It's not easy, in the short-attention-span theatre known as politics, to look past the next election.
But the real question now at Montreal city hall is not really who will win on Nov. 1, much less how to fix the water grid. The real question is how to fix the way the city operates, no matter who's in the swanky wood-panelled first-floor office next year.
Monday night, city auditor-general Jacques Bergeron as much as said the city's $355-million water contract should be scuttled. Yesterday Mayor Gérald Tremblay killed it, parted ways with two senior officials, and asked a third for an "action plan" to fix purchasing.
The mayor was all business at his press conference, but repeated a little too often the auditor's observation that elected officials did not have all the information they needed before they agreed to the contract.
The mayor seemed to wrap himself in a cloak of ignorance about the contract terms, as if not knowing made him blameless. But any fool knows not to sign a $355 million - or $600 million - contract if you haven't read it.
We don't suggest that Tremblay and the executive committee should master every clause of every contract. But somebody should, specifically officials in the city's corporate-affairs and legal departments. But much of that work, it turns out, has been subcontracted to the private sector. The legal department was, shockingly, left out of the loop on the biggest city contract ever.
So, of course, were the opposition and the public, because of the usual rigid secrecy at the executive-committee level.
The city's purchasing system, evidently every bit as feeble as one of Montreal's leaky old water pipes, plainly needs major repairs. But that's just a start. Tremblay cannot be allowed to ignore the blue whale in the room: How can the mayor and executive committee have so little understanding of what their civil service is doing? Why were they not aware the deal had been sweetened - at taxpayers' expense - just weeks before signing? Does secretive centralized control still seem wise?
This contract needed to be cancelled, whatever that might cost. And let's face it: Cost over-runs on government contracts are not exactly a novelty. But it seem obvious that murky doings at Montreal city hall will persist as long as our highly-centralized way of running the city persists. Who's would do what to open up the process? That's the real election question Montrealers need to have answered.