City of Montreal council speaker Claude Dauphin (right) walks away from Mayor Gérald Tremblay (top) and his possible replacement Claude Trudel at a special council meeting in Montreal on Tuesday. The meeting was to find out if Dauphin would be suspended as speaker as Tremblay has said his former right-hand man is the subject of a provincial police investigation surrounding the awarding of a grant to a demolition firm doing business in Lachine, where Dauphin in also the mayor.
Photograph by: John Kenney, The Gazette
Another conclusion that one can't help but draw is that if Mayor Gérald Tremblay was, as he has repeatedly maintained, unaware of the goings-on, he is so out of touch with his own administration's activities that it amounts to dereliction of duty.
After weeks of adamantly denying that city administrators under his command have spied on elected officials, the mayor admitted this week that in fact the city's comptroller general, Pierre Reid, had been opening the emails of council speaker and Lachine borough mayor Claude Dauphin. Tremblay said he had only just had this confirmed to him by Reid, and this only after the illicit breach of Dauphin's confidential communications was reported by La Presse. In making the admission Tremblay further claimed that this had been done with the authorization of the provincial police, an assertion that was flatly denied in short order by the force.
This latest spying episode, which Municipal Affairs Minister Laurent Lessard qualified as patently illegal, follows a similar case of hacking by Reid, this time into the emails of the city's auditor general, Jacques Bergeron, which came to light in February. Since then rumours have been rampant at city hall that elected representatives were also targeted, only to be vigorously denied by the mayor. One might think he would have taken the trouble to inform himself whether this was being done, as indeed it was in at least Dauphin's case.
The city's director general and senior bureaucrat, Louis Roquet, should also have made it his business to know what was going on. Why has Roquet not been taken to task? And why did the mayor merely dismiss Reid as comptroller general on Monday but leave him in the city's employ? And how, you might reasonably wonder, with all of this questionable and even illegal behaviour having gone on right under his nose, can Tremblay still consider himself qualified to hold his job?
The spying on Dauphin was prompted by suspicions that there was something amiss in the awarding of a municipal grant to a local company for the demolition of a one-time dye factory and the decontamination of the land on which it stood in Lachine. The grant amounted to nearly $700,000, and if it was improperly awarded, certainly it is a serious matter. But if the city administration suspected impropriety, the right course of action would have been to turn the matter over to the police for investigation. And if hacking Dauphin's emails was deemed necessary, due process required the police to obtain authorization for such action from a judge.
(La Presse further reported this week that the administration had paid a private security firm to investigate former police chief Yvan Delorme based on suspicions about a contract to another private security firm that provided security at police headquarters. If the report is founded, the administration was once again in violation of due process. The correct procedure, clearly spelled out in the law governing cities and towns, is to refer the matter to the province's public-security minister for investigation.)
There is clearly a profound malaise at the top of this city's administration, one that appears beyond the capacity - or will - of the mayor and his senior officials to redress. What might best be done about it is for concerned citizens to begin organizing now to replace this inept bunch with a competent and honourable administration in the next civic election two years hence. As for higher authorities in Quebec City, thought should be given now to reforming Montreal's administrative structure and mandating greater transparency in its operation. A good start would be to downsize the ridiculously bloated city council and eliminate the current system of municipal parties that has led to so much corruption and waste.
Montrealers deserve better than this, much better. A better system for running their city, and better people to do the running.