Where is there a Town Council, an administration and a mayor who justify policy by saying whatever seems to float through their minds, drowning out reason and truth (for this, there should be liability – political if not legal), and evoking anecdotes of their Mediterranean childhood and of seeing waifs alone on a shore? The answer, unfortunately for us all, is North Hatley. When the concern of councillors and administrators for their personal liability trumps the concerns of the community, and when remaining stone faced and silent in face of the opposition of more than one hundred residents becomes a strategy councillors and the mayor use against the community itself (the mayor has stated that those who oppose the decision to lock the gates to the beach are no more than children having a tantrum in a toy store, and then has tried to say he was only using an analogy!), then the time has come for the joke to end. 

It has become crystal clear that negotiation is no longer possible; it was evident at the latest Town Meeting that citizens are not being listened to. The mayor repeats the same tired, and incorrect refrains. The fence to the beach, he claims, was erected for reasons of safety. Yes that is true, it would seem, but for the safety of people already at the beach, and not to prevent access to it. The gates to the beach are open, says the mayor, forgetting or failing to add they are locked all mornings and most months in a year, thereby depriving of access to the lake residents unlucky enough not to own waterfront. In doing this, the municipality is enforcing and perpetuating a form of economic discrimination and is actively dissuading new families – new taxpayers – from settling in the village.  The finances of NHRS are in a mess, the mayor claims, despite a routine Federal audit three years ago that found nothing wrong and despite a new system of accounting already in place for the future.

Council, states the mayor, is limited in what it can do by the legal opinion it obtained from the firm of lawyers it retains on a commission basis. But how does this opinion fit with legal jurisprudence and doctrine, neither of which it cites, and how does it counter the arguments in the opinion obtained in 2016 and communicated to the administration of the Town? But of course this new opinion couldn’t counter them, since, or so it would seem, this 2016 opinion was never circulated by the administration of the town, or by the mayor – to the lawyers, or to all of the sitting councillors. And why wasn’t it circulated? Well that’s part of the joke, as is the cost of obtaining a new legal opinion that is unaware of the one that already existed. And again at the last Town meeting, the mayor cited the insurance company in his attempt to justify locking the gate at the beach. But the insurance company has made no such demand. But then the facts don’t seem to matter much. Laughable, if only it were funny!

Where can we possibly go from here? There would seem to be three possibilities: a) Council begins to take its role of ‘representation’ seriously and starts listening to, and actually ‘hearing’, what the community has been telling it; b) Council continues down the same path of searching for justifications of the ‘policy’ it has adopted (and continues to desperately count the number of drownings in lakes in Québec); or c) members of Council and of the Town administration decide they are unable to continue in the roles they have chosen to exercise, and to follow the policy they have adopted, faced with the opposition of a number of residents that is only growing. The first possibility would constitute a desirable but radical change, and so is unlikely; the second would constitute no change at all, and would be unbearable; and the third, well that would constitute a punch line and put an end to the joke.

• Paul St-Pierre

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