NEWS: Montreal to Give Citizens Power

by Dimitri Roussopoulos

The premise held by many citizens is that democracy is flawed and needs major repairs. This view is accompanied with the recognition that democracy is a politically neglected subject.

Democracy is perceived as too difficult to be dealt with, though it is so fundamental to any improvement in our quality of life. The critical literature on the flaws of mainstream democracy is large and one reason is that the progressive alienation of citizens from the political system continues to grow. Yet radical reforms are rarely advanced in Canada.

Montreal is an exception. There have been a number of fundamental reforms that  have made this city the talk of civic democracy advocates in various parts of Canada. Internationally, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) promote these Montreal advances as breaking important new political ground. When the UN World Urban Forum was held in Vancouver in 2006, one of the most attended sessions included a presentation on  one such radical reform, the Montreal Charter of Rights and Responsibilities, presented by Montreal’s Mayor Gerald Tremblay.

The Montreal Charter begins its articulation of citizen rights with a two-page section on democracy. The subject is the foundation of the charter  and begins with an explanation of what the City of Montreal considers its responsibilities towards all its citizens. In this section, one of the rights recognized is that citizens would be able to initiate, by themselves, a public consultation on any number of subjects by 2010.  But how would this citizen initiative work?

Last year, Montreal’s Taskforce on Democracy was asked to develop a comprehensive definition of what such a citizen initiative would embrace. The taskforce was faced with the fact there was no precedent anywhere in Canada, and little elsewhere in the world to guide it. After more than a year of analysis, discussion, working papers and research, a final document was drafted earlier in 2009.

In Montreal, the Charter re-defines citizenship and we now speak of urban citizenship. This departure from the conventional understanding of citizenship is particularly important in Canada, as we are a country that admits no constitutional recognition of cities as governments in their own right. In this context, the initiative proposal recognizes citizens have a right to demand a public consultation on a proposed public policy by the City of Montreal or by a borough council. Montreal has nineteen administrative boroughs with their own local decision-making council, making it is the most decentralized city in North America.

Under the initiative process, citizens have a publicly-recognized right to oppose, and to do so by means of a publicly-recognized institutionalized procedure – the initiative process. Thus critical opposition goes beyond what the existing public consultation bodies have on their agendas, and moreover, Montrealers may go beyond public protests over this-or-that proposed policy by city government. An initiative can now come directly from citizens, whether to oppose or to propose.

This means citizens can now have official public consultations on new public policies or directions, proposed by them, the grassroots, or community organisations. In other words, civil society, in general, can make proposals beyond what politicians and bureaucrats can think up.

Politically, for the first time citizens can think up and propose new public policies themselves, in between elections. Citizens become more than taxpayers and consumers of public services. Citizens become political actors, policy-makers and thus complement the work of elected city and borough councillors.

To be sure, the by-law has a series of restrictions and limitations. The draft initiative by-law had to be approved by the city's lawyers, and will still have to be approved by a majority of city councillors later this month. It will be a leap forward in our perspective of participatory democracy nevertheless.

To actually have a public consultation at the city-wide level, or at a borough level, citizens must seriously mobilize large numbers of supporters for a public consultation for or against a particular public policy. First, a group of citizens ask for a public consultation. The politicians can say no or yes. If they say no, then citizens can embark on campaigning with a petition calling for a public consultation on a particular concern. If the citizens get the required numbers of signatures, the politicians must conduct the public consultation.

The proposed bylaw as drafted by the taskforce was adopted by Mayor Tremblay, by the powerful executive committee of city councillors, by the mayor's Union Montreal party (the majority civic political party at city hall) and was submitted for first reading at city council on Aug. 24. The new bylaw will be voted on at the last council meeting on Sept. 24, just before the November civic election.

If it successfully passes at council, the citizen initiative will come into effect at the beginning of January, 2010. After it becomes law, there will need to be an ongoing public education campaign informing and encouraging people to take up the responsibilities of citizenship. This new democratic tool can only be made important if citizens seize it and push forward much needed changes to the urban agenda.

Dimitri Roussopoulos is a resident of Montreal’s Plateau-Mont Royal borough and chairs the city’s Taskforce on Democracy.