November 13, 1997 

Last week I got a letter - along with a petition signed by 45 Westmount-ers - that made a plea for fixing up the arena and swimming pool. The petition stated that, if a choice must be made between work on Victoria Hall or on an improved sports centre, the latter should be our priority. While the letter writer had nothing but praise for the library renewal project, he said it was time for other things. The pool and rink are overused and in poor shape. He went on to say he has "fully supported most if not all of the policies City Council and you have adopted during the last few years", so this was a letter written in a friendly and fair tone.

My correspondent did aim a gentle zinger in my direction: "to become involved in the public sports complex would represent a particular challenge to you, in that your personal lack of interest in sports activities is legendary". His use of the word legendary is "colloquial", or so harr-umphs the Oxford Dictionary. So I prefer a purist's definition of legend-ary: "connected with a popular but unfounded belief".

No, I'm not interested in sports, if by sports one means the vicarious act of watching a bunch of males sweat together. My interest, therfore, in professional hockey, baseball or (God forbid) basketball is nil. I never read the sports pages. Taxi-drivers or well-intentioned lunch companions often assume - based solely on the evidence that I'm male - that I must be upset when the Habs lose, or that I can't wait to know all about the batting average of some tobacco-chewing American dressed in an Expos uniform.

But I do believe in playing sports oneself. I also think sports are great for kids, and serve as a way of knitting together our community. So upgrading our sports facilities falls right in line with Council's objective of boosting Westmount's community feeling and trying to attract young families. My correspondent has obviously never seen me race at Family Day, or do over one hundred laps of the rink in 40 minutes at the Scout's skate-o-thon. He, mercifully, has also never seen me play tennis. Or jog.

So maybe I'm not a real jock. Neither am I a library-user. Yet it's fair to say that I was instrumental in making the $7.5 million library project happen. So not being a jock in no way stops me from getting behind the idea of renewing our sports facilities. Even if I may not always use them.

And it's not a question of either Victoria Hall or the arena. In fact, in 1996, we developed a rough draft of a plan to upgrade all city buildings. The arena was slated for a $5 million upgrading in 2002 - only four years away, folks. Since we will have to spend $650,000 replacing the refrigeration system in 1998, we have decided to start the planning process now. After all, six years elapsed from the time it was decided that work needed to be done on the library and the date of its completion. Ditto Vic Hall.

Under Councillor Lulham, an internal committee has been formed to report on options regarding the arena. We'll then start public consultation.
Please see Peter F. Trent's Letter that outlines the project.

A TAX HIJACK AND A RED HERRING

November 20, 1997 

The $500-million tax hijack by Quebec - reduced by popular demand to a mere $375-million - is slowly fading out of the news. But the story had legs - it lasted six months, long enough to inflict quite a bit of damage on the PQ, enough damage to cause Premier Bouchard to step in and take over the management of this downloading exercise from Trudel.

Well, it's still not over. We are still saying NO. The Conference of Suburban Mayors is even looking into the possibility of a legal challenge, on the ground that we municipalities can't take taxpayers' money and turn it over to Quebec to do with it what they will. The way I see it, we, by law, must return local tax money in the form of local services.

I am also suggesting to my fellow mayors to adopt 1998 budgets that do not take into account this bill from Quebec. It would be most illogical to continue to refuse our share of Trudel's bill, and, concurrently, make provision for it in our budgets. In extremis, if all our efforts come a cropper and Quebec just takes the money from us, we can always adopt a supplemen-tary budget sometime next year that would also take into account any savings in employee costs that Trudel originally said he would help us with. This way, we would send out a "Trudel tax bill" (or a "Bouchard bill") that would clearly reflect the cost of this craven shirking of provincial responsibility. I just hope the mayors representing cities in PQ ridings off the Island do likewise. Nothing concentrates the voter's mind like an extra tax bill just before election time.

So, worst case, we're now looking at a tax increase of around 6.5%.

I can claim partial credit for getting Westmount's bill cut by $1,093,000 per year, thereby avoiding an additional 2.5% increase in your tax bill. This is because the original calculations included Westmount's purchases of electricity. I made the case to the deputy minister that, for the eight cities in Quebec that distribute electricity, the downloading formula of 5.78% of our expenses should not include our utility oper-ations.

However, Westmount does get penalized for good manage-ment. The formula finally adopted - thanks to the Union des Municipal-ités du Québec - removes debt service costs from the calcula-tion. So cities with very low debt like Westmount pay more, and heavily indebted cities like Laval, where 36% of the budget goes for debt, pay less.

A "red herring" refers to the practice of dragging a smoked herring across a fox's trail, destroying its scent for the following hounds. The new minister of the Montreal region, Robert Perrault, has come up with a dandy red herring to get the media loping off in another direction: he is hell-bent for leather on merging the three transit corporations.

If you can stand me partially mixing smelly fish metaphors, Perreault thereby hopes to turn the downloading story into a shotten herring - a herring that had voided its spawn, and is therefore useless. We'll see.

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BUNDLING UP FOR WINTER

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November 27, 1997 

Americans are sensible in celebrating Thanksgiving today - or rather over the next four days. Faced with the prospect of winter, they can fold in on themselves a bit, reflect, and generate a mutual warmth. Up here, we confront the oncoming bleakness without the benefit of a family holiday.

Last week, though, brought a mild spell. A walk around Westmount revealed a very late autumn pretending to be very early spring. What gave it away were the fallen maple leaves on the street surface, macerated by passing cars, layered over by a mush of brown and white melting snow. Here and there, some dried leaves clung to branches. And, by the way, are those clumps of leaves high up in tree branches really squirrels' nests?

It was mid-November: no longer autumn, not really winter. Undone work outdoors seems to stand out, without the artifice of summer foliage and flowers. While the lack of make-up shows the rugged beauty, the good bone structure of nature, it's the man-made things that look a bit worn. Peeling paint, crumbling mortar in crazy paving, dirty windows: they look at me accusingly, stuff I should have seen to before winter set in.

I did tie up some bushes into straggly fascicles. I fought with strips of recalcitrant snow fence, forcing them around the yews, getting not just a green thumb for my pains, but also green fingers. I managed to cover some plants in burlap. I like its musty smell and honest no-colour look. But the cocomatting remains rolled up, and not rolled out. And there are still clumps of dessicated flowers with brown deadheads, and a yellow carpet of Norway maple leaves covering the grass. A larch - the only deciduous conifer, I'm told - insists on dropping its beige needles well after the snow falls. They get tracked in all over the house.

I'm beginning to think that the annual wrapping-up of bushes for winter should be considered a minor art form. After all, you have the geometric school - all rectangles and pyramids. Then there's the deconstructionists with their exposed iron posts clearly supporting tautly-draped canvas. The minimalist school makes do with a simple hempen string to tie up bushes - like the understated single-strand necklaces of Country Life brides-to-be. The modernist school goes in for orange polyethylene snow fencing or new white tarpaulin. The arty-crafty bunch likes open-weave homespun and old broom-handles. The aboriginally-inspired school opts for wooden-slat teepees and white polystyrene-foam igloos. The religious school can be identified by sackcloth and sashes, or water-stained and blackened burlap shrouds that look as if they'd been handed down through generations.

We could give out prizes for the most artisically-wrapped bushes in the same way we judge ice sculptures or Xmas tree-trimming.

Ah, but I think ahead to next spring when all this greenery is released from its winter confinement, and the world looks fresh again.

 

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MUC, MERGERS AND MEGACITIES

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December 4, 1997 

According to some, we must, lemming-like, follow the "lead" of Toronto and be stampeded into creating our very own, made-in-Quebec megacity. One city covering the island of Montreal. The glories that would be ours had we just had the courage to take the plunge are, once again, being touted by a hardly disinterested party - the mayor who would be mayor of us all: none other than Mayor Bourque. Even if overcome by nausea, please, dear reader, forge on.

Last Sunday, under the headline, "Bourque would like to be mayor of all the island and its suburbs," our would-be leader managed to share the folllowing gems with La Presse: "Amalgamation can bring about so many advantages that (Ontario Premier) Harris is ready to do the same thing to Hamilton and Ottawa. And meanwhile, we (in Montreal) will continue to tear each other apart." He then was moved to make the following observation: "Take the residents of Westmount. They are, above all, Montrealers. They work downtown, they have a Montreal culture. In fact, you can’t get more Montreal in nature than the people of Westmount!"

Which brings me - slowly - to the point of this column. The way I see it, Harris managed to get away with the highly-unpopular merger of the six Toronto cities owing to a very popular by-product: it meant the elimination of Metro Toronto, their bloated version of the MUC. Harris killed seven birds - especially the peacock - with one stone.

Fortunately, back home, the MUC is not as hated as Metro Toronto. (Although, as you know, I am far from being its biggest fan.) Had it been otherwise, we would see even more support for a one-island one-city concept as a way of getting rid of the MUC. If we regard the MUC as a service co-operative, there will be little pressure to get rid of it through Island amalgamations. On the other hand, if the hegemony of the MUC continues to grow, aided by talk of an MUC fire brigade, the island would be that much closer to becoming just one magacity.

Is the MUC juggernaut under control? Because of tight budgeting, member cities’ contribution to the MUC has dropped by $39 million since 1993. But $21 million of that will come from cutting its contribution to the MUCTC, plus another $10 million of new user-fees. So the real cut to our apportionments to the MUC is only $8 million. And that assumes the MUC will find the money that is needed for a break-even 1998 budget. And even those "savings" came at the cost of cutting our police force from 4,384 in 1993 to a mere 4,022 in 1997.

And the MUCTC made some of those savings by upping metro and bus fares, revenues for which went up by some 15 per cent since 1993. But buses travelled 8 per cent fewer miles and the metro moved 11 per cent less. Meanwhile the MCUTC debt will go from $217 million in 1993 to $482 million by 1998.

Is the MUC yet under control? We still have a way to go.

 

Amalgamation by Peter F. Trent