Poking the swells
Pierre Poilievre wants you to know who he doesn't like
You can tell whether a politician thinks he’s made a gaffe by what he does next. Last night on the social medium Pierre Poilievre was calling everything that moves incompetent — “incompetent Toronto city politicians” and “incompetent [Vancouver] NDP mayor Kennedy Stewart” (it was a greatest-hits retweet, Stewart lost the last election). Of course that’s because he spent yesterday afternoon calling the mayors of Quebec’s two largest cities incompetent…
…and the only reaction that seemed to worry him was the notion that he was somehow calling Quebec politicians in general incompetent. So, just to be on the safe side, he made a point of calling some anglos outside Quebec incompetent to show it’s about mayors, not about Quebecers.
I was warned we might talk about Poilievre vs. the mayors of Montreal and Quebec City for my regular Thursday-night pundit gig on Le Téléjournal (in the end we didn’t) so I did some reading, and damned if he didn’t have a point, or at least a basis for discussion. Housing starts were down 37% in Montreal in 2023, worst in the country, and they were also down in Quebec City.
When Montreal’s mayor Valerie Plante fired back at Poilievre — saying that federal housing money in Quebec is managed by the province, not by individual cities — he showed that he had a sur-rebuttal ready, as debaters should. Of course housing funds are very far from being the only determinant of housing starts: cities can be more or less cooperative with the ambitions of private real-estate developers. Poilievre linked to this study from the conservative Montreal Economic Institute, which says “nearly 25,000 housing units have been blocked by the Plante administration since it took office in 2017.”
Most of the research for the paper comes from a close reading of assorted Montreal newspapers:
So thanks for a year of diligent reporting, Montreal mainstream media journalists, in case Poilievre forgot to send you a card. I looked into several of the cases the IEDM paper lists, and sure enough, most of them reflect a real conflict between the Plante administration and real-estate developers.
Some of the city’s decisions have been thrown out by judges. At 3470 Park Avenue, in my old stomping grounds between Sherbrooke St. and Milton St., the neighbourhood council nixed high-rise student housing — in a neighbourhood that is crawling with high-rise student housing — because it didn’t “integrate harmoniously with surrounding buildings and draw inspiration from their rhythm.” A superior court judge — appointed by the Trudeau Liberals! — laughed that bit of ridiculous prose and shaky judgment out of his court.
Other disputes are quite thorny. At Square Children’s, a condo development on the site of the old Montreal Children’s Hospital, the city cut the maximum height of the developer’s sixth tower from 20 stories to four. Which sounds zealous, until you (a) remember there are five other towers that were as high as anyone could want (b) find out that the developer had promised social housing on-site, a basic requisite for most new high-rise housing in large cities and certainly in Montreal — and was trying to get away instead with building social housing in a different neighbourhood. The developer has his own version (“I signed that deal with a gun at my temple”) and is suing Plante personally. I suspect it’ll be fascinating if it gets to court.
I walk you through all this because I like to complicate while everyone else is simplifying, but also to set up maybe three or four points. First: How confident are you that you want to live in a city whose government ignores things like protecting the character of neighbourhoods and ensuring low-income housing? (Low-income housing might sound like the sort of thing you want to avoid until you remember that the alternative is homelessness, so, you know, choose your fighter.) There’s a constant tension between building and living in any city. The reason Ontario premier Doug Ford spent half a year in Greenbelt hell is because his government took one look at the prospect of mandating increased density in Toronto and said, I’m gonna skip that fight, thanks.