Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
The following is excerpted from the upcoming The Merger Delusion: How Swallowing Its Suburbs Made an Even Bigger Mess of Montreal by Peter F. Trent.
And, indeed, this book
is not just about the City of Westmount, my Camelot lost and mostly
regained. Nor is it just about the formation, the reformation, and
the counter-reformation of the City of Montreal. Nor is it just about
Quebec, an enchanted world so full of contradictions and quirks
that even Jonathan Swift could not have dreamed it up. My story is also about how politics is played, how governments impose decisions,
and how bad ideas take root.That fateful December morning, the Quebec National Assembly
imposed municipal mergers throughout the province, mergers that
were to come into effect a year later. Then, 1 January 2006, some of
those same mergers were rather messily undone. For five years, successive
provincial governments made 212 municipalities dance the
merger and de-merger gavotte. When the music stopped, only thirty
of them had regained their freedom.Three people were responsible for this wholesale obliteration of
municipalities: Pierre Bourque, Louise Harel, and Lucien Bouchard.
In my least charitable thoughts, I think that the mayor of Montreal
in the 1990s, the otherworldly Pierre Bourque, was caught up in
his own sense of grandeur in trying to deliver what his idol, Mayor
Jean Drapeau, had failed to create in the 1960s: one city covering
the whole Island of Montreal. In that same sour frame of mind I
think that Louise Harel, the provincial minister responsible for putting
through the forced mergers and, notably, One Island One City,
wanted to do something monumental, all the while settling old grievances
against the “privileged” suburban cities. Lucien Bouchard, the
saturnine provincial premier, was fed up with the carping of truculent
and fractious municipalities and just wanted them to go away.
That his political party, the Parti Québécois (PQ) had no electoral
mandate to do so, and that his government had never formally consulted
the population, did not seem to bother him.
To learn more about The Merger Delusion, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
No comments yet.