Montreal Citizens Make Their Own Charter

Dimitri Roussopoulos doesn’t like to talk about big visions. In fact, he chastises people when asked a too broad a question on the subject of public participation.

“I don’t think in terms of ideals – I like to be more concrete,” says Montreal’s Urban Ecology Centre Director Dimitri Roussopoulos. “To me, working on public process is a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, year-to-year kind of thing. It is not something off on some horizon.”

The frank, forthcoming and sometimes bullish Mr. Roussopoulos is an agitator in the best sense of the word. Best known in Vancouver for his work on the Montreal Charter of Citizen’s Rights and Freedoms, Roussopoulos helped author this revolutionary document that imagines a new form of municipally-based citizenship.

With its articulation of locally-based rights, roles and responsibilities, the Montreal Charter has created nothing short of an original, innovative, institutionally-supported framework for urban democracy.

Montreal Charter - What is It?

The Charter is succinct yet potent. It is a manifesto for 21st century urban governance.

Over the course of a dozen-or so pages, it lays out the rights of every citizen of Montreal in relation to seven overarching areas: democratic life, economic and social life, cultural life, leisure, physical activity and sports, environment and sustainable development, security and municipal services.

Each of these themes, in turn, is developed as a series of relevant articles about what sorts of things citizens can expect from their municipal government and, by extension, the things they have the right to hold the government accountable for should they feel the City of Montreal is not living up to its responsibilities. And citizenship here extends to anyone living within the territory of the City of Montreal, a definition of citizenry that is a radical and inclusive step forward, empowering populations of refugees, newcomers and others who are, on national and provincial levels, excluded from such distinctions.

"In addition to fostering closer ties among citizens, elected officials and the municipal administration, the new charter will help enhance the quality of public services," says Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay in an official statement on the Charter. "With this charter, the city adopts an essential tool for building a future rooted in the qualities we value: openness, respect, solidarity, transparency, and democracy."

It's a brazen thing for any mayor to sign up for.

Value statements are one thing, but the distinction between a city that has the power to do something - vis-à-vis its mandated responsibility - and one that formally articulates what it will actually do is substantial.

Imagine an official City of Vancouver document that says the city has a formal commitment "to provide homeless persons with temporary and secure shelter" or guarantees the municipality will consider "the needs of vulnerable persons and particularly individuals from low- and modest-income families in its implementation of housing measures" (Article 19 Montreal Charter).

It sounds unreal to many people dealing with the realities and political inertia of Vancouver's homelessness epidemic. But in Montreal such words are no longer visionary platitudes or election rhetoric - they are entrenched rights.

"There is no other document I know of where, in a very self-effacing way, a political body says ‘I recognize my obligation to you,'" says Roussopoulos. "This is not an electoral platform. This is not an electoral program. This is not a politician standing before you in an election promising this, that and the other thing."

"The most important contribution of the Charter is that it is a document in which a city government says my obligations to you are A, B, C, spelling them out in a concrete fashion and providing citizens with a very clear path of recourse, if they have an issue or concern," says Roussopoulos.

Montreal Public Participation: A 20-Year Transformation

Of course, like all periods of transformation, both the Montreal Charter and the process that led to its creation were born of a particular context. Turn back the clock 20 years and there was, in Roussopoulos' words, absolutely no citizen involvement or participation in municipal public policy.

This all changed when the left-leaning Montreal Citizen's Movement government of Jean Doré took office in 1986. The new government developed a range of new public commissions at city hall, as well as a new urban master plan for the city. As a result, Montreal started along the track of involving the public in major policy initiatives. Doré remained in power for a total of eight years, during which time the precedent for public involvement was established.

When the right-leaning Vision Montreal government of Pierre Bourque assumed control in 1994, it found its attempts to role back some of the citizen involvement initiatives stymied on two sides. First, the public mobilized against this dismantling, and secondly a supportive provincial government intervened, directing the Bourque government to continue to consult the public in a meaningful fashion.

"Between pressure from below and above the Bourque government had to put a great deal of water in their whisky," says Roussopoulos. "They backed down in a kind of half measure, reluctant kind of way."

And though scaled-back, there was still a window left open for citizen input.

Throughout this pre- and post-millennial period, Roussopoulos and his Urban Ecology Centre were instrumental in convening gatherings throughout Montreal featuring a number of many key individuals and organizations that comprised the city's civil society - the intent of which was to encourage dialogue on a number of civic issues. In the spring of 2001, at one of these events, the idea of a civic charter was floated as a potential mechanism to encourage local democracy. It was an idea that was both rich and, in the case of North America, unprecedented.

In 2001, a centre-left party came to power, this time under Gérald Tremblay's Union Montreal Party. Shortly after coming to power, Tremblay's government picked up on the idea of a gathering of civil society and decided the city needed a similar summit - officially sanctioned.

The Montreal Summit, launched in the summer of 2001, lasted for three days and featured several thousand invited members of the city. Out of the summit came several city-funded taskforces, including the municipal democracy taskforce headed by Roussopoulos.

The municipal democracy taskforce, thanks to the vigour of its chair, was able to pick up on the idea of the charter and run with it. Three years on and many consultations later a draft charter was presented to the public for comment. One year later, this draft was unanimously adopted by city council.

In January 2006, the Montreal Charter of Citizen's Rights and Freedoms came into effect. And according to Roussopoulos, the linkages between civil society and local government were critical to the venture.

"It's very important if one is going to unleash a process of significant change in the city, that there is this combo between an organized city society's initiative that involves as many people as possible and City Hall," said Roussopoulos. "You need a kind of interplay and possible marriage in terms of certain common objectives between what you want and what they want, and what they're prepared to do and what you're prepared to do. There has to be this dialectic back and forth. And it has to be maintained throughout the process."

But Roussopoulos puts the responsibility for kick-starting the process at the grassroots level.

In Montreal, civil society needed to host their own citizen's summit in which large numbers of people gathered to have a sophisticated discussion over public policy. This coming together to discuss issues of common concern before approaching government enabled a common agenda to be identified, so that the dialogue with civic authorities that ensued was not fractured before it started.

New Vision Of Citizenship, Grassroots Genesis

The Montreal Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides a radical reconstitution of the notion of citizenship. Conventionally construed in terms of national identity and membership, the Montreal Charter advances a type of different citizenship - with concomitant roles and responsibilities - linked to the city. In an era when the majority of the country is living in urban environments, and where the primary everyday reality is an urban one, the idea of a new scale for citizenship seems prescient and sensible. Such an idea, however seductive, is fairly new.

There are charters in several European cities, but most of these have been moral documents, meaning they lack the more concrete legal authority embedded in the Montreal Charter. Roussopoulos, while acknowledging the European work as an inspiration, is also dismissive of its limitations. By merely talking about the idea of people being citizens of cities, but not developing a framework of roles and responsibilities, the notion becomes moot.

"There's a lot of ‘blah, blah, blah' in these documents" says Roussopoulos. "The notion of urban citizenship is there but it's still at a very wordy effusive level. Here, in Montreal, it is actually put into place."

In order to understand the strength of the Montreal Charter, as well as its capacity to get beyond esoteric meaning, one also has to look at two other concurrently created institutions that support its implementation. The Montreal Charter rests on two other pillars that emerged from the early years of the Tremblay government - the first was an office of public consultation, the second was the office of the ombudsman.

The office of public consultation anticipates the need for citizens to be involved with public processes of all sorts - something that supports and enables the intentions of the Charter. The office of the ombudsman, more substantively, provides citizens the actual means of recourse when they feel their Charter rights have been violated by the city. Without these, the Montreal Charter would flounder.

"A charter alone floating out in ether is not enough. It has to be grounded. It has to have two legs, minimally, in order to go forward," says Roussopoulos. "The overarching opportunities for participation and arbitration have to be put into place, legalized and implemented."

"As a citizen, if I look under the Charter and I see an obligation the city is not respecting and I feel that I as an individual or people in my neigbourhood are not getting what the charter says I should be getting, I can then launch a formal complaint to the office of the ombudsperson," says Roussopoulos. "The office of the ombudsperson has to deal with the complaint by going to see where is the source of the problem and reporting back to me the citizen."

It is this actual opportunity for recourse that ensures the Charter has teeth. The ombudsperson is empowered through the charter to conduct investigations into complaints, engage in mediation and to find one or more solutions compatible with the Charter.

How to Measure Success

So how is the Charter is working? In place for just over a year, it's too early to draw firm conclusions, but even so there are some encouraging signs. The report of the city ombudsperson notes the number of complaints received and the number of complaints that have evoked the charter are substantial.

"It takes time for these things to become part of the consciousness. It took 20 or 30 years after the 1948 signing of the universal declaration of human rights before people across this planet began to be aware of the concepts that it entailed. And this was a moral document, not a legal document. But nevertheless it hasn't held back people from saying this or that is my right and I'm going to fight for these rights. So this is a long process."

That being said, awareness of the Charter is increasing. According to Roussopoulos more citizens are taking advantage of the charter. They feel empowered to exercising their Charter rights and are pressing forward with reforms, suggestions and initiatives. For Roussopoulos, the injection of newfound civic participation has been dramatic.

"The whole of the political machine in Montreal has been substantially lubricated by growing citizen involvement," says Roussopoulos.

Given its natal state, it is hard to anticipate how, in fact, the Charter might be used outside of its original context. In its very language, the document occupies an unprecedented legal space. In the Charter it says it can't be used within the judicial system, but that doesn't mean it won't be. Roussopoulos admits that one day it's going to be brought before the courts.

"We'll see what the courts will have to say," says Roussopoulos. "At some point, someone will disagree with a decision of the ombudsperson and the legal validity of the document will be tested."

And that very challenge will have the potential to provide an even bigger stage to examine the merits of the Montreal Charter and its conceptions of urban citizenry.

You can almost see Roussopoulos smiling as he says as much - as if silently anticipating the debate that might yet come of this.