June 10, 1999 

With all this talk of amalgamation, no one has explained just how getting bigger will improve the deplorable management of the City of Montreal - and that's whether we're talking one island, one city, or one island, five cities. (Now that the Provincial government has discovered that francophones only make up 53.8% of the Island population, and that number will soon drop below the magic 50%, it seems Quebec is (predictably) getting cold feet about having just one mayor ruling such a polyglot realm. It would become too big an impure-woollen power base.)

Bad management seems to have dogged Montreal over the years. Montreal in this century has been run by a series of populist mayors who spent money on extravagant projects, and whose city as a consequence regularly got put into trusteeship by the Provincial government. Médéric Martin, the mayor from 1914 to 1928, started this profligate tradition. He headed such a corrupt and bankrupt administration that the government stepped in, made him a figurehead, and ran the city from 1918 to 1921.

History repeated itself when Camillien Houde became mayor in 1928. He was in power - off and on - until 1954. He, too, ruled over a corrupt administration. The government put the city under trusteeship twice during his mandate. The second time, in 1940, the city was so much in debt that it could not redeem its maturing bonds.

With Jean Drapeau's election in 1954, the free-spending ways continued. He started to build the métro in 1961 before he got any sort of financial aid from the province or the suburbs. He got bailed out of Expo 67's overruns by a Federal government that contributed 75% of the cost. Then there were the costly children of Expo: remember Man and His World? And the fact that Montreal just had to have (and support) a baseball team? And then, shortly before the Olympics were to take place, the provincial government had to step in and take over Drapeau's grandiose plans and shaky management. Even though the government bailed out Montreal and picked up most of the billion-dollar tab, Montrealers still got stuck with a bill for $200 million.

A more subtle form of trusteeship was the creation of the MUC in 1970, which was Quebec's way of taking the police away from Montreal. This was the government's response to violent protests, both by police who felt they were underpaid compared to Toronto cops, and, later, by police and firemen furious with the city for holding back pension funds. The police actually going on strike was the final straw.

Even if personally austere, Drapeau had an extravagant, secretive, and autocratic political style. That, and the ravaging of the city's architectural heritage, led to the rise of Jean Doré. But spending, fuelled this time by out-of-date leftist doctrine, continued apace. Socialism replaced imperialism. Even if well-meaning, Doré's party wanted to spend their way to prosperity. To be continued.

The best the amalgamationists come up with (other than the "too many cities" non-argument) is that it would rid Montreal of all those suburban parasites. Oh, yes. And it would also create a uniform tax rate. A uniformly high tax rate, I might add. Since when is the mere fact of uniformity a virtue?

Kathryn Quilico and Peter F. Trent aka Mayor Hon. Eustache Prud'homme, senator

27 May Menu page

• Menu of Trent's Stories
  
  
• March 21, 1999 GAZETTE EDITORIAL
  
• MAY 1999 URBICIDE AND MEGACITY MANIA
  
• May 13 PARTS OF IT ARE EXCELLENT
  
• May 27 MONTREAL: MISDIRECTION GENERAL
  
• Jun 10 BREAD AND CIRCUSES…AND DEBT AND TRUSTEESHIP
• Jun 24 ONLY QUEBEC CAN HELP MONTREAL
  
• Apr 8 MEGACITY MANIA - PART II
  
• May 13 PARTS OF IT ARE EXCELLENT