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Warning to developers: Hudson doesn’t want you and will make your life hell.
The latest sighting of Hudson’s true anti-development colours came near the start of Monday’s February council meeting.
It’s the part where the councillors take turns reading the decisions of the Town Planning Advisory Committee. I tape these singsong recitations because they’re the only tangible proof that something has been decided since this administration has seen fit to turn TPAC into a policy instrument and ceased posting TPAC minutes online.

“448-450 Main Road: Commercial/residential project R443, considering this project subject to SPAIP (site planning and architectural integration program) Bylaw 571
First submitted in February 2014, with [four subsequent meetings], TPAC does not recommend preliminary rendition of the preliminary proposal for mixed building project.

“Members of TPAC do not see justification for extension of corridor between the buildings. In addition, both sides of the building should be connected as one building as per national building code. It is proposed by Durand, Woodhead that council agrees with TPAC that extension does not meet security and technical norms and that they can be joined underground to permit more parking and aesthetics.”

Josie Pascoe, owner/developer of the commercial/residential project at 448-450 Main Road, was stunned by this latest twist of the Hudson screw. “I had no idea what’s happening,” she told me Tuesday. “There’s no openness, no communication.”

Pascoe had planned to start construction of a 12-unit condominium block this spring, but after two years of negotiations with TPAC and Hudson’s urban planning department, she sounds ready to toss in the towel.

“Is it really worth going on? It’s not as if Hudson has an excess of major projects demanding attention,” she said. “They should give their people a mandate to get things done…if something doesn’t agree with them, they should pick up the phone, find solutions.”

She has already dropped money and energy into the total rehab of the 100-year-old former Habib’s, to the benefit of the entire community. Included in the commercial reno was the sales office for a dozen condo units in a separate building to the rear of 448-450 Main. Hudson’s zoning bylaws allow only one building per lot, so the plans for the condo included a glass-enclosed breezeway joining the old and the new.

Two years later, these clowns are asking her to forget the breezeway and build a tunnel.

If Pascoe decides she’s had enough of being jerked around, she’s not alone. Remember Chris Vinson, the hopeful Hudson resident who wanted to build an office/retail complex on Cameron opposite Cunningham’s? Cunningham’s enjoys taxpayer-subsidized parking; all Vinson was asking was the right to be able to claim access to a few public parking spaces along the mini-park opposite his property so he could satisfy the town’s selectively applied parking requirements. Even though he was ready have the park space landscaped to the town’s specifications at his expense, he was turned down. Instead he was told his clients could hoof it the 300 feet up to the former medicentre at 98 Cameron.

So rather than incur the cost of maintaining the two derelict structures on the double lot, he had them torn down.

Hudson’s stiff parking requirements for multi-unit residences and commercial properties are famously flexible when it comes to an administration’s pet projects. One of the councillors who refuses to explain to Pascoe the reasons why she’s being jerked around was all aglow at Monday’s meeting about a project to build a three-storey apartment block in the Wyman Memorial United Church parking lot. Unlike Pascoe’s proposed condo block, it would have no basement and therefore no underground parking. Wyman would retain the land but lose its parking, presumably because it would continue to enjoy public parking on the municipal lot at the corner of Main and Selkirk. If that isn’t a double standard, I’m the Pope.

Never mind that Hudson already has R-55, a 12-acre site off Côte St. Charles zoned for a seniors’ continuing-care campus. Never mind that Hudson has already been screwed twice by unscrupulous developers who promise an assisted-care seniors facility when they get their permit, then renege on the deal.

Louise Villandré, Hudson’s former town manager who is to be sentenced February 22 after pleading guilty to charges of fraud and abuse of trust, was far more honest in ensuring that people knew what was happening at the administrative level and why.

At first it was a joke, people wondering if the Town of Hudson could have Louise back to clean things up at town hall. It’s not funny any more.

The best gauge of how Hudson’s taxpayers feel about their current administration is the attendance at monthly council meetings. Monday’s February session attracted another full house, eager to catch the latest episode in the embattled burg’s ongoing political-reality show, now in its fourth season.

Both question periods heard residents clamouring for answers on contentious files, including:

– Employee X’s suspension. Director-general Jean-Pierre Roy hinted at an indefinite suspension in response to a question from Eva McCartney. (Everybody in Hudson knows they’re talking about about Parks and Recreation director Julia Schroeder’s 15-day suspension for questioning the planning for the Radio-Canada Petite Séduction shoot, but God help anyone who says so in public.)
The exchange began with McCartney asking the mayor whether the sanction had been lifted.
“The inquest still going on,” said Prévost, an unfortunate choice of words as he tossed the hissing bomb to Roy.
“It is a confidential matter concerning an employee,” Roy began. “Technically the suspension was to have finished on the 26th of this month, but for some technical reason it continues but I cannot tell you more, this is confidential.”
McCartney persisted. “Until when is the suspension continuing?”
“ Indefinite, but don’t write…” (audible reaction from the crowd.) Roy struggled to contain his temper. “I’m trying to give you some information in your language…if I do not say it correctly I will tell you correctly. This is a confidential matter…he is not suspended indefinitely…for a technical reason, because we did not receive some testimony we needed to continue. That is all I will say this evening, because it’s not respectful for the employee to talk about his case when it’s not settled.”
“Do you foresee when the suspension will continue until?”
“This is confidential for the moment.”

The strange exchange highlights this administration’s increasingly costly failure to suppress dissent, both internally and from without. This month’s list of cheques issued by the town included one of more than $20,000 to legalists Dunton Rainville to cover eight invoices. That prompted Helen Kurgansky to note this administration has blown $120,000 on legal advice over the last three months.
“The last thing I want to do is fill the pockets of the legal community,” Prévost told her.

We don’t know which budget envelope the legal fees will come from, but we will later this month. There is reason to believe this administration has juggled its 2016 budget figures to create a $600,000 contingency fund. If so, it will emerge when the town has to forward its final version to the municipal affairs ministry at the end of February.

This administration never passes on an opportunity to blame its predecessors in whatever way it can. The culture and tourism director got a Jan. 11 email from the Lester B. Pearson School Board together with a March 2012 letter of intent “signed by the former recreation director and the former director-general” committing the town to cover a third of the $75,000 cost of new playground equipment at Mount Pleasant Elementary. Council resolved to find the $25,000 but the inference was that the exes had acted inappropriately in binding the town to a deal the council of that period had never approved. (I’m told by people close to the file that those smeared by the administration have the documents to disprove council’s accusations.)

UPDATE: Former interim mayor Diane Piacente confirms the issue was discussed. (See her comment.)

Council’s critics note the absence of cost-cutting zeal when it comes to funding publicity-generating events. Hudson will pay $6,000 toward the $18,500 cost of the Land Art project to deface Hudson’s greenspaces, $7,500 plus insurance and security for the annual St. Paddy’s alcohol festival, 10 grand for the Hudson Music Festival (but no insurance) and $15,000 for the Hudson Village Theatre.

The subsidized seniors housing block being proposed for Wyman Memorial’s parking lot is another financial albatross in the making. We’re told (by the councillor for the area (who also manages the Manoir Cavagnal) that Hudson taxpayers won’t have to subsidize it much because they’ll be reimbursed by the Société d’habitation du Québec and the MRC. How much is much? People who know these things tell me 24 to 32 units are not financially sustainable, especially when rents starting at less than $600 must cover the cost of employees to care for, cook and clean the residents. They wonder where churchgoers and employees of this new facility will park once Wyman’s parking lot is gone. They wonder why the town is considering rezoning for this facility when the town has R-55, a 12-acre site already zoned for a continuing care seniors campus.

Mayor Prévost noted with gloom he was mulling dropping Saturday morning meetings, “…an underwhelming success…there have been four, five, six at the most.” The aim was to open an informal back channel by giving residents the opportunity for one-on-ones with the mayor and councillors. “Instead, people prefer to come up to the mic at council meetings and ask questions. Have to deal with that…try to come up with a better way of communicating with you and your concerns.”
There was no clear explanation of why the town was budgeting up to $35,000 to prepare for a March 17th or 24th continuation of this administration’s interminable strategic planning process.
“Sometime in March, we will provide you with shortened version of strategic plan which will become known as the mission statement where you will be asked again to comment, suggest or otherwise your agreement or disagreement. That will be mailed out.” To what end? Governments are elected to lead, not to follow.

If it’s not someone else’s fault, obfuscate.“Several residents are upset with amount of tax increases, and rightly so,” the mayor said in his customary opening monologue. “Most are because of the impact of property values, generally five per cent…however in light of some of the substantial increases, we’re meeting with the evaluators Wednesday (today) so we can understand the basics of their work that we expect to share with you shortly thereafter. We have no control over municipal evaluation procedures. We tendered under the banner of the MRC. I ask you to be patient, wait to hear from us.”

Later, an impatient Jim McDermott asked the mayor what line item on the 2016 budget was affected by the new property evaluations.
“We have a budget we’re not about to start playing around with,” Prévost countered.
Under McDermott’s prodding the mayor admitted the valuation roll was filed Nov. 1, six weeks before the adoption of the 2016 budget.
“So why didn’t you make adjustment before tabling the budget?”

What DOESN’T the town spend money on? On Monday, council approved a bid from collection agency ARO to collect $87,229 in back business taxes for 2014 and 2015. It will cost the town a quarter of whatever ARO succeeds in collecting. In neighbouring Rigaud, mayor Hans Gruenwald, when he finds himself with a few spare minutes, gets on the phone with the town’s tax deadbeats and warns them to pay up because he’s got bills to pay.

Just sayin’ but isn’t that the way to run a town?

Unless current trends miraculously reverse themselves, market watchers will remember 2016 as the year Canada went to hell, stranded in No Man’s Land in a war among the world’s biggest central banks. The loonie and crude have yet to find a floor. Unemployment is expected to top 7% but stats will be misleading. As EI benefits run out, the destitute turn to the underground economy. The taxpayer loses any which way.

Meanwhile, Canadian investors are so terrified of losing their nest eggs in a bear market they’re sitting on $75 billion of excess cash. Remember former Bank of Canada head Mark Carney calling out Canadian corporations for sitting on cash reserves rather than investing in productivity? Carney’s ‘dead money’ estimate is thought to be closer to $600 billion than it was when Carney said it. The banks scold us for lacking faith in Canada, but in an economic environment this bleak, who feels like investing?

Besides, not everyone is hurting equally. As NDP leader Tom Mulcair notes in a fundraising plea this week, Canadian banks earned a record $35 billion in profits in 2015 and handed out $12.5 billion in bonuses. According to Disgruntled Tom, those same banks eliminated 4,600 good-paying Canadian jobs last year alone.

We’re looking at a planetary crisis. Earlier this week, an Ottawa symposium on income inequality sponsored by the Hill Times heard that as 2015 drew to a close, 62 people held the same amount of wealth as the world’s poorest 50%.

…the wealth of the one per cent richest people in the world amounts to $110-trillion, which is 65 times the total wealth of the poorest half of humanity. An international network of tax havens allows the world’s elite to hide $7.6-trillion. – Oxfam International’s Ricardo Fuentes-Nueva

…which brings me to why I like Bernie Sanders for president of the United States. I recall the first time I heard Sanders explain his Robin Hood tax. Sanders would tax stock transactions at half a percentage point, less for bond and derivative trades. Bernie estimates it would raise $300 billion a year to cover free tuition at every public college and university in the U.S. His supporters estimate the collective student loan debt is close to $1.3 trillion, much of it at unsustainable interest rates.

A whole lot of ifs stand in the way. If Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, if Michael Bloomberg doesn’t spoil a Sanders/Trump shootout. And of course, if Bernie wins with the  Democratic majority he would need to pilot socially divisive legislation through the House and the Senate.

If it adopted such a measure the U.S. wouldn’t be alone; Britain, Germany, Switzerland and China tax financial transactions. The Trudeau Liberals would put themselves on the right side of history by including a made-in-Canada transaction tax in the upcoming budget. Sooner or later, the world’s central banks will have no option but to agree to measures that will have the effect of reining in wealth flight, corporate extortionists and fiscal tax havens because of the human cost of extreme wealth inequality and injustice. An equality tax is a modest first step.

Unless his lawyer wins a stay of sentence, Toronto cop James Forcillo will spend four years in prison for pumping too many shots into drug-crazed teen Sammy Yatim.

Before you read any further, watch the video (the Globe and Mail has the best edit). I had to watch it half a dozen times to get a clear idea of what happened that July evening in 2013. Stripped to basics, the video shows Yatim clearing out a TTC streetcar with his breast-grabbing, penis-exposing, knife-waving antics, then waiting for the police. Sometimes he’s immobile, other times pacing, but never making a move to leave the vehicle. When they arrive, the cops order the kid to drop the knife. Yatim takes a couple of steps toward the back of the streetcar, then moves into the doorway.

We see two, then three police officers 20-30 feet from the door. One of the cops has already assumed a firing stance. He drops Yatim with a three-shot volley. The shooter fires six more times. We see Yatim’s foot in the frame, jerking as five of the shots strike him.

It was on the basis of this video and weeks of testimony that the jury concluded Forcillo didn’t murder Yatim. They determined that Forcillo’s initial three-shot volley was in self-defence, so they did not find him guilty on the unpremeditated murder charge even though those first three shots killed Yatim.

We’ll never know for sure, but I think we can assume the jurors decided they had to find Forcillo guilty of something. So they got him for the attempted murder of the kid he’d already killed.

Thanks to the Harper government, attempted murder carries a four-year minimum sentence, which is why Forcillo’s lawyer proposes to challenge the constitutionality of mandatory minimums. Given the Supreme Court’s allergy to anything the Harper Tories rammed through Parliament, I’ll be interested to see how they deal with this.

The video I saw showed the execution of a skinny strung-out kid by a burly cop armed with the latest perp-stopping technology. It took me back to the first time I saw a police execution, the ambush of two bank robbers outside a caisse populaire on the south shore by members of the SQ holdup squad. I was a rookie police reporter but I knew what I’d seen was wrong. Since then I’ve chronicled maybe a dozen police executions, beginning with the 1987 murder of Anthony Griffin by a Montreal police officer. I can’t speak for the rest of Canada but most extrajudicial execution victims in Quebec seem to be members of visible minority and cultural communities – or aboriginals.

Before you accuse me of stereotyping all police officers as stone-faced killers, understand this: Canadians have assigned the job of dealing with society’s most disturbed individuals to our police forces. Whether it’s some poor soul off his/her meds having a psychotic episode in public, sex predator, jihadi terrorist or revenge-driven ex, it isn’t you or I who answer the 911 call. I can find sympathy for some cops who kill because they’ve never been taught or equipped to do better. Others should never have been hired, let alone armed. Political complicity is the reason why cops investigate cops, why cops are ready to perjure themselves to protect a colleague. We are moving past this. But we are moving far too slowly.

The Forcillo jury came to a ridiculous verdict. There’s nothing else to call it. But they’re like Canadians everywhere, sick of watching our police departments dealing inappropriately with society’s problems. Are we better off buying our cops better guns and   body armour or forcing elected officials and their top-cop appointees to move past the platitude-ridden bullshit we’ve been eating for far too long? One can only hope Canada’s top court recognizes this verdict for what it is – a call for help in stopping killer cops.

Well, lie. Spout platitudes. Make nice.

The trouble with New Democratic Party leader Tom Mulcair is that he’s a fighter, not a lover. Canadians, always apt to vote while looking in their rear-view mirrors, dumped the Harper Tories. Quebeckers bitching about having elected a Liberal government have only themselves to blame.

Justin Trudeau and his caucus have four thankless, grinding, troubled years ahead in a world economy that bears no resemblance to what we were seeing 365 days ago. From the messages coming out of Davos, the worst lies ahead. The Liberal agenda has been bushwhacked and it’s highly unlikely next month’s budget will change this let alone what the New Democrats and Conservatives decide at their respective conventions.

My only regret is that Mulcair isn’t leading Her Majesty’s Official Opposition. I’d drive to Ottawa to catch QP if he was.

Hudson residents ask me what’s going on at their town hall, and with reason. For example, sharp-eyed residents consulting the minutes of the Dec. 16 budget meeting on the town’s website will note a significant change from the budget presented to residents.  The bottom line ($12,053,290) is the same as that adopted in December, but the administration has made a few crucial changes, such as adding $592,840 for public transportation. That was left out of the December budget presentation, but unless you took screen shots of the Powerpoint, taped the whole show or finagled a copy, how was anyone to know? Of course my confusion may be a function of my inability at basic math, so I’ll reserve further comment until the town files its budget with the municipal affairs ministry. One assumes this will be posted on the municipal website as in past years.

•••

Then there’s the $2,086.80 the town spent last fall on hotel rooms for the Radio Canada production crew in town to shoot a Petite Séduction episode. I was skeptical taxpayers would be asked to foot the bill to put them up, given Hudson’s proximity to the Maison Mère. So I emailed my questions and got this reply from Ophélie Simoncelli, the show’s researcher.

Nous avons tourné une magnifique émission à Hudson cet automne qui, sans aucun doute, aura de belles retombées sur votre communauté! Cet épisode sera diffusé en avril ou en mai prochain – nos calendriers de diffusion ne sont malheureusement pas encore complétés.

Les municipalités qui posent leur candidature pour recevoir La Petite Séduction le font en toute connaissance de cause. Le conseil municipal doit d’ailleurs adopter une résolution en ce sens, sachant qu’il doit réserver un budget pour la réalisation des activités et pour l’hébergement de l’équipe. L’équipe est sur le terrain 12 heures par jour et doit profiter de chaque minute de lumière pour faire la plus belle et la meilleure émission possible, voilà pourquoi nous sommes logés sur place, même si la municipalité est à une heure de route de Montréal.

Grâce au comité de citoyens qui a piloté cette Petite Séduction avec la complicité de notre équipe, Hudson profitera d’une visibilité enviable sur les ondes de Radio-Canada. Nous sommes regardés par une moyenne d’un million de téléspectateurs, d’un océan à un autre du pays.

Cet épisode sera à l’image de votre communauté : une émission colorée, aussi touchante qu’amusante, qui laisse une belle place à vos magnifiques paysages et au divers talents de vos concitoyens.

En espérant que vous apprécierez cette Petite Séduction à Hudson!

The council indeed adopted a resolution approving a maximum expenditure of $10,000.

I’ve since been told other expenses were incurred in staging the shoot but have so far been unable to quantify them. As for les rétombées economiques hinted at in Mme. Simoncelli’s email, residents will have to find the patience to await results. As Justin Trudeau pointed out in Davos, gladhanding and a lower Canadian dollar will take time to work their magic.

I bring this up because the shitstorm from the Petite Séduction episode appears have been behind the suspension  of Parks and Recreation Director Julia Schroeder for 15 days. The suspension, approved Jan. 15 by a council majority with only District 1’s Rob Spencer voting against, is based in part on an alleged violation of the town’s spanking new anti-harassment bylaw adopted at that very same confused Dec. 15 special meeting. Schroeder’s transgression was to have gone public with her concerns about Hudson’s indifference to the Petite Séduction shoot. A competent administration would have done a better sales job, like when Schroeder’s predecessors Mike Klaiman and Jean Chevalier recruited Hudsonites by the hundreds to vote their downtown core as one of the Seven Wonders of Vaudreuil-Soulanges.

People familiar with the file believe Schroeder is being set up for dismissal because she’s not seen by the current administration as a team player. I hope this isn’t the case. My own experiences have taught me the wisdom of seeking a more positive, proactive solution to human relations. Successful managers realize it’s easier to get things done by selling the mission at hand – and ultimately their global vision – to the people assigned to deliver the results. Willing hands mean lighter work for everyone.

Grumbling and dissent are symptoms of a deeper malaise. Firing or suing one’s critics may silence dissent in the short term but does not cure the underlying condition.