The announced departure of the mayor is the equivalent, neither more nor less, of Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois if he were to leave Québec Solidaire. These two parties will self-destruct as the announcement of a mission impossible.
Évelyne Beaudin was the backbone of this resolutely left-wing party because she could still bring the credibility of an experienced economist. This is certainly what allowed her to be elected to town hall beyond a machine supported by Québec Solidaire and the sharp strategies of Claude Dostie, her first chief of staff.
Many believed it. Many have also read his book Govern Effectively which was intended to be as much a plea for change within municipal administration as a plea in favor of a new way of doing politics.
Unfortunately, all that was missing for Sherbrooke Citoyen’s adventure in municipal politics to continue was precisely a dose of pragmatism and reality. Who graps all, looses. Turn everything upside down in the first term. Overdoing it. Above all, do it to the extreme. The saying could not be more apropos than today.
However, let’s admit that apart from an electoral campaign which demonized the issue of commercial flights at the airport by pretexting a series of nonsense like the GHG of planes or when we were going to subsidize empty seats, the new mayor had everything to mark a change in culture within the municipal council.
The creation of commissions reducing to six bodies what was done with more than forty committees, the integration of an economic development coordination Office so that the City can be a little more involved in the main orientations, the secretariat to citizen participation, in short, so many changes which, if they had been better balanced, could perhaps have actually brought more efficiency to the municipal system and allowed greater citizen participation.
I’m not saying I agreed with these directions, but I could certainly give the runner a chance. After all, she also had the wisdom to seek out Danielle Berthold and Annie Godbout on the executive committee. Wise decision to bring the opposition to the decision-making table. What a waste to have escaped them during the mandate.
Courting and cajoling the enemy is, however, a great force in advancing one’s issues. Here again, I am convinced that Claude Dostie had something to do with it. He’s a strategist. Not for nothing either that he and I spent more than five hours drinking beer together on a certain day in September 2021 at Siboire. Live on your left Pierre, he told me. I still think about it because it was so right.
After Mayor Beaudin’s announcement on Friday, I even wonder if she was not also a victim of her own party. Its members are more often than not deeply dogmatic to such an extent that it was better to risk the departure of the main pillar of the party rather than putting a little water in its wine and measuring the harshness of the reforms.
Understand, for example, that even if we persist in wanting to protect 45% of wetlands and woodlands in Sherbrooke, this will have absolutely no impact on the fate of the planet if India, China and the United States do not take no action. However, at 25% protection, the Nature Plan would have been a huge success in addition to very likely rallying all independent advisors. And 25% was still quite a leap forward.
If we had chosen, for example, to only create the Economic Coordination Office in a first mandate with two or three employees, without dismantling everything from Sherbrooke Innopole and Destination Sherbrooke, the message would have gotten across better. We would have given ourselves the time to see how things are going between the authorities and above all we would have once again rallied the majority of the opposition. Because after all, the idea of having an office that wants to better supervise economic development efforts and bring together several players in the sector was not a stupid idea. It could even be complementary and perhaps improve Sherbrooke Innopole’s offer.
And even if I don’t agree, if we hadn’t stuck in the first mandate to only clearing the damn bike paths without adding the swimming pool tax, once again we would probably have succeeded in passing a pill quite a bit more easily.
The worst part of all this is that the members and elected officials of Sherbrooke Citoyen preferred to lose the trust of the entire population by rushing into the “no matter what” pile and without evaluating the political consequences on their own program and their own party. . Because there will be political consequences. All these ideas for wholesale reform, which had to be implemented at high speed, will simply ensure that the party will leave power during the next municipal election without the possibility of seeing its ideas adopted by the population.
The biggest lesson here comes from former Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa. He used to tell his troops that success in politics is about adding, not subtracting. Clearly, this means that when we add up the opponents, when we cannot bring them to our side to pass a file, we evaluate what we must put aside for it to pass. It’s a lot better than losing everything and seeing your projects die in the soap opera.
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