Pointe-Claire council seeks ministry help with city functions

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Seven Pointe-Claire city councillors who are opposed to Mayor Tim Thomas passed a resolution on Tuesday asking the Quebec Municipal Affairs Department for help to restore order.

Bruno Tremblay was the lone dissenting councillor who, along with Thomas, voted in vain against the resolution at the special council meeting. The mayor called it “another unnecessary political tactic” by his adversaries that will undermine the city’s credibility and autonomy.

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The motion, moved by councillor Kelly Thorstad-Cullen and seconded by councillor Paul Bissonnette, calls for the municipal affairs department’s assistance to “identify the nature of the problems and propose an action plan to improve the general functioning of the city.”

“It basically just says we’re not functioning at our optimal and we would like help from the minister, an outside source, to give us the tools so we can function in a better way for the rest of the term,” councillor Tara Stainforth said in response to a citizen’s question wondering why the public wasn’t permitted to see the resolution ahead of the meeting’s public question period.

“Maybe it will be a good thing, after all,” the citizen then responded to Stainforth, “if they (the ministry) can follow our bylaws and when developers get permits, they’ll be forced to follow the bylaws. That could be a good thing.”

“All we want is transparency, which has not been here for this so-called resolution,” another citizen said.

“It’s been obvious that there’s been a lot of dysfunction with this council. And please, can you just respect each other and us and work together and not sort of gang up on each other? That’s all I ask. Transparency, please. Because really, this is nonsense.”

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The council has been divided since the November 2021 municipal election, in which Thomas defeated incumbent mayor John Belvedere while six councillors aligned with Belvedere won their seats. Thomas soon introduced a temporary freeze on development projects and refused to exclude Cadillac Fairview’s redevelopment plans next to Fairview shopping centre.

Erin Tedford, who along with Tremblay was one of the two councillors elected in 2021 and not aligned with Belvedere, resigned her seat after just over a year in office. She cited, in part, “a disturbing level of anger and division.”

The by-election to fill her seat was won by Claude Cousineau, the incumbent whom she had defeated in 2021.

The next general election is scheduled for November 2025.

On Tuesday, Cousineau and councillors Eric Stork, Cynthia Homan and Brent Cowan joined Thorstad-Cullen, Stainforth and Bissonnette in voting in favour of the resolution to call in the municipal affairs department.

A few months ago, Cowan wrote an open letter calling for Thomas to resign as mayor for allegedly abusing his power as speaker of council by rebutting Stork during the latter’s allotted speaking time at a council meeting. Thomas’s adversaries have on different occasions walked out of council meetings and called for him to resign.

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“I support this resolution because for the last two-and-a-half years, we’ve been trying many different ways to work together and it has been quite a struggle,” Homan told the meeting, adding “there’s lack of respect, there’s lack of leadership.”

“This opportunity, through the government, is going to help us give us guidance that we are struggling with right now,” Homan said.

Thomas, for his part, urged members of the public to view archived videos of past council meetings “and see the conduct of people at the council meetings.”

“The current resolution from the ruling majority on council is consistent with many of their previous tactics, which include voting to form a communications committee to censor my interviews and social media posts,” Thomas said.

“A member of this council actually went to the trouble of texting my significant other to suggest that I was having an affair, not once but two times, involving two different women. Such antics are juvenile even in high school. These kinds of disruptive, bullying tactics and hostile and inappropriate language used by the ruling majority on council and their supporters at council meetings make our city look out of control.”

“This resolution is symbolic of the political culture that reigns supreme at Pointe-Claire city council,” Tremblay said, adding that the political culture is a carry-over from the previous mandate or mandates.

“Having lived in this environment for more than two years, I simply can’t believe this resolution’s being tabled for the sake of peace, love and understanding. This is brute force given the sequence of events that I’ve witnessed and seen in the past. It’s a cannon shot to end political opposition and affect the 2025 election.”

One citizen asked whether seeking counsel from the municipal affairs department could end with Pointe-Claire placed under trusteeship.

“We don’t know what they’re going to do because they have to come in and observe and assess the situation and then they will decide what tools, what mechanisms, etc. need to be put into place in order to help us  move forward in the best way possible,” Stainforth said of the ministry. She called it a “stage one intervention.”

lgyulai@postmedia.com

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