Window on Westmount Web
Back to Back to Menu Best to use your Browser's 'BACK' key
Whenever government thinks it has a problem, or whenever voters tell politicians they must "do something" about something, officials often fall back on a time-honoured nostrum: the creation of a nice new structure. They'll give the new body some highfalutin generic name such as Agency, Council, Board, or Commission. The voters are happy because the "problem is being addressed". The politicians are happy, as it gives them another soapbox from which to remind the public that "something is being done". And the bureaucrats are happy, as they have yet another opportunity for promotion, new titles, more control...and, therefore, pay raises.
Sometimes, a new organization is the right answer; but the agencies, councils, and commissions that were created by previous responses to "do something" about the same problem are still very much with us. And each body winds up being run by bureaucrats. A board of directors is often a nice touch which lends the appearance of public control and accountability. 
The absurd notion shared by the electorate and politicians alike that governments can actually "create jobs" has led to an orgy of creating structures with precisely such a Pollyannaish goal in mind. The only thing these bodies accomplish is a convoluted form of income redistribution - after, of course, skimming off a goodly amount for operating costs.
An example of such a body is the Regional Development Council of the Island of Montreal. Put together a few years ago to act as a socio-economic planning device and to dispense government handouts, the CRDIM wasted no time in building up the requisite encrustation of bureaucrats. It costs them $1.4 million to give out $5.1 million of largesse - often to smaller organizations doing the same thing. Apathy at the top level has been such that they had to reduce quorum to only one-third of their 52 council-members. And I'm vice-chairman of this thing!
But I was supposed to talk about the MUC (of which I'm also vice-chairman). While nobody denies the need for an island-wide structure to furnish some common services, the MUC is a rather heavy-handed and sclerotic body that suffers from a structural overburden. It is also beset with appendages such as public commissions more noted for poor attendance and little media coverage than for any meaningful debate.
Stripped to its essence, the MUC provides police services. Its sister (daughter?) organization, the MUCTC, provides mass transit services. Aside from the $300 million pass-through the MUC contributes to the MUCTC, the latter is a stand-alone body, with its own chairman and public meetings. Speaking of standing alone, the MUC Police is also pretty much an autonomous body that would still function even if the whole MUC apparatus that sits on top of it were to disappear tomorrow morning.
Is that all the MUC does? Well, not really. Next week, we'll talk about what else it does, and what it should become.
What does the MUC do, other than provide police services and collect money to pay the MUCTC deficit? It's next most costly job is sewage treatment. We are finally treating all of the island's sewage - one of the finest (cynics would say the only) achievement of the MUC. But since the treatment plant runs by itself, it is really no longer a locus of political concern or control. It's just there, quietly filter-feeding on our muck.
What remains for the MUC to watch over are the runts of the litter, financially speaking. All its responsibilities other than police and sewage treatment amount to only 5% of its budget.
The municipalities on the island pay 80% of the care and feeding of the MUC, of which amount 43% is for the police, 37% for the MUCTC deficit, 8.7% for sewage treatment. Then comes administration at 3.2%, parks (2.8%), assessments (2.1%), Arts Council (1%), air/food inspection (0.4%), economic development (0.3%), and land-use planning (0.2%). The remaining 20% of the cost of the MUC is borne by Quebec, as they pay for most of the borrowing costs of sewage treatment and mass transit.
In a way, the most significant service rendered by the MUC has to do with income redistribution - from the rich cities to the poor, and from the suburbs to the central core. Whenever people accuse us suburbs of living off the central core, they never take this little-known mechanism into account. It works this way: cities fund the MUC in proportion to total evaluation and receive services based on population. Westmount contributes as much as Montreal North, which has four times our population.
So. What to do with the MUC? Here's the way I see it:
n The MUCTC should be folded into the MUC or sever its links. I tend to favour the latter. Right now, it is neither fish nor fowl. And with the new Metropolitan Transportation Agency covering the whole Greater Montreal Region (with twice the population of the MUC), ultimately the MUCTC, the Agency, and the gallimaufry of fourteen other transport boards should all combine to form a true Regional Mass Transit Authority.
n Waste water management could have been regionalized; that is, before Laval persuaded Quebec to foot the huge bill for its very own plant. It would have cost far less money for them to have hooked up to the MUC's plant, and we have extra capacity. Still, environmental controls should be regionalized. Air and water pollution is not confined to our island.
n Regional parks should be (logically) a regional or Provincial matter.
n The MUC Arts Council duplicates arts funding by local cities, Quebec and Ottawa. It should become a Provincial responsibility.
n Assessments should return to local control. We can do a better job.
n Economic development and land-use planning should be regionalized.
So the MUC would then become a body providing police services only. Everything else would be regionalized or given back to local cities.
In my home office, I don't have a filing system. I have a piling system. On any spare horizontal surface, I create piles of documents, each pile on a different subject. When these piles reach the height of apprehended collapse, they get a permanent home in binders, boxes, or a recycling bin.
Our society has mistaken information for knowledge. If information is organized data, then knowledge is organized information, and wisdom (one hopes) is organized knowledge. The computer, along with its partner in crime, the photocopier, spews out unimaginable quantities of data - and, if we're lucky, information. I don't know if we're any the wiser for it. This may be the age of information. It's clearly not the age of wisdom.
I tend to ruminate on the profligacy of today's information generators when I do my piling. Take my pile on Bill 102 - the slow-in-coming subject of today's column. This pile took only a year to reach the height of 12". I have trees that grow more slowly.
What is Bill 102, you might well ask? Bill 102 was the law creating the Metropolitan Transportation Agency. This law was concocted under the then-Minister of Transport, Jacques L‚onard; it was rammed down our throats by the next Minister, the unlamented Jean Campeau; it briefly became the responsibility of Minister Jacques Brassard; and recently it was inherited by Serge M‚nard. All this in the space of one year. Is it any wonder that our government gets run by bureaucrats rather than elected people, when you have Ministers changing jobs so fast?
The Metropolitan Transportation Agency will supposedly co-ordinate the mass transit offering and fares in the Greater Montreal Region - be they m‚tro, busses, or commuter trains. Originally, L‚onard wanted it run by a triumvirate of government appointees. He later relented and added two people representing local authorities - one from the Island of Montreal.
Campeau, in turn, rejected out of hand a counter-proposal prepared by local mayors - input which the draft law actually contemplated. It took us six months to put it together, and was a far more sophisticated approach to regional mass-transit cost sharing than the original law.
Then it was Serge M‚nard's turn. In spite of Bourque's objections, I had managed to get Yves Ryan, the chairman of the MUCTC, to be chosen as the Island's representative to the Agency. Last week, out of the blue, Menard informed me he had reservations about that choice on the grounds of "conflict of interest". How could one seriously suggest such a thing? The head of the MUCTC is there to protect our interests in an Agency controlled by Quebec. You might as well say I have a conflict of interest by being both Mayor of Westmount and vice-chairman of the MUC.
I fired off a pretty caustic letter to M. M‚nard. The Liberals managed to get a copy of this letter (not from me!) and brought it up in the National Assembly. Let's hope this thing ends more amicably than it started.
Much has been made, especially by this writer, of the loss of 200,000 people from the Island of Montreal from 1971 to 1991, all to the benefit of off-Island suburbs. The causes are known: the lure of lower taxes, personal security, more space. Some researchers say it's also the linguistic homogeneity off-Island that attracts francophones who don't find the cultural tossed salad in Montreal quite to their taste.
Whatever the cause, fewer people are paying for Montreal's fixed infrastructure and for the costs of keeping up an international city centre.
So let's just build more dwellings on the Island to regain our population, right? Not necessarily. This Rx is prescribed by just about everybody, including the minister responsible for the Montreal Region, Serge Menard.
The solution is not to build willy-nilly more and more dwellings. We lost that population not because the three little pigs went around huffing and puffing and blowing houses down. In actual fact, the number of dwellings on the Island has actually increased by 25% during the same period we lost those 200,000 citizens! The problem is that the number of people per dwelling has dropped like a stone. This is because younger families with children have been the ones to move their Penates, as the French say.
To reverse this trend, we have to make the Island attractive to young families. Concreting over greenspace, for example, is contraindicated.
Our rejection of CP's proposed eight-storey condo development in the 1.5% of Westmount that is undeveloped - the Glen yards - was not just based on the anticipated traffic and the unWestmount nature of yet another bland Nun's Island development. It was also based on our observation that young families do not in tall condos live.
Last week, I rushed to the defence of the mayor of Outremont when M. Menard made intemperate comments about Outremont's refusal to accept CP's dense development plans for their marshalling yards: a project five times the size of Glen Yards. M. Menard apologized to me the next day.
Mayor Unterberg has a lot on his hands, what with cost overruns on the library and theatre projects, and trying to pick his way through a maze of zoning changes. (Don't I know how rough that is!) But they're his problems to sort out. Even if M. Menard was "seduced" by the project, he should not have waded in, threatening to annex the yards to Montreal if Outremont continued to hold firm, all the while belittling the mayor. But it took guts for a minister to apologize publicly.
The Island of Montreal cannot offer the suburban dream of an $80,000 house surrounded by scads of grass (and a car for each member of the family). We can offer a richer, more varied, more culturally invigorating way of life, even to young families. But this means M. Menard must address the real issues of unequal tax burdens, government subsidies for cheap (off-Island) houses, and the (perceived?) lack of personal security.
Those who document the Gallicizing of English words, especially in France, get a lot of press coverage. Anyone keeping tabs on the Anglicizing of French words here in Quebec is treated as a pretty harmless drudge. But the list of Frenglish words continues to grow, and it even includes the non-word "francisation".
Take "morosity", for example. While only a few English-speakers would be guilty of using "aggressivity", I have made a number of sightings recently of "morosity" - even in a Gazette editorial. "Morosity" exists only in the superannuated sludge of the big Oxford. And, seemingly, here in Quebec. Maybe we are unconsciously blaming French for our moroseness!
Similarly, I have noticed a tendency among anglophone mayors to appropriate the French term "fusion", meaning amalgamation or merger. Actually, "fusion" suggests that some physical force is involved in the process: "merger" sounds much more like the product of a voluntary act, a happy joining of forces. So maybe they are on to something: up until now, the proposals from Quebec City to get smaller cities to merge smacked more of coercion than volition. As of last Friday, that's all changed.
I spent a couple of days last week in a workshop retreat in Three Rivers with the Minister of Municipal Affairs, R‚my Trudel. One of the major issues was amalgamations. Trudel and his predecessor, Guy Chevrette, had been bandying about the idea of wholesale mergers throughout Quebec, even suggesting mergers here on the Island of Montreal.
Well, I can tell you we'll not be seeing any local mergers - except, perhaps, Dorval Island. For, unlike the 416 small Quebec towns they have slated for mergers - if it's not done voluntarily, the government might take away their transfer payments -, those cities in urban agglomerations have been effectively spared. Mind you, we have a year to come up with merger plans, but there is no penalty for keeping the status quo.
In government, nomenclature is everything. And even the government is trading in the word "fusion" for the word "consolidation", which sounds so eminently logical and energy-efficient.
The minister has come to a wise conclusion. The plethora of towns and villages here in Quebec is a rural phenomenon. Not only do we have 67% of municipalities in Quebec with a population under 2000, but 19 to 44% of their revenues come from government transfers. If they want to continue to exist, they'd better do it by getting off this artificial life support that you and I are paying for. By the way, documented evidence of the elusive "economies of scale" can only be found when micro-municipalities (less than 500 people) combine to form bigger ones.
So the government is taking a new and reasonable orientation. I mean direction.
Apr Previous page
jun page
david.nicholson's
© 1997 by David T. Nicholson
Please phone (514)934-0023 for a human
or e-mail us your thoughts.
96may.htm Sunday, January 17, 1999
