In getting elected November 1, especially by such an impressive margin, Pierre Bourque has broken all the rules in politics. Except the first one: there are no rules.

Certainly it has given the lie to what I and my elected brethren consider to be a political maxim: if the media dislike you, there is still some hope of redemption; but if they laugh at you, you're toast. For a year, Bourque was the butt of ridicule in the newspapers. This relegation to the scribbler's purgatory of derision did not seem to hurt him one bit during the election.

Significantly, the electronic media did not nor could not make fun of Bourque: TV has yet to create its version of the political cartoon, for one thing. And TV has no editorials. The point of all this is that most voters don't read newspapers. They watch TV and listen to radio. And, as well, by indefatigably working the neighbourhoods, the populist Bourque won the hearts of people. A municipal campaign is still very much a ground war.

Another received wisdom is that you need a machine, a stable political party to win. Much was made of the disarray of Vision Montreal. But Bourque is the master of the nonce party. People join, quit, or are thrown out of his party with great regularity. It's the political equivalent of Brownian motion - the random movement of particles in a fluid. But it works. That's because parties have no place in municipal politics. They are an artificiality, a construct introduced by Drapeau to suit his own designs.

The tradition in politics, whether federal, provincial, or municipal, is that a bureaucrat rarely becomes a politician (and never vice versa). It was felt an elected official should "come from the outside" to oversee the bureaucracy. Bourque certainly broke that mould. And his competitor Duchesneau, too. This phenomenon of civil servant becoming civil master is not limited to Montreal. Five Montreal Island suburban mayors work or worked for a municipality before becoming mayor. Certainly they can rely on a pension to supplement their exiguous (or, in Bourque's case, renounced) mayor's salary, and they understand the workings of local government.

However he did it, Bourque is back in the saddle - with nary a burr. And he seems to want to mix it up with the Island suburban mayors. He recently announced ex cathedra he would put his man in to head up the MUCTC, ignoring Mayor Ryan who, by tradition, has another four years. Perhaps the last thing Bourque the annexationist wants is peace between us. By picturing us as obstreperous and parochial, he can go to Quebec asking, "who will free me from these turbulent mayors?". The only solution is "one island one city". The Ministry of Municipal Affairs has for years planned Island mergers. So with the complicity of a more-assured Bourque and another (gulp!) PQ regime, the pressure to amalgamate will continue.

Let's hope, in this respect, the only victory he savours is his election.

Nov12 14 Jan 99

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• Menu of Trent's Stories
• September 3, 1998 SOUND BEGETS FURY
  
• 2 Oct TAXATION BY MISREPRESENTATION
  
• 12 OCT on $500,000,000 TAX GRAB Tax grab turns into burlesque
  
• 16 OCT A MEETING WITH BOUCHARD