Achi news desk-
What started as a dispute over alcohol spending by a library volunteer in St-Patronil, Que., has spiraled into a political crisis that has upended the small village east of Quebec City and shaken its governing body.
The resignation this week of three members of the St-Petronil city council is the latest turn in the months-long heated conflict between residents and elected officials, which prompted an investigation by the district authorities and led the municipality in the winter to send legal notices threatening a tenth of its population.
Mayor Jean Cote did not give reasons for the departure of councilors Claude Archambault, Alain LaRouche and Lynn Gosselin when he announced their resignations at a city council meeting on Tuesday, but the news drew cheers from audience members in St-Petronil. hall.
“Weird,” said Cote, clearly frustrated at the response. “It is not easy to be an elected official in the municipality,” he noted in a short speech to praise his former colleagues. “We can understand their decision.”
The resignation leaves only four councilors remaining.
Cote opened Tuesday’s council meeting by outlining the series of events that brought tensions to a boil in the normally sleepy town. It all started last summer, he said, when a library volunteer’s request to be reimbursed for alcohol purchased at an after-work event was denied.
“The Saint-Petronil City Council has been suffering since August from retaliation from the library’s former volunteers, who never accepted the council’s simple request not to bear expenses on behalf of the council without its approval,” he said.
Shortly after the library episode, a group of residents began questioning the town manager, Natalie Puckett, and her departure from a previous job at the Val de Lacs municipality. In December, they launched a petition asking Met-Patronil to investigate her employment, citing an alleged letter from the mayor of Val de Lac, obtained through an access to information request, that they said made the decision “incomprehensible.”
In response to the petition, at least 97 people in St-Petronil – whose population in 2021 was just over 1,000 people – received legal letters on behalf of the city demanding that the recipients stop “violating Paquette’s private life and reputation”. The local paper, Autour de l’Île, was also notified.
A public outcry ensued, and the city in January called on Quebec’s department of municipal affairs to review Puckett’s hiring, though Cote said in a statement at the time that the city remained “convinced that the hiring process of our city manager, whose integrity is being unfairly attacked, was conducted rigorously and diligently.”
So in March, the residents began circulating another petition calling on elected officials to “adopt an appropriate attitude” towards citizens, to allow “freedom of exchange” at council meetings and to commit to “proper use of public funds, as opposed to the commitment of lawyers’ fees to citizens and the local community”, among other things.
That petition received 512 signatures, said François Martin, the signer who presented the appeal to the City Council on Tuesday. In the interview, he said that he withheld everyone’s signature but his signature to prevent retaliatory actions from the municipality.
At the town hall meeting, Côté responded to the petition section by section, but told Martin that the council had already enacted measures that met her demands.
“We are very, very disappointed,” Martin said Friday. “But I also cannot understand how the mayor can think that people will sign a petition asking for changes… if these changes were not necessary.”
Cote and Martin agreed on one point at the council meeting: both characterized the situation in the village as “alarming.”
They are not alone. In a statement on Friday, Municipal Affairs Minister Andre Laforet said she was “troubled” by the resignations of St-Patronille’s three councillors.
“It’s not normal for it to come to this,” she said. “Our elected municipal officials must be able to carry out their essential mandate in a healthy climate. It is also essential for municipalities to listen to the concerns of their citizens.”
In an interview Friday, Cote said his colleagues’ departures were part of what he called an “alarming” wave of resignations by Quebec city officials amid increasingly challenging working conditions. More than 700 of Quebec’s 8,000 local politicians have left office since the last municipal elections in 2021.
An investigation by the Quebec Municipal Commission into Puckett’s hiring is ongoing.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on April 6, 2024.
