Sparring continues between Mayor Tremblay and his onetime protégé Benoit Labonté: today Labonté called the mayor’s plan to put the downtown core under direct mayoral control undemocratic, which is just grandstanding.
In politics, as in other human endeavours, there’s a predictable cyclic tendency between decentralization and consolidation. Anyone could see that the borough system was invented in a wave of decentralization (fed by Quebec’s chronic urge to divide and conquer Montreal), and wouldn’t last. It’s not surprising that it’s the issue of managing the difficult but crucial downtown core that’s started the pendulum swinging back.