City bureaucrat leaves with nice severance after two years

$190,000 for economic planner

The administration of Mayor Denis Coderre is giving the director of the city’s economic development department a $190,000 package to leave the city after two years in the job.

Serge Guérin, who was recruited by a headhunter firm paid $43,000 by the city, was supposed to come up with an ambitious economic development plan for Montreal.

Instead, he was dispatched with a year’s salary because little was done, opposition Projet Montréal party said Tuesday.

However, the party’s assessment was contradicted by the mayor, who said Guérin’s dismissal by city manager Alain Marcoux on Jan. 20 was an administrative decision and came after Guérin oversaw the restructuring of the city’s economic development department.

Speaking to reporters at a news conference, Coderre said the city also restructured the organizations through which it offers assistance to entrepreneurs in Montreal during Guérin’s two years.

The city abolished local economic-development committees and replaced them with six centres collectively known as “PME MTL” to offer support and financial assistance to entrepreneurs.

“He really did colossal work and we have to thank him,” Coderre said of Guérin.

Nevertheless, Projet Montréal called the money spent on the recruitment and salary of a director who only lasted two years in the position and the lack of a plan to kick-start business in the city emblematic of Montreal’s economic stagnation.

It also said Coderre must take responsibility.

Every year since 2014, the city has finished dead last in an annual survey of 121 Canadian cities that assesses their municipal economic development policies.

The survey is conducted by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.

Montreal doesn’t have any performance indicators to measure economic development progress in the city, Projet councillor Laurence Lavigne Lalonde said in a statement Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Coderre hinted that economic development initiatives are in the offing now that Quebec has agreed to grant Montreal special status as a metropolis.

The city says it finished 2016 with 66,000 more jobs on the Island of Montreal than a year earlier, an increase of 6.9 per cent.