec government, Trent said. “When Coderre speaks, they listen.”
However, Trent added that Coderre’s strong personality leads him to be impetuous, “and he has to be careful of that.”
“Overall, he’s given something Montreal desperately needed, which is hope,” Trent said. “So I have no compunction about saying that Denis Coderre’s two years has allowed Montreal to actually hope again after not just the corruption scandals, but after Tremblay and even Bourque. They didn’t focus on making Montrealers feel proud and try to bring the city up by its own bootstraps.”
But the buck-stops-here has its down side, such as when Coderre faced public backlash over a revelation that the city plans to dump eight billion litres of raw sewage into the St. Lawrence River this fall.
The debacle went viral as he personally drew a Facebook rebuke from Erin Brockovich, the environmental activist portrayed by actress Julia Roberts in the 2000 film. It was a slap in the face of a political leader who uses social media, particularly Twitter, to cultivate the image of a populist who’s connected to the people.
In fact, the persona that he’s created with his everyman tweets appears shaky since Coderre’s popularity on Twitter was revealed last month to be artificial. As the Montreal Gazette reported, an audit of his 219,000 Twitter followers found that nearly two-thirds of them are fake accounts.
To some observers, the populism is at any rate the creation of an astute politician.
“He’s a very intelligent person, in spite of all the theatrical gestures and the Twitter stuff,” Trent said. “In spite of that image that he tends to convey as a populist, don’t ever think he’s not intelligent. He’s a very intelligent guy who really goes over his files in detail. And he tends to think strategically.”
What has happened in the past two years is that the word “démocratie” has been eclipsed by the expression “la ville intelligente” (“smart city”), another Coderre election promise, which calls for using digital technologies to improve the quality and responsiveness of municipal services and to engage citizens.
To that end, the city recently launched some smart phone applications about city services and an online searchable database of municipal contracts, although lacking information about subcontractors and cost overruns, two other promises in Coderre’s 2013 election platform.
Coderre gets full marks from the open-data community for creating a collaborative relationship with them and for opening a Smart and Digital City Office, a semi-autonomous body at the city, said Jean-Noé Landry, the new executive director of Open North, a non-profit company that makes online tools to encourage democracy.
In fact, the smart and digital city office is employing tools that permit online interaction to vet its action plan and isn’t just writing bureaucratic reports that recommend the use of such tools, he said.
Coderre also appointed former Open North employee Stéphane Guidoin as the smart and digital city office’s open-data adviser, a positive signal that the city is drawing from leaders in the field and that it’s prepared to engage civil society and startups in the move toward open data, Landry said.
“It’s not an either-or situation,” Landry said of traditional methods of consultation and online tools. “I think we need to recognize that there’s always going to be a place for face-to-face consultations, but the issue is to develop more hybrid models of consultations where we’re able to insert a technological element to ways for people to meet.”
The web puts useful information out there and allows for added transparency, Roussopoulos acknowledged. “But it’s not an enriching democratic experience in and of itself. There can be no substitute, absolutely no substitute, in the democratic experience and in the exercise of citizenship for face-to-face discussion.”
And there has been far less of that since Coderre took office.
City hall’s human interface with citizens is its consultative committees of city council, which allow the public to express opinions on the city’s policy directions.
However, six of council’s eight current permanent consultative committees haven’t held the minimum four public meetings so far in 2015, as required by a long-standing city bylaw. In fact, three of them — the committee on culture, heritage and sports, the committee on public safety and the committee on transportation and public works — have yet to hold a single public meeting so far this year.
(However, all of the committees have held in-camera “work sessions.”)
What’s more, the culture, heritage and sports committee didn’t hold a public meeting in 2014, either.
The committees weren’t given enough value under Tremblay, Roussopoulos said. But 2015 is shaping up as the low point for public consultation in the past five years.
“Democracy is not just on the day of the election and the rest is just politics,” Heritage Montreal policy director Dinu Bumbaru said.
The city held credible ad hoc public consultations on Montreal Island’s new land-use plan, which entered into force this year, although the consultation process was legally required for its adoption, Bumbaru said.
And executive committee member Russell Copeman said in August that Montreal plans to conduct a “vast” public consultation next year to update the city’s urban plan.
But there are even more contrary signals when it comes to the value the city places on public input, Bumbaru said.
For example, he referred to what many critics argue was a sleight of hand this year when the Ville-Marie borough, where Coderre is borough mayor, opened a public register in the middle of the summer for opponents of a project to demolish the landmark Maison Alcan on Sherbrooke St. W. and erect a 30-storey commercial tower. Coderre also publicly endorsed a plan this summer to develop a vast natural space in western Pierrefonds for 5,000 residential units over many objections, before public consultations have even been scheduled.
All that causes Coderre’s detractors to express concern for the future as the Quebec government prepares to grant Montreal metropolitan status with accompanying new powers.
Will the new powers be for the city or the mayor, Roussopoulos asked?
“I’m all for Montreal having more powers, many more powers,” he said.
“But if it’s going to be exercised the way it has been until now, then it’s a source of tremendous worry.”
The future of the democratic experience is not as bright and hopeful as it once was. DIMITRI ROUSSOPOULOS