It’s time to go, Peter Trent says
Long serving mayor of Westmount says he’s ready for new projects
It has been 13 years since an iconic photo was taken one night in June 2004 of Peter Trent, the guiding spirit of the anti-merger forces in former suburbs that had been amalgamated in regions across Quebec, resting his head on a Westmount councillor’s shoulder and exulting in victory. Westmount and more than a dozen other ex-suburbs that had been forced to merge with Montreal had just regained their independence in demerger referendums.
The epic battle against “one island, one city” has been, without a doubt, the combat of Trent’s 37year political career. But soon it will be one island, no Trent.
The longest-serving mayor of the affluent municipality of 20,000 residents, who played a critical role in forcing the provincial Liberals to allow demerger referenda to be held, is stepping down.
Trent plans to announce his resignation at a local council meeting on Monday.
“I prefer to go out at the height of my game,” he said. “If I were to run again, it would be my sixth term. At some point, it’s time to hang up the skates.”
Trent, 71, cited his age and a desire to move on with other personal projects, such as book writing.
He is bowing out seven months before the municipal elections across Quebec this Nov. 5, saying he wants to leave time for council to choose an interim mayor and make the transition.
Because the next general election is less than a year away, there will be no byelection.
Quebec law gives Westmount council 30 days to choose one of its members to replace Trent until the election. That means Trent’s last day on the job will likely be sometime in April.
The Association of Suburban Mayors, which speaks for the demerged suburbs on the island, will also have to find a new president now that Trent is leaving.
Jacques Duchesneau, the former Montreal police chief who has known Trent for 30 years, said his departure will be a loss to Westmounters, but also to anyone looking for positive role models on the integrity front among Quebec politicians.
“He’s Mr. Clean,” Duchesneau said of Trent. “A class act. This guy could have been a diplomat. He’s a leader, and most certainly the guy who can stand up for his values (and) principles. And you don’t have that many like that.”
Duchesneau said he worked closely with Trent in the 1980s and 1990s at what was then the Montreal Urban Community.
The MUC oversaw the islandwide police department. Trent was, among other titles, vice-chairman of the MUC from 1994 to 1998.
In 2010, Duchesneau recalled, Trent was the only elected official in Quebec to call for Laval’s thenmayor, Gilles Vaillancourt, to resign from the board of the Union des municipalités du Québec following allegations that Vaillancourt had offered cash-stuffed envelopes to two provincial political candidates. Vaillancourt refused to quit the umbrella group representing Quebec municipalities, so Trent quit the UMQ executive in protest.
Later, Vaillancourt resigned as mayor amid other allegations and was arrested by Quebec’s anticorruption
squad, UPAC, in 2013. He recently pleaded guilty to fraud, breach of trust and conspiracy charges and was sentenced to six years in prison.
Trent was first elected as councillor in Westmount in 1983 after three years of involvement in a local heritage battle. In 1991, he was cajoled by outgoing mayor May Cutler — a political foe — to run to succeed her.
In all, Trent ran for the mayoralty five times between 1991 and 2013 – and was acclaimed each time.
He decided not to seek a new term when the mergers were legislated by the Quebec government.
Even so, he polled as the most popular choice for mayor of the Montreal megacity in that election, held in 2001.
By the next election in 2005, Westmount and 15 other island suburbs had voted to demerge.
But it wasn’t until 2009 that Trent decided to run again.
It was during his political “exile” that Trent worked on “freeing ” Westmount from the megacity.
He enlisted retired judge Lawrence Poitras to write a report on the feasibility of demergers that landed at the start of the 2003 provincial election campaign and made demergers a campaign issue. The Liberals of Jean Charest won on a pledge to allow a mechanism for citizens to decide. However, Trent later fumed when the Liberals set a high bar for the referenda, requiring the votes cast in favour of demerger in a suburb to represent 35 per cent of its eligible voters and not just outnumber votes against.
In 2012, Trent published an opus on the merger/demerger battle. The 672-page book, The Merger Delusion, was a finalist for a prize as the year’s best Canadian political book.
“Westmount has been very fortunate to benefit from the leadership of a consummate professional,” federal Liberal MP Marc Garneau, one of Trent’s constituents, said in a statement to the Montreal Gazette.
“Principled, sometimes in challenging circumstances, Peter has made an enormous contribution to our city, one which speaks to his love and dedication for Westmount.”
Besides mergers, Trent has often expressed a disdain for political parties.
“Party solidarity muzzles elected officials and turns them into purveyors of pap and the party line,” he wrote in a 1999 opinion piece for the Montreal Gazette.
It’s unclear whether Westmount council will continue to eschew parties after his exit — which he jokingly calls “Trexit.”
Nevertheless, Trent says he’s leaving a municipality in strong financial shape.
Westmount is back to paying for infrastructure out of pocket, as it did before mergers and before Montreal began paying capital expenses by taking loans in its name.
For example, Westmount’s $41-million recreation centre opened in 2013 already paid for, just like the restoration and expansion of the Westmount Public Library in 1995.
For the first time, Westmount has zero net debt – meaning it has cash to pay remaining loans as they come due – even as its infrastructure investment has doubled in 2017, he said.
“I wouldn’t say everything’s done,” Trent said. But the next chapters will be written by someone else.