What is this the shape of?
And, for you smarty pants who already know, a tougher follow-up: why is it shaped like this?
UPDATE: This is, of course, a map of the town of Côte Saint-Luc. Those things on the right are exclaves, little pockets of Côte Saint-Luc land sandwiched between Hampstead and Montreal. They're tiny, but their history is one of controversy, bad blood, political power struggles and, of course, money.
Plateau borough mayor Luc Ferrandez went on a bit of a rant Saturday on his blog about the media's handling of a story about changes to parking regulations. Apparently a Radio-Canada story was exaggerated with its headline, a Presse Canadienne story and an Astral Media story just re-reported the RadCan story without checking it, and everyone went crazy over a non-story that's had no new developments since the election.
The outburst was enough for an Agence QMI story to be written about Ferrandez's reaction (the QMI story quotes 24H, apparently unable to read Ferrandez's blog for itself).
UPDATE (Jan. 10): Ferrandez has cut out the media-critical part of that post, explaining in another that it was un-mayor-like. To me, the best part about Ferrandez is that he's un-mayor-like. But maybe it rubbed a few people the wrong way.
It's funny (and unusual) for us regular folk to see a politician air these annoyances publicly like this. Normally they just call the reporter directly, or call the reporter's manager, or complain to friends. If the case is serious enough, they might write a letter to the editor.
But what strikes me about Ferrandez's post is that this is part of his education process as a rookie borough mayor. He's not used to the idea of the media getting a story wrong and that error propagating more quickly than it can be stopped.
As much as I'd like to defend journalists and the media here, to say that he's got it all wrong, instead I can only offer that he should get used to this. This isn't the last time he'll be misquoted, not the last time someone will get the story wrong because they went for the sensationalism over caution, were lazy or just confused.
Journalists are human. They make mistakes. And with all the cutbacks in the news business these days, those mistakes are going to get worse.
From February 2008: Will all weekends be like this?
The snow hit the fan Tuesday morning, with La Presse reporting that Projet Montréal plans to change its snow removal policy for the Plateau and Ahuntsic-Cartierville (the two boroughs it holds the mayor's seat for).
Instead of paying expensive overtime and equipment charges, the borough would increase the minimum amount of snowfall before they bring in the dump trucks from 8 to 15 centimetres. They would also no longer truck away snow on weekends, instead leaving it until Monday, to save money.
Note that this applies to snow removal, not snow clearing. The plows will still push snow to the side of the street and clear the way for traffic. What this will affect is parking, which tends to get creative when there are snowbanks.
Note also that this won't apply to major thoroughfares, which are the central city's responsibility, and so probably won't apply to most places travelled by city buses.
But small residential streets that get significant snowfall on weekends might have to live with it for a day or two more.
Despite the reported non-trivial savings this move would create ($500,000 to $1 million, by Projet's estimate), the reaction has been negative (or, at least, skeptical). Tristan Péloquin did a video streeter for Cyberpresse and only found one person who thought it was a good idea. Catherine Handfield found merchants whining about how a lack of parking would affect their businesses. Even Patrick Lagacé picks up the flag of the Pro Car Party (albeit reluctantly, and with a tiny car), saying snow clearing is expensive but needs to be done.
Even though I'm perhaps a little biased because I don't have a car, I'm willing to give Projet Montréal the benefit of the doubt and let them try this plan. I'm just as skeptical as the rest, in fact I have an added concern: If the idea is to save money by trucking away snow only during business hours, wouldn't that cause incredible traffic chaos? Plus, why can't truck drivers be regularly scheduled to work on weekends?
This is the first major policy initiative that Projet Montréal has come up with since the election, and unlike many of its promises during the campaign, it's a logical, conservative, money-saving idea rather than a bold vision for massive spending. If we're going to use their control of the Plateau borough as a testing ground for their eventual control of the city, we need to let them try stuff. If it fails, they can always switch it back with relatively little work.
Part of this plan that intrigues me is also how Projet is going about it. While the Tremblay regime would just declare it a fait accompli and present it to city council, backing down only under overwhelming public protest like they did the Park Ave. name change, Projet is setting up a public consultation, Dec. 16 at 7 p.m. at the police brotherhood office on Gilford St.
Luc Ferrandez, the Plateau mayor, has also taken to his blog to get his message out directly to the citizens, bypassing the media filter. While I don't think La Presse or other media got anything wrong here, hearing directly from a politician on his own terms can help people understand a bit more of the context and reasoning behind Projet's plan. This is a clear example of why Ferrandez was right not to shut down his blog after the election.
Even if this project fails, doing so with democratic principles and by deferring to common sense would go a long way toward showing responsible leadership on behalf of Projet Montréal.
For the sake of municipal budgets, let's hope this idea is a lot smarter than everyone thinks it is.
Before a week ago, Benoit Labonté liked the attention.
But then, journalists started to discover things about him.
The timing wasn't a coincidence. According to anonymous sources that came forward, Labonté's constant criticism of Mayor Gérald Tremblay and his Union Montreal party as being corrupt was a hypocrisy too outrageous not to be challenged.
When reports by Rue Frontenac's Fabrice de Pierrebourg (confirmed by Radio-Canada but ignored by TVA) and TVA's Paul Laroque came out that Labonté asked for and received large cash contributions from city contractors (including the water-meter-infamous Tony Accurso) while he was running for the leadership of Vision Montreal in 2008, Labonté's first reaction was from the standard politician playbook: deny, deny, deny.
It's a no-brainer. Either he's telling the truth that this is a smear campaign against him, or he's lying. But if he's lying, then the crime will destroy his political career and nobody will care about the coverup.
When Labonté said he would step down, supposedly to prevent being a distraction to his party, it was pretty obvious to everyone he was guilty. Innocent people don't resign during an election campaign because of false charges.
But the media had to play along. Without absolute proof of his guilt, they couldn't report what they were all thinking privately.
When Louise Harel accused Rue Frontenac and others of outright lying, as if these news organizations would all risk their reputations on such a serious accusation without conclusive evidence, nobody could say that was bullshit. When she blamed Union Montreal for making up a story, the media had to assume that was a possibility. (Of course, Union Montreal could very well have had a hand in this story, but they certainly didn't make it up.)
And so everyone had to act surprised when, a day later, Harel announced she asked Labonté to resign as a candidate for Vision Montreal. (Because the nomination period has ended, Harel could not replace Labonté on the ballot. So the Ste. Marie district of Ville-Marie will have no Vision Montreal city councillor to vote for.)
During her press conference, Harel made it a point to "saluer" the work of investigative journalists, supposedly the same ones she had called liars the day before. She offered no apology for attacking their reputations the day before.
Neither did Labonté, who went tell-all in an interview with Radio-Canada television four days later.
I'm sure Rue Frontenac, TVA and Radio-Canada won't lose any sleep over it. But Harel and Labonté called them liars. They threatened to sue. They attacked the integrity of these organizations. Even though Labonté still denies taking money, it's clear he attacked them to save his own skin. Don't they deserve an apology?
They didn't get one that I could see, even though Labonté did his interview ostensibly to save his reputation.
Only a politician would think he could save his reputation while at the same time admitting he outright lied to people about his integrity.
And yet, journalists are treating his two-hour interview (which Radio-Canada has decided to show excerpts of but not air or put online in its entirety yet) as if he's come clean and can be trusted. Even though this interview contains such hard-to-believe statements as he lied to protect his party. So all the accusations he's levelled against Gérald Tremblay suddenly have a new air of trustworthiness to them.
I certainly wouldn't take Labonté's accusations against Tremblay at face value, even now that he really has nothing to lose by finally being honest with us. Nor do I take the statements of disgruntled former Vision Montrealers that they warned Harel about Labonté with anything other than a giant grain of salt. But Labonté's statement (supposedly quoting Tremblay) that this kind of corruption is what municipal politics is all about, that makes a lot of sense.
A poster plastered on the Champ de Mars metro window
So now that we know the problem, what do we do? Gérald Tremblay thinks he can clean up city hall, an absurd statement if I've ever heard one. Louise Harel still thinks she can sweep up the corruption, even though she was clueless about her right-hand man.
And Richard Bergeron, whose party hasn't been touched by a corruption scandal yet (notably because he's the only member of that party who's ever been elected) sees his numbers slowly climb in the polls.
I don't think Gérald Tremblay is corrupt. Nor Louise Harel. Nor Richard Bergeron. But if the past few weeks and months have shown us anything, it's that leaders can't always account for the actions of members of their parties.
Both Tremblay and Harel were let down by high-ranking politicians. If they can't trust them, how can they trust all 102 people running as city and borough councillors? Can any of the three parties really vouch for the integrity of that many people?
In Quebec City, the grandstanding is just as theatrical. Pauline Marois is calling for a public inquiry with a kind of urgency that suggests it can't wait until after the elections. Jean Charest wants to wait for police investigations to end first, and hasn't committed to anything.
We need a public inquiry. But it needs to be about more than municipal corruption, and it needs to be about more than Montreal. We need an inquiry into the whole system of municipal politics.
It's clear from the actions of politicians of late that they simply can't be trusted. We need to, from now on, work under a system that simply assumes that they are corrupt. Rather than punish people when the truth eventually comes out (because in many cases it doesn't), we need a system that has roadblocks in place to stop every step of this.
I was under the impression such a system was already in place. There's a reason that donations to politicians can't be made by giving that politician money. Instead, all funds must go through the "agent officiel", who keeps track of it. If such a system isn't in place for leadership campaigns, or for parties in general outside of election periods, then it needs to be.
According to Vision Montreal's website, the party has raised $300,000 from 1,180 donors. Union Montreal has raised about $105,000 from 297 donors (though that list hasn't been updated in two weeks). I don't know if that's enough to run an election in a city this size (even if you're not putting up posters). It's $1,000-$3,000 per candidate.
Not only do I not know if I can trust that this represents all the money going into party coffers, I can't trust that all this money really originates from the people named in those lists. And I don't know who those people are. I don't have time to call 1,000 people and ask if they have any connections with the construction industry.
This inquiry also needs to look to the other side of the equation. If politicians are getting money off the books, how can they spend this money without arising suspicion? Is the money being laundered somehow? Are they buying things outside the official party structure? If so, measures need to be in place to stop it.
We also need to take a step back and ask ourselves if the party system in general makes sense in municipal politics. We need to ask if political parties should be able to accept donations or if they should be entirely funded by the government (presumably based on how many votes they got the last time). We need to look at the way construction contracts are assigned. We need to ask if the contracting of construction work (rather than doing things in-house) makes sense.
In short, we need to look at everything.
Nine days before the election, it's too late to start now. But starting Nov. 2, the file needs to be opened. The problem is too systemic for whoever is elected mayor to fix it from the inside, no matter their honourable intentions. And you can bet it's in a lot more places than Montreal.
Of course, there's no need to take my word for it. The Gazette's City Eye blog is developing a top 10 list of things to do to combat corruption, taking suggestions from the audience and talking to experts. #1 on the list is the public inquiry, but other items are worthy of note.
Both Union Montreal and Vision Montreal have an element on their platforms that some technologically-inclined Montrealers might find interesting: free (or cheap) wireless Internet access in public parks and other public areas.
The idea isn't new. The city first approached the volunteer group Ile Sans Fil more than two years ago to talk about setting up such a system. Ile Sans Fil provides free wireless Internet through more than 150 access points in the city, most through places like coffee shops who pay ISF a small fee.
The city has even conducted studies and hearings on the subject, and a presentation given in November 2007 resulted in only one comment, in support of the project. In a report, filed at the beginning of 2008 (PDF), the city's commission on economic development recommended setting up a network with Ile Sans Fil.
For various reasons internal to the city's operation, this issue has been sitting on a shelf since then. ISF even appealed to the public in August 2008, (perhaps prematurely), though specifying that the group wasn't in danger if the deal fell through. ISF were expecting a call for tenders earlier this year on a free wifi project, which it would then bid on and be a clear favourite for, but it never came.
Both Tremblay and Harel should be somewhat embarrassed to have this on their platforms. Tremblay because the city hasn't acted on this yet despite the preliminary work being done, and Harel because it was an idea of the Tremblay administration that her party has now stolen.
I was invited for a short interview on the Ric Peterson Show on CJAD today. For those who missed it (which I imagine is about everyone), the audio is here: Me on the Ric Peterson Show (MP3)
Apparently Mr. Peterson finds this blog interesting and informative about local issues (joke's on him, I'm just some moron on the Internet), so he asked me a few questions about the big city council meeting tonight and the city's new ethics hotline. (My uneducated take in brief: it sounds cool, but experiences in other cities show such hotlines aren't worth the cost.)
I started off the interview pointing out that even if people were interested, they couldn't watch this meeting live. No electronic media - TV, radio or online - are broadcasting this meeting. Not even VOX, LCN, RDI, Info 690 or CJAD. There was plenty of live coverage of tonight's preseason Canadiens game (two television networks and three radio stations, by my count), however. Gives you an idea about priorities.
Even the city's own website doesn't provide live streaming. The best you get are video clips posted online after the fact.
So if you want to watch the meeting, you have to be in the building. That's kind of sad. Not that most people would sit down and watch a council meeting from start to finish (especially when there's the season premiere of House), but you'd think we could find some space in the 500-channel universe to what news people pretend to be the biggest news story of the week.
The media is, of course, at the meeting and will report on it. The Gazette is quasi-live-blogging it. Radio and TV are providing updates as part of regular news reports.
But all of them are providing a filter on this news, instead of letting us see it for ourselves.
Union Montreal's "English" website
I got an email Friday morning, just as the municipal election campaign officially began, informing me that Union Montreal has redesigned its website.
So, of course, I checked it out with my usual critical eye. I was pleasantly surprised by what I found. The design was clean and simple, the page looked fine even with the style sheet turned off. They've got the usual Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and Flickr accounts. They're even releasing their content under a Creative Commons license.
Great, I thought. So where's the English version?
After a bit of searching, I could find some pages that had a link at the bottom that said "English". That would bring me to an English version of those pages. But then I'd click somewhere and it would bring me back to the French website. Or it would be the English page and all the navigational text would be in French.
I asked the guy who emailed me, Marc Snyder, what's up with all that. He said they're working on it:
We're progressing in the right direction: I think this is what a work-in-progress is all about ;-)
Building a website that's bilingual isn't easy. Most cool content management systems don't think of building in support for bilingual websites. So many do so through third-party plugins. In this case, the website is WordPress based and they're using the Qtranslate plugin.
But to launch a website so publicly without even basic information in English (at first, there wasn't even an English bio for the mayor) seems a fairly major gaffe. Even now, most of its content isn't accessible in English. Instead, you get a short apology with a link to the French version.
Remember, this is supposed to be the anglo party, embracing both languages of this diverse metropolis. Vision Montreal, with ex-PQer Louise Harel who speaks little English, and Projet Montréal, which doesn't even translate its name into our language, both have better English versions of their websites.
Maybe next time someone from Union Montreal criticizes Louise Harel for alienating anglophones, she can point out the fact that people don't need to look up what "Arrondissement de militantisme" is before they can donate to her party.
Oh wait, she can't. Neither can Michel Richard Bergeron. Because both Vision Montreal's donation form and Projet Montréal's donation form have random untranslated bits of French on them.
I realize this is small-time politics and we're not dealing with real big budgets here, but these are forms people fill out to give you money. If you're so careless about translation, I can only imagine what kind of controls you have on the $100 I'd be putting in your campaign fund.
Colour me pas impressionné.
Brenda Paris
Mayor Gérald Tremblay got yet more bad news when he found out that the president of his party, Brenda Paris, has defected to rival Vision Montreal to run as a borough mayor.
In addition to her various roles with government and non-profit organizations in the city, Paris is a member of the Société de Transport de Montréal's board of directors. There, she serves as the "transit users' representative", which means she represents regular people like us who take the bus and metro to work every day.
It's one of two seats on the board set aside for this purpose. The other is for a paratransit users' representative, and is currently held by Marie Turcotte. Both Paris and Turcotte have served since 2001, making for quite a long tenure.
All the other seats on the STM's board are held by municipal politicians. Borough mayors, city councillors, or representatives of on-island suburbs. Now, having declared herself as a candidate, Paris has become one of them. (One might argue she was already one of them being president of a political party.)
I'm pretty sure that when the "transit users' representative" was added to the STM's board, this wasn't what they had in mind for it. There are already far too many politicians on the board, and far too few people from the community.
I don't know Brenda Paris, and I have no reason to believe that she's anything other than an outstanding person. But after eight years on the STM's board, I think it's clear that she has more connections to municipal politicians and civil servants than she does regular transit users. It's not a personal fault, it's just the natural progression after eight years and being so involved in politics.
The STM has done a lot for transparency, and is continuing to improve (putting documentation online, for example, and releasing annual reports with useful statistics), but there are serious deficiencies, starting with the board of directors itself. While the agendas for meetings are published in advance, the items are vaguely described, and there is no supporting documentation available. Reference could be made to a new bus route in the agenda, but a description, map or schedule of that route isn't available before or at the meeting to interested users.
At the meetings themselves, time is set aside for questions from the public (which usually comes in the form of complaints about individual cases of inconvenience from people who clearly have nothing better to do with their time), but when it gets down to business, there is never any discussion of the millions of dollars of projects approved unanimously. The actual meeting, with a dozen items on the agenda, lasts for less than 10 minutes, with the secretary noting only who was present and who moved and seconded various motions.
It's time for a new transit users' representative on the STM's board. Perhaps even one selected by the transit users themselves instead of by political appointment. (I focus on Paris and not Turcotte here, though if a paratransit user was willing to serve on the STM's board I would suggest change there as well.) And I think some consideration should be given to term limits for these positions.
I don't know if Mayor Tremblay has the power to remove Paris from the STM's board because she defected from his party (or whether he'd be so petty as to remove her strictly for that reason), but even if that doesn't happen, I think she should recognize it's inappropriate for her to continue serving on this board in this capacity.
I'm sure Brenda Paris is an asset to the STM, and would even suggest that she be appointed to one of the political seats on the board in the event she wins in November's election. But she's taking up a seat that needs to be filled by someone with new ideas and a better perspective on the issues that transit users face every day, someone whose votes won't be clouded by the worry of how they might be seen on the campaign trail.
For that reason, I respectfully suggest that she resign.
The fallout from the switcheroo at Vision Montreal is continuing. Less than a week after the party's vice-president quit because she couldn't support a sovereignist anti-borough leader, token anglo Karim Boulos has quit the party and decided to sit as an independent, leaving Ville-Marie borough mayor Benoît Labonté in a minority position on the borough council.
The move comes a couple of days after Boulos posted an item on his blog about how destructive party politics can be, based on a column from The Gazette's Henry Aubin he read. Though he asked for comments, the post only got one, from me, asking if this means he'll be sitting as an independent. I didn't actually thin he'd just make the jump right there.
As important in his decision is that Boulos represents the Peter-McGill district (PDF), which includes all of the Ville-Marie borough west of University (in other words, both anglo universities, though not the McGill ghetto). With the splitting of the borough into a third electoral district, his turf becomes even more anglo than it was (it used to extend to St. Denis). And having a sovereignist former PQ minister leading your party isn't sitting well with those constituents on Pine and Dr. Penfield.
His move also comes just over a week after he defended Vision leader Louise Harel on his blog, saying he's still a federalist Liberal but they can work together on municipal matters.
Karim Boulos, the anglo at Vision Montreal, wants us to know Louise Harel is not to be feared by our people. As a Liberal and federalist, even he can find a way to support her, because she believes in the same things Benoît Labonté believes in: centralization and improving services and bring more environmentally friendly and cookies and puppies and happy children and such.
He promises to highlight electoral platforms "as soon as the parties render them public".
Better pull these ads quick. There's a minor update to them.
Well, it's official. Benoît Labonté is stepping aside as leader of Vision Montreal so that former PQ minister Louise Harel can run in his place for mayor of Montreal.
I must say I'm surprised by this move. Not only does Labonté have a lot of ambition, but he's made his campaign for mayor all about him. The Vision Montreal website still links to his blog, which has his face plastered all over it and is now useless as a campaign website (which makes his assertion that his cause "isn't personal" absurd to the point of late-night comedy). They'll replace it by one from Louise Harel (who will hopefully hire Labonté's web designers instead of sticking with her current blog).
I could criticize Harel on many points. She was the person who gave us the whole megacity disaster (fortunately for her, residents of Hampstead and Beaconsfield don't vote for Montreal's mayor), and she wants us to just forget all that, saying "there's no question of rekindling the debate." She's an evil sovereignist who spent most of her political career in Quebec City and can barely string three words together in English. And she shares Labonté's habit of using lots of words that say nothing, not to mention his lack of humility.
But what gets me most is how matter-of-fact this all is. Five months before an election that Labonté has been preparing for more than a year, they have a meeting and just replace the leader.
The ease by which this happened reflects something I wrote about with Labonté in April: He and his party have no platform.
You can see it in Harel's press release, just like in Vision Montreal's "Manifesto". There's lots of talk of "true political and administrative leadership and attention to priorities," but no discussion of what those priorities actually are. The only thing that ties Labonté, Harel and Vision Montreal together seems to be the only point of the platform so far: A dislike of Gérald Tremblay.
Actually, to be fair, there's one other platform point hidden among the empty calories of text about "visionary leadership" and "bold vision": a desire for a radical change to the borough system and more centralized power at City Hall. It's something Labonté has supported and something Harel instituted with municipal mergers (though her bill created the mess in the first place).
But that still leaves a lot of blank that can be filled in by almost anything (provided it can be sold as bold and audacious) before November. They could fill it with Projet Montréal's trams and greenery if they go through with a merger, as Harel hinted at. But I'd like to think that Richard Bergeron is smart enough not to tie his reputation to this sinking ship.
In the end, this probably says more about Vision Montreal and our city's politics than it does any individual player. The parties can't be pigeonholed like they can on the provincial and federal levels (Conservatives/ADQ xenophobic conservatives who want to dismantle the government piece by piece, NDP/Québec solidaire crazy leftists who want to pour even more tax money into inefficient black holes, BQ/PQ left-wing separatists who talk radical to get elected and then soften up when they get into power, Greens the environment nuts, and the Liberals the centre-left lesser of many evils who have the experience to run government and the experience to exploit their offices). We don't really know what separates Union Montreal and Vision Montreal other than who's leading them.
Like with Labonté, I'm willing to give Harel the benefit of the doubt, and look forward to reading her platform if eventually it comes out.
But right now it's hard not to see the party of Pierre Bourque as a blank cheque to be cashed in by naive, ambitious politicians who want to parachute in and carpetbag their way into power based solely on their personal, vastly overestimated popularity combined with a lot of empty words from rejected Obama speechwriters.
UPDATE: Le Devoir agrees with me, asking why the left-wing Harel is uniting with the pro-business Labonté.
De Maisonneuve Blvd. W. at Decarie Blvd.
You'd think that Côte des Neiges and Notre Dame de Grâce, being so young, urban, working-class and eco-friendly, would have lots of bike paths spread across its huge territory. And yet, when you look at a map, you see only one, along de Maisonneuve Blvd. next to the tracks.
So I'm sure plenty of people got excited when they heard last Friday that the borough is working to vastly improve its bike path network, adding a new east-west corridor on the north side, about where the 51 bus travels. It would start from the western end of the de Maisonneuve path, go up West Broadway, east along Fielding and Isabella, then along Lacombe and Édouard-Montpetit until it reaches the Outremont town limit, where it will link up with the new path along Côte-Sainte-Catherine Rd.
Well, almost.
I have a feeling I'm going to break someone's heart with this post, but it's true. There are professional web designers, and there are people whose pages belong on Geocities in the 90s.
The website for (long-shot) mayoralty candidate Louise O'Sullivan belongs in the latter camp:
partimontrealvillemarie.ca
Let us count the ways:
I'm sure you can add more in the comments. Feel free.
Sadder still, there are other atrocities where this came from, people who presumably spent hundreds of dollars for these sites. Perhaps the "© 1999" at the bottom might have something to do with it.
On Île Bigras, they don't tolerate shit.
Patrick Lagacé has a column in today's La Presse (and accompanying blog post) about a fake blog put together by a marketing company to promote Montreal's Bixi bicycle rental system.
Lagacé chronicles the various methods used to pull the wool over people's eyes: fake authors with fake Facebook pages and a fake story about how they met. He tries to get professional marketing experts to denounce the practice and cites rules for marketers that prohibit astroturfing like this. Patrick Dion also outright condemns the practice.
But curiously, the company behind this fake campaign defends the blog, apparently suggesting that the creation of fictitious personalities does not qualify as deception. Lagacé rightly tears Morrow Communications a new one for that.
So why go through all this trouble?
The answer is mentioned in passing by André Morrow:
"Si on avait fait un blogue hébergé par Stationnement de Montréal, personne n'aurait été intéressé."
Think about it: This guy runs a marketing company, and says that if people knew a marketing company was behind this, they wouldn't be interested, regardless of the content.
What kind of self-confidence problem must you have that you need to create fake personalities because you're convinced nobody will like you?
Of course, I reject the premise of what he's saying. I subscribe to plenty of marketing outlets. I get press releases from public transit agencies, official notices from the government, blogs from newspaper editors promoting their content, even some CNW feeds. I do this because I want the official word from the company, and in a lot of cases that's where the news comes out first.
The problem is that this stuff is informative but boring. It's not edgy or creative, won't get you talked about in the news or win any marketing awards.
But you can be creative and still be honest. Even knowing it came from a marketing agency, this video of a bike racing the 24 bus (legally) is still impressive. And there are plenty of other examples of this kind of marketing, even clearly labelled as such.
Morrow Communications needs to grow up and realize that they don't have to pretend to be someone else just so we'll like them. Be honest with us and we'll appreciate them for who they are.
A marketing company being honest ... now that's edgy.
UPDATE: More reactions in the blogosphere:
The City of Montreal is holding hearings about youth participation in the democratic process, and it wants to hear from young people. It's not really clear what it wants to hear from young people exactly, but it has something to do with "their capacity to influence the development of their neighbourhood, their involvement in collective actions, and their interest in municipal affairs."
Being a soulless pit of bureaucracy, it issued a public notice (in PDF format, because young people want to print out everything they read online) inviting people to open forums where all questions have to be pre-approved 30 minutes before the meeting. Those wanting more information can see this page, deep within the city's vast website (it took me a while to find it even though I knew what I was looking for), which has a bunch of other PDF documents.
I'm just going to go ahead and predict that young people aren't going to flock to this meeting in large numbers.
For those who do want to go, the first meeting is April 20, 7pm at Verdun city hall (4555 Verdun St., right outside Verdun metro).
Campaign ad at Crémazie metro
With only seven months to go until the Nov. 1 municipal election, Vision Montreal leader Benoit Labonté has launched his campaign, which includes ads like the one seen above as well as a blog which his duties as Ville-Marie mayor apparently leave him plenty of time to keep updated. (There are also the requisite YouTube, Twitter and Facebook pages)
Labonté, whose public persona is so poor he's being outpolled by the city's equivalent of Ralph Nader, has a lot of work to do in those seven months if he's going to be competitive in this fall's election - both in his race for mayor and the downticket races for city councillors and borough executives that his party's future depends on.
His main fault is that nobody knows anything about him or what he's about, other than his rather public falling out with Mayor Gérald Tremblay. That's a problem entirely of his doing. When you see interviews or campaign videos, you hear words like "audace" and "espoir" and "intégrité" and whatever. But Tremblay could say the same about himself. There's no differentiation between the two of them.
It's not a question of message. The two men simply don't diverge enough in their opinions. Labonté is big on sustainable development and green policy (for the most part - see below). But so is Tremblay. Labonté wants the private sector to contribute to make this city better. But so does Tremblay.
Labonté's image problem stems from the simple fact that Tremblay has actually been a pretty good mayor. Sure, he's had issues with the demerged suburbs, his executive committee performs far too much of the people's work behind closed doors, the municipal bureaucracy is horribly bloated and the unions all hate his guts. But none of that would change in a Labonté administration.
I tried to look at Vision Montreal's platform to see what kind of policies they would follow, what kind of bylaws they would pass and what kind of budget they would create that would be different than the current administration. But I couldn't find one, either on Labonté's website or on the Vision Montreal one. Even his political "manifesto" doesn't include any specific ideas in its 2,347 words. The closest thing I could find were a couple of videos posted a year ago, including the one above, which outline some things he's done as borough mayor. But I've already pointed out the flaws in these (to recap: his plastic bag recycling system creates waste where there was none before; his Parco-Don is a gimmick that isn't bringing in much money; and to add a new one - his commitment to pedestrianization of streets is tainted by his demand to get rid of a reserved bus lane in the Old Port because it interferes with traffic and parking).
UPDATE (April 11): Spacing Montreal has links to show Labonté's inconsistencies when it comes to his policies.
Labonté needs to figure out what he's about. Perhaps my view is tainted by the fact that he lied to me the one time I interviewed him, but I don't think I'm the only one whose first impression of him is of a self-obsessed politician who will pander to whoever is necessary to win an election.
Fortunately, he has seven months to fix that image and present a vision that has more ideas and fewer vague political clichés.
Benoit Labonté's blog has lots of pictures of him
Oh, and since I criticized Tremblay's party website for having too many photos of him on it, I should probably point out that Labonté's website has half a dozen photos of him on it too.
In case you missed it, last month the borough of Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-dame-de-Grâce-de-our-borough-name-is-too-long relaunched its quarterly newsletter, renaming it "Le Citoyen" and giving it a newspaperish look. It also moved to a five-issues-a-year schedule instead of four.
This caused some concern from those who saw this as the borough attempting to replace the NDG Monitor, which recently decided to stop its print edition, with a government propaganda machine which would never be critical of the borough.
The Gazette's Henri Aubin takes a critical look at the first issue of Le Citoyen, which is available as a PDF in English and French on the borough's website. The Suburban's Dan Delmar also looks at Le Citoyen, with quotes from journalist-turned-borough-PR-director Michel Therrien.
A direct comparison is somewhat silly here. One is a quarterly newsletter, and the other was a small, understaffed weekly newspaper that had maybe one article a week that provided anything resembling interesting local news.
Still, there's a larger question here: If the private news media is unwilling or unable to provide loal news, will it be up to the towns themselves - and their seemingly limitless communications budgets - to provide it for us? Could future newspaper shutdowns be followed by newsletter startups that try to fill the gap in information about local events and (uncontroversial) informtion?
It's not the borough's fault that The Monitor shut down, so there's no sense in blaming them for it, or calling it unethical, as The Monitor's Toula Foscolos does.
What should be outraging people (like former councillor Jeremy Searle and Aubin) is that the borough is spending $73,000 a year (and probably more in editorial, design and other costs) to distribute a newsletter to 80,000 people who won't read it because it's filled with self-congratulatory messages that don't say anything even remotely useful.
Take this from borough mayor Michael Applebaum:
Applebaum message in Le Citoyen (Feb. 2009)
Now, other than the fact that Applebaum is now on Montreal's executive committee, responsible for sports and recreation, did you learn anything from the text above?
This isn't a problem limited to CDN/NDG. All the boroughs have these kinds of newsletters, and they're all filled with messages from elected officials talking about how honoured they are at something or other. Some include messages from each of the councillors as well, wasting untold amounts of space and money.
Not only do our highest elected officials have to spend time writing (or, in Mayor Gérald Tremblay's case, hire writers to compose) absolutely pointless messages, but they then must be edited, translated and laid out in these newsletters, which are then printed and sent out.
There's a usefulness to borough newsletters. The last one in my borough gave details about changes to garbage and recycling collection schedules. But nobody in my apartment building read it because these things get tossed away as soon as they arrive (just like the local Transcontinental weekly and the Publi-Sac).
Perhaps, during this time where everyone is cutting back their budgets, it might be a good idea to spend less time on these self-congratulatory messages and only distribute printed newsletters that contain information that's actually useful to citizens.
And maybe the city can spend its communications budget making its website easier to navigate instead of patting itself on the back in print (or putting up ads everywhere asking people not to move to the suburbs).
So it seems the Association des restaurateurs is in a tiff because the city suggested that its opinions on parking meters (namely, that they shouldn't exist) are "marginal".
Okay, they're only saying that their hours should be reduced, but business-owners groups always comes out against increases in meter rates or hours, and in favour of their reductions. They also oppose most reserved bus lanes because those take parking spots away.
The argument is that drivers' are frustrated at having to pay excessive meter rates, and this encourages urban sprawl and moves to the suburbs.
Really? I'm not a driver, so I can't speak from experience, but it seems to me drivers aren't annoyed at paying meter rates as much as they are annoyed at having to drive around the block 50 times looking for a spot. After all, as pissed off as they are about paying meter rates, they're not pissed off enough to stop using them to capacity.
Parking spaces are a finite resource downtown. Trying to accomodate drivers is a strategy that is destined to fail. Therefore the alternative is to encourage other forms of transportation, like buses and taxis (which don't need to be parked) and bicycles (which don't take up much space).
Even if you reject that conclusion, parking meter management should be simple, conforming to the rules of supply and demand. If the meters are used to capacity, the rates should go up until the demand is reduced. If demand is so low that the spaces are unused, rates should be reduced to encourage more use and keep those businesses happy.
What's so complicated in all this. I mean, besides the political grandstanding?
Speaking of Concordia, the Côte-de-Neiges/Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough (which really needs a new name) is conducting a public consultation about a request from the university to make dramatic changes to its sports complex on the Loyola Campus, which would include the creation of a removable dome which could be installed over the football field to protect the Stingers from rain. (And... uhh... some educatiomanal stuff too... right...)
Google Map: A long way to walk
What I especially love is that the consultation isn't taking place anywhere near the people most affected by this. Instead, it's taking place 4 km away in Côte des Neiges, forcing local residents to take a half-hour transit trip or walk an hour each way.
I suppose there are worse examples (Pierrefonds, for example), but it just seems to me if you're going to hold a public consultation about a neighbourhood project, you should hold that consultation in the neighbourhood.
Even Richard Bergeron is outpolling him in the race for mayor of Montreal.
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