Candidates off and running for Gatineau city council
Goneau, Tassé target incumbent, could split anti-Pedneaud-Jobin vote
It’s election time across the river.
The City of Gatineau’s election pre-game show was officially underway at dawn, meaning candidates can register for the Nov. 5 vote.
Hopefuls have until the end of Friday, Oct. 6 to file their papers, but already there are five candidates for mayor: incumbent Maxime Pedneaud-Jobin, city councillors Sylvie Goneau and Denis Tassé, senior federal bureaucrat Clément Bélanger, and the treasurer from the village of Bowman, Rémi Bergeron.
The youngest candidate for councillor appears to be Edmond Leclerc, 18, a student from Buckingham.
It will be the city’s first publicly funded election campaign — a move intended to reduce the influence of individual donors after the provincial Charbonneau Commission on corruption in the construction industry heard evidence that under-the-table gifts from companies greased the wheels of politics in Quebec.
The election pre-game show kicks off as the sun rises on Friday, when Gatineau’s municipal campaign officially gets underway and candidates can register. Voting day is Nov. 5. The list of candidates isn’t final yet because they have until the end of Friday, Oct. 6 to file their papers.
Barring last-minute entries, there is a bumper crop of five candidates for mayor, two of whom are newcomers to the city’s municipal scene. They are: incumbent Mayor Maxime Pedneaud-Jobin;
Sylvie Goneau, currently the councillor for Bellevue;
Denis Tassé, currently councillor in Touraine;
Clément Bélanger, a senior bureaucrat on leave from Public Services and Procurement Canada;
and Rémi Bergeron, who lives in Gatineau but works as secretarytreasurer of the village of Bowman, north of the city.
With no burning, make-or-break issue so far, debate has meandered around taxes, efficiency and infrastructure.
Pedneaud-Jobin, who has been mayor for one term, wants an eventual crossing of Ottawa’s LRT to west-end Gatineau (basically Aylmer) but says Aylmer can’t wait another 10 years to get this project done because there is a “crying need” for transit improvements now. This should be the top transportation priority of the next council, but it will take cash and at least another year to bring major improvements, he said.
His party, Action Gatineau, has promised to spend $13 million to extend Gatineau’s cycling network over the next four years. That’s a little more than the amount the city spent on new bike paths in the current term of office.
Gatineau covers 61 kilometres end-to-end.
Overall, Action Gatineau says it will raise taxes by 2.9 per cent in 2018 and by 2.5 per cent in each of the following three years.
Growth is booming in the western communities, and Goneau has criticized Gatineau’s transportation planning. The plans always say everything is going to be rosy, she says. Then the homes are built and the transportation problems show up.
She has been vocal during and after this year’s catastrophic flooding. Gatineau, backed up by financial aid from the province, is allowing flooded homeowners to rebuild on the same sites as before. But Goneau, whose own home was flooded, says the city has been sluggish in helping flood victims, causing delays in the repairs.
She has been supporting the rights of everyone in the flood zone to rebuild, even those whose homes had to be destroyed.
She also says repeated annual tax increases of 2.9 per cent are too high, and that the city’s snow clearing isn’t adequate.
Tassé claims Pedneaud-Jobin hasn’t been open enough, for example in the case of the new $79-million hockey arena that was negotiated with one company
without calling for tenders; and that he is confrontational.
He says he wants to lead a less fractious council, to boost economic growth and to spend heavily on infrastructure.
With Goneau and Tassé both attacking the current mayor’s record, the question is whether they and the two new mayoral candidates will split the anti-Pedneaud-Jobin vote.
Bélanger has said he wants to build a Gatineau that acts like a major Quebec city (it is the province’s fourth-largest) and not like a bedroom community of Ottawa. You want one of those, he told reporters, you should go to Kanata or Orléans.
He says specifics of his platform will emerge during the campaign.
Bergeron wants improvements to the city’s 311 phone system, and promises a system of continuous improvement based on consultations with residents and city staff.
Since two current councillors have jumped into the mayoral race, this opens up vacuums in their two districts — Bellevue and Touraine.
As well, François Tremblay is retiring from politics, leaving La Baie with no incumbent.
There’s only one formal party — Action Gatineau — but several other current councillors say they will form an informal “team.” These include Daniel Champagne, Gilles Carpentier, Mike Duggan, and a mix of current councillors and new challengers. Newcomers in the team include Pierre Lanthier, a former police officer who was the Gatineau force’s spokesman, running in Bellevue; and Audrey Bureau in Aylmer.
The youngest candidate for councillor appears to be Edmond Leclerc, 18, a student from Buckingham.