Articles tagged with: 2009 Montreal Municipal Elections
You win some, you lose some
It all depends on how you look at things, or rather how see the glass of water (insert water meter scandal joke here). Forget the Box now offers you two different views of what happened, take your pick
Montreal elections: the glass half full
The scene at Le National was electric. There was hope in the air and people were celebrating. It wasn’t the victory everyone had hoped for, but it was progress and quite a bit of it, at that. A few weeks ago Forget The Box endorsed Projet Montreal and Richard Bergeron as the party capable of bringing new, progressive ideas to City Hall, cleaning up all the corruption that the present administration left and getting Montreal on track to becoming once again the booming metropolis that it once was. Voters listened, at least in certain parts of the city and in particular the Plateau.
Montreal elections: the glass half-empty
Despite eight years in power with not much to show for it except a trail of corruption, Gerald Tremblay will remain the mayor of Montreal. This means that projects he has given the green light to will most likely continue, including former petty thief and fraudster, now thug developer Christian Yaccarini’s Quadrilatere St-Laurent.
The company we keep
In the 1980s, Christian Yaccarini was on the administration council of the Association générale des étudiants de l’UQAM when he was found guilty of stealing the contents of a caisse étudiant (student-run bank). The same decade, he was convicted of defrauding the librairie Caron where he worked of $11 604. He was also found guilty of shoplifting thousands of dollars worth of merchandise from Audio d’occasion.
A project whose time has come
Back in 2005, I participated in a show at the now-defunct Les artistes du Toc Toc in Mile-End. It was called Tramway Trance and was a benefit for a new municipal political party called Projet Montreal. I didn’t know that much about the party, except for the fact that they wanted to bring the Parc avenue tramway back, which sounded like a good idea to me.
Friends ’till the end?
Ramming a controversial project through and making executive decisions that go against the ruling of a public consultation body aren’t new in politics. Generally, though, they’re the sort of things politicians do when they have a few years left in their mandate or when they’re almost out of office and can’t return (like how US presidents pardon their friends at the end of their second term). It’s not the sort of thing they do just before an election campaign.
