HENRY AUBIN - Louise Harel says that, despite earlier denials, she is thinking of running for mayor of Montreal. Oh boy.
Let's check out her record as it affects this city.
That record spans 1998 to 2002 when she was the Parti Québécois minister of municipal affairs with special responsibility for Montreal. Inspired by mayor Pierre Bourque's vision of une-île-une-ville, Harel spearheaded the Bouchard government's forced merger of Montreal Island's 28 municipalities.
The minister's promotion of the merger reveals a striking approach to leadership.
Harel spurned the opinion of the people most affected.
More precisely, she disregarded a demonstration in which tens of thousands of residents demanded that she consult them. She shrugged off five suburbs' non-binding referendums in which the vote against a merger ranged from 94 to 99 per cent. And she dismissed the fact her party had been elected without a mandate to carry out such a controversial step. Indeed, premier Lucien Bouchard had even disavowed any such intention before the previous election.
Harel rejected not only public opinion but also expert opinion.
The consensus of impartial research in North America and Europe is that forced mergers are counterproductive. Experience shows that as cities get bigger, their per-capita costs rise, their services become harder to manage, and citizens feel more remote from local government (as reflected in declining voter turnout). The minister did not heed this.
Indeed, when the Bédard task force - which she had set up - echoed this consensus, she ignored its advice against making the island a monolithic municipality.
Harel misled the public about the merger's benefits.
She argued that to be a global city Montreal had to keep up with "what is being organized" in other metropolises. She pointed in particular to Boston, touting it as an example of how a big municipality can attract prosperity. Her government even took out full-page newspaper ads suggesting that the formula of municipal organization that was working for Boston would work for Montreal.
The argument was preposterous. Fact: The municipality of Boston (pop. 560,000 at the time) was one-third as populous as Montreal Island. As well, its metropolitan region - more populous than Montreal's region - was divided into 238 municipalities, more than twice as many as here. In reality, then, Boston was practising exactly the reverse of what Harel claimed.
This was part of a pattern of half truths and absurdities. She claimed that a merger would keep Montreal in step with European cities (never mind that 34 European countries had signed a charter that repudiated forced mergers as undemocratic). That it would save money (Toronto's merger experience was showing the opposite). That it would curb urban sprawl (predictably, it has not). And that it would spread wealth from rich parts of the island to poor ones (when mergers were unnecessary to achieve such an end).
Harel rebutted critics by resorting to anglo-bashing.
An example occurred during a National Assembly debate. When Liberal Roch Cholette quizzed her on such non-ethnic, non-linguistic aspects of her proposed merger as taxes and local democracy, Harel erupted. She accused the Hull MNA of defending Westmount and its "anglo-British character, its old stench of colonialism."
Critics of mergers became running dogs of WASP culture. Never mind that such other anti-merger hotspots as Hull, Quebec City and the South Shore were largely francophone. (In all, the PQ merged 42 urban areas across Quebec.)
So much for how Harel oversaw the process leading up to the merger of Jan. 1, 2002. As for the actual product - the new city itself - it has achieved none of its goals.
Harel admits mega-Montreal is now "dysfunctional," but she blames this on the Liberal government's decentralization of 2004. Never mind that the megacity's problems had already started emerging by then: inefficiency, a net increase in bureaucrats across the island and degradation of services - everything the experts had prophesied.
Harel is a superb campaigner. She comes across as charmingly soft-spoken and gracious. But heed the record, not the smile. She is capable of authoritarian use of power, of rejecting empirical evidence if it does not suit her, of manipulating public opinion through far-fetched claims, and of vilifying adversaries with demagogic ethnic slurs.
All of this while leading Montreal in a counterproductive direction.
haubin@thegazette.canwest.com