Gatineau will make a clean sweep of its economic development authorities

The exercise should extend throughout the next year. The details of this transformation will come over the coming months, but it already appears inevitable that the role played by ID Gatineau, the main economic arm of the City, will be reviewed in depth. Some of the organization’s responsibilities, such as prospecting and attracting businesses and planning the development of the commercial sector, would be repatriated within the municipal administration, to the Economic Development Office. Expectations towards the organization as well as its supervision by the City should be tightened.

Human and financial resources currently allocated to ID Gatineau, which has a budget of $4 million per year and has 25 employees, would be transferred to the Economic Development Office, which currently only employs four people. The latter would be called upon to step up and become the main person responsible for deploying the economic strategy of the City of Gatineau.

The findings

The economic development structure currently in place in Gatineau dates from 2016. The shuffling of cards carried out by the Pedneaud-Jobin administration had the objective of achieving an “entrepreneurial shift” which should “put the entrepreneur at the center of decisions and methods to do”. Changes at town hall, at the city’s general management and at the head of ID Gatineau have not helped put this vision in place, noted RCGT.

Eight years later, the findings drawn up by the firm are clear. The formula does not work, so everything needs to be reviewed.

“There is currently no entity that truly assumes leadership in economic development in the territory,” maintains the report presented Tuesday. Despite the existence of a strategic plan, RCGT notes that the vision and the directions resulting from it “are not clear and uniformly understood by the different authorities, including within the municipal organization […] and each of them tends to pursue its own agenda rather than a common objective.

The main players in the economic development ecosystem of the City of Gatineau “do not demonstrate a robust and assertive economic development culture,” continues the report, so that “the City continues to rely largely on the advantages and acquired from the strong presence of the federal public service.

The responsibilities of each authority are so “fuzzy and insufficiently supervised” that this leads to a “lack of coherence in actions, as well as a lack of alignment with municipal orientations”.

RCGT believes that the economic development commission must increase its impact on the municipal council by formulating recommendations aimed at promoting the creation of wealth in the City’s territory. “The weak culture of economic development and the interest or priority given to these issues during the municipal council could partly explain this dynamic,” adds the consultant.

The same goes for the Office of Economic Development whose overly restricted mandate, according to RCGT, limits its capacity for action and influence. This situation would result from a municipal administration that works too much in “silos”, particularly in the town planning department.

As for ID Gatineau, although the City finances the organization almost entirely and the agreement requires that its actions be aligned with the City’s orientations, “the governance and direction of ID Gatineau appear disconnected from municipal priorities and are focus more on achieving their own organizational goals,” the report reads.

An important moment for Gatineau

Rather reserved in nature during public discussions at the municipal council table, the director general of the City, Simon Rousseau, did not hesitate to question the elected officials, Tuesday, on the importance of the exercise which is beginning for the economic future of Gatineau.

“I will say it in my words, this is a major presentation in your mandate, it is a significant shift that we are preparing to take,” he told the elected officials meeting in plenary committee. What is the council’s economic development goal this year? We don’t know. There, we line up the troops and give ourselves an objective. We stop running everywhere. Successful cities have a clear goal that everyone works towards. Leadership must come from the board. In 2025, we will have a new economic development service. This is an important shift for the City.”

The mayor of Gatineau, Maude Marquis-Bissonnette, said she was staying at exactly the same address as the general director. “The findings are striking,” she admitted. We must improve our culture of economic development. Our entrepreneurs say it: it is not always easy to do business with the City. This cannot be resolved by shouting scissors. It takes time and concrete actions. […] In business development, for example, there is only one resource assigned to this responsibility at the Economic Development Office. ID Gatineau also has resources for that, but there is no connection between the two teams, they work in parallel. It doesn’t work, you need consistency. Decisions about what is important must be made at the council.”

The president of the economic development commission, Edmond Leclerc, noted that the objective of this report and of the exercise which is beginning “is not to put the people on trial who put their shoulder to the wheel to develop the city’s economy. However, he noted that obviously the structure in which the City has been operating since 2016 is “not optimal”.

“Who carries the ball when it comes to economic development? he asked in the press scrum. There is a lack of clarity. Everyone acted in good faith, but we came to the conclusion that we must change our structure. The council must give the main orientations and the commission must make recommendations in terms of vision. What needs to change is how it will be handled internally afterwards. Currently, the plans we are working on in committee do not percolate into the administration and it is the same thing in ID Gatineau. There are plenty of efforts being made, but in a structure that is not optimal.”

The general director of ID Gatineau, Sylvie Charette, has been in office for less than a year. She claimed to reach “similar conclusions” to those of the RCGT report. She says she sees “very favorably” the municipal council’s desire to improve the city’s performance in terms of economic development.

However, she insisted on emphasizing the effectiveness of her organization in terms of supporting businesses and entrepreneurial mobilization in the Gatineau region. Despite the recommendations of the RCGT report which proposes a significant overhaul of the role and responsibilities of ID Gatineau, Ms. Charette indicated that she did not expect a significant reduction in staff within the organization.

“This is not in the spirit of the discussion at the moment, we are not there currently,” she said. We visit more than 400 companies each year and 14 of our 22 employees are on the ground, with the companies. This is where we are strong because we have been able to build a special bond and I believe that the City wants to build on our strength and our agility. We shouldn’t compromise that.”

The municipal council must adopt the launch of this overhaul next Tuesday. The new economic development governance structure must be in place by early 2026.