Almost absent from public space since the beginning of July, Mayor Bruno Marchand gives the impression of a politician who has lost his compass, at the start of this pre-election year.
The mayor made his big comeback last week with a mission to New York that had only been announced to the media the day before. The media were not welcome, which breaks with tradition and the principle of transparency, as I wrote last week.
And it continues. Absent from the first council of the new school year on Tuesday, due to a virus, the mayor obtained that the dates of upcoming municipal councils be moved to allow him to attend.
He would indeed have been absent from these sessions, due to a mission in Europe in which he must take part, from September 24 to October 5. This will be the longest mission of a mayor of Quebec in the recent past.
Imagine if the mayor couldn’t even attend the mission in question because he was still sick. The dates of the sessions would have been moved for nothing…
Wrong message
This upheaval of the council dates also sends a very bad message. It is as if the mayor had just demonstrated that no one in his team was able to perform in his absence. It is strange, coming from a leader who said he wanted to do politics differently, and who presented himself as a team player.
It has happened in the past that the mayor had to be absent for a mission and could not be present at the council, exceptionally. The City of Quebec has not stopped functioning because of this.
Certainly, in cities, the mayor or mayoress takes up a lot of space. The population often does not even know the names of the other municipal elected officials. This is a bit of a characteristic of the municipal model.
But it is up to the mayor to put forward the members of his team as much as possible.
The mayor’s team is made up of women of stature. I’m thinking of Maude Mercier Larouche, Marie-Pierre Boucher, Marie-Josée Asselin, Mélissa Coulombe-Leduc, to name just a few.
Women who we see far too little of, and who would benefit from speaking out more.
Gollum and the Ring
All this to say that one year before the next elections, the mayor elected by the skin of his teeth in 2021 has failed his return to school, and in a monumental way. And what’s more, he will be absent again for two weeks for an essentially diplomatic mission that comes at a very bad time.
The mayor has stated on several platforms since his arrival that he compares politics to the ring in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. We must be careful, in politics, not to become like Gollum, who is blinded and transformed in the wrong way by power, he explained in essence.
The mayor would do well to remove his ring, precisely, and reconnect with the people of Quebec, whom he seems to be neglecting. Because all things considered, he has little time left to do so before citizens go to the polls again in November 2025.
