thousandlashesdotca

Venture capitalists will tell you the worst investments are the walking wounded, enterprises that neither fly nor die but bleed cash and stagger from crisis to crisis. The challenge is determining whether they’ll ever come back. Wouldn’t it be more merciful to end the suffering?

Postmedia is long past that. It’s the Undead. Dead man walking. A corporate zombie waiting for a financial stake through the heart from banks, investors, shareholders – everyone with skin in the game of weighing $650M in debt against the dream of actually recouping some of their losses.

What’s Postmedia worth if it’s carved up and the chunks sold? CEO Paul Godfrey said in September selling assets wasn’t on the table. That was during discussion of a debt restructuring proposal to convert $648M in old debt into $325M in new debt at a marginally lower interest rate. The proposal was accepted, wiping out $200M in shareholder value in exchange for a $50M annual reduction in interest payments made possible by an injection of cash from a U.S. venture capital firm.

So what, you say? It’s more of the same bad drug that poisoned Southam, Hollinger, and Canwest, beginning with convergence: the asinine notion that one can achieve economies of scale by merging radio, television and print newsrooms and firing all those redundant bodies. Wave after unholy wave of wannabe media barons and their financial dogsbodies looking to boost shareholder value have succeeded in silencing hundreds of community voices across Canada. What they haven’t destroyed, they’ve burdened with debt and stripped of human assets to the point that even the Montreal Gazette, an enterprise with intrinsic value, may not survive the final cuts.

I can’t help laughing when I hear pundits holding out hope that federal regulators will ride to the rescue. We thought so too when we went to Industry Canada’s Competition Bureau with proof TC Media was attempting to stifle competition. The complaint followed Quebecor’s surrender after a four-year war of the weeklies with TC. Quebecor sold 74 weekly newspapers, some of them essential voices in their respective communities, to TC for $75M. TC merged some with theirs, sold others and placed half up for auction. The Competition Bureau could have imposed tougher measures on TC to ensure the survival of the orphans. It chose not to.

We hear about the plight of the Postmedia dailies, and with reason. But what about all those little weeklies Postmedia obtained from Quebecor? We’re talking about papers all over Canada, many of them in small towns and rural communities fighting for survival. What hope is there for a little community weekly whose reporter is the only neutral face at the monthly council meetings?

The disease isn’t confined to print. Parallel processes are underway in radio and television, with newsrooms slashed and content generation centralized. No wonder the Canadian media-consuming public isn’t consuming mainstream media – everything reads and sounds the same because we’re losing the diversity of voices. Government bailouts will do nothing to reverse the damage generations of bad management have caused.

It’s not just me. Friends say they stay better informed about what’s happening in North America when they’re getting their news via the BBC, TV5, Eurovision and Al Jazeera’s successor. CNN Asia is infinitely better than the Americentric mother ship.

Many of us have stopped reading newspapers because smartphones, tablets and apps are more convenient. I pay for the electronic New York Times and Globe and Mail because they’re must reads for original-source junkies like me. La Presse, CBC, Torstar, CNBC, BBC and L’Observateur fill in the blanks. Why read one newspaper when you can triangulate the daily truth for yourself?

I feel guilty about not taking the Gaz. It was my mom and dad for the 10 years I worked there. I know and like a lot of its people and wish them well. But until it improves its website and paywall terms, I’m not buying. From the sad sounds coming from Postmedia’s boardroom, I’m not alone.

Hudson has opportunities and we have a storied history of bold moves that we have made stick on some green issues like pesticides. But, we’ve somehow lost our ability to act, to embrace and to empower complex and especially controversial forward looking changes.

I’m trying to think big ideas for our future, but think we need to start by implementing small logical steps leading in the correct direction. Also, I would like to promote ideas that more of our citizens might feel comfortable supporting with a comment or like so that council might get a sense of security or comfort to allow them to implement small changes.

We’re intending to revise a bunch of bylaws and zoning, so I thought I’d start to throw some of my own thinking in from way out in left field. I’ll start one green tidbit at a time in baby step form, copy Council and see if they bring any of these ideas forward into a resolution that can be stated in one or two sentences plus the required raft of Whereas clauses to make it legal and binding.

I’ll start with the smallest of greenhouse gas reduction initiatives that could be adopted by council resolution at next council, if there’s will. It doesn’t require a committee, it doesn’t require consultants, public consultations and it fits with our loosely adopted, mainly for appearance of green, but already ignored by our own Council, Green House Gas Reduction planning. Yes, we paid a consultant to have a greenhouse gas reduction plan and then later installed a replacement oil furnace in a town building and it might have been the correct decision.

Green Baby Step One: No more fossil fuel powered new buildings will be approved.

Yes, that’s the whole bylaw or resolution. And no, it doesn’t really change much, except it shows a clear direction by closing less green doors. Just outright ban oil, natural gas and hybrid wood fired furnaces and water heaters for new construction.

That makes electric and solar the only approvable HVAC and water heater systems for new builds in Hudson. In Quebec virtually 100% of our electric power is renewable hydro-electric, wind or solar, and we have virtually no input from oil, coal, natural gas, or nuclear.

Do not ban replacement oil or natural gas furnaces for existing structures; because the cost and complexity to retrofit old oil fired heating systems with new electric can be very high relative to the value of the home. That’s basically the reason Hudson retrofitted a town heating system with a new oil furnace, and while it wasn’t exemplary of green intentions, it was the correct decision due to current financial constraints. Besides, the new oil furnaces are so much more efficient than the old ones that if an existing furnace is more than 10-15 years old it would pay you back quickly to replace it and save a bunch of fossil fuel and the resulting greenhouse gases. Call your favourite local oil furnace guy and ask him how much it would cost and how much you can save.

The Town of Hudson’s reign of error continued at the June council meeting with the revelation this administration won’t hold a byelection to replace the ailing Mayor Ed Prevost. Councillors appeared to be divided on whether to hold a byelection to replace dissident councillor Rob Spencer.

Neither Spencer nor Prevost have attended the last three council sessions. Article 317 of Quebec’s cities and towns act says a municipality MAY hold a byelection to replace council members if they miss four meetings and if more than a year remains to the end of the current mandate. That would be in November 2017.

But Article 317 is rife with weasel words and wormholes. The town is under no legal obligation to replace the missing council members if the remaining councillors agree it would be in Hudson’s interest to continue as is. Town clerk Vincent Maranda told residents he checked with the municipal affairs ministry (MAMOT) to nail it all down and they said it was kosher. I checked with Quebec’s director-general of elections and got referred to MAMOT. I asked the legalists at MAMOT whether citizens had any say. They told me I could file a complaint. Translated, there’s screw all anyone can do. In Quebec, municipal democracy is an oxymoron.

I get that the mayor may need the medical insurance that comes with the job. So be it. But what’s it say to you if this administration opts to keep Prevost on the payroll out of mercy and guns Spencer because he took Prevost before the Quebec Municipal Commission?

Likewise, I’m struggling with the word to describe this administration’s statement that Hudson’s business sector supports the installation of water meters in the commercial sector. This prevarication was delivered during question period by councillor Ron Goldenberg and town manager Jean-Pierre Roy, who as far as I can determine, attended none of the meetings where this was discussed. It was in response to my accusation the town has done nothing to prepare for this summer’s incipient water shortage and the inevitable ban on all lawn watering other than to restate its determination to stick it to Hudson’s hapless commercial sector yet again.

One of the local rags subsequently reported the exchange verbatim without fact-checking. In fact, businesses had reluctantly agreed to  water meters back in 2014 as a concession to arrive at a solution to the water tax crisis (engineered by the current council). Not that most residents care, but businesses were (and still are) being grossly overcharged for water in comparison to residents. (How many businesses have bathtubs? Swimming pools? Automatic lawn sprinklers? 2.5 bathrooms? Dishwashers? Laundry rooms?)

In 2014, Goldenberg gathered a water tax committee which consisted of both business owners and residents to review and make recommendations with regards to installing water meters. From the outset, business owners and commercial landlords were led to believe the entire town would eventually be metered and that they were to be the first step in the process. So the consensus was that businesses would be the guinea pigs. In exchange, the town would agree to meter some 50 residential properties to establish a comparative sample to properly measure consumption. Furthermore, public buildings would also have to be metered, including schools, churches, town buildings, etc. (Basically anything that is not residential).

The only part of those 2014 discussions to have survived was “businesses agreed to be metered.” The rest? Conveniently forgotten.

Also conveniently forgotten was council’s vow to post details of the litigation embroiling the town (50 grand this month, I’m told.) There was a Gazette story reporting the vow in early March. There was a repeat at last week’s council meeting. Unless they’ve artfully hidden the list somewhere on the town’s expensive new website, it’s still not there.

All this to say there’s a good reason why transparency and accountability are nowhere to be found on the town’s $5,000 mission statement. Old-fashioned virtues have no place in Hudson’s new branding. Take solace in the growing assurance that meters are no more likely to this inept administration of dreamers and schemers than the Mohawk performing arts centre or the wholesale giveaway of public greenspace. Fair trade, my ass.

I have been Blog Squatting here as a continuation of my self-admitted local democracy experiment. I would like to thank Jim Duff as my benevolent Bloglord (blog landlord) victim for his indulgence, his turning a blind eye, or simply a lack of interest that has allowed me to indulge myself and experiment here.

Blogging can easily become narcissistic blathering. For the time being, I am hereby evicting myself from being an uninvited main voice on this blog that is not mine. I lack the skills, time, commitment and wider social connections needed to build this Blog towards anything resembling truly relevant discussion. Perhaps in modern times building that sort of relevance is becoming close to impossible. I will try to explain later in this post.

The basic questions I have been trying to answer recently are: How will small communities, lacking a politically involved local newspaper remain involved in their own politics and municipal destiny and what new modern tools are available to fill any gaps left by the disappearance of that local paper? I have yet to find a good answer, and I believe that the tools do not yet exist to replace good local journalists. Communities like Hudson who lack good local papers will diminish in some ways we don’t yet fully understand. Such change will come first to small communities, but where we once had multiple Montreal English dailies we now have one mostly branch office English paper. More of our media is controlled by fewer corporations, never a good omen for having balanced insight among citizens.

I’d like to thank those who have followed me on this period of the blog, an interested and interesting gathering of people who think and care about Hudson’s future and are willing to contribute their thoughts at the risk of judgement. You are quite unique within the municipal political landscape; even participating is a small group discussion can be a scary task in a small town divided into factions and social groups. Very few will like a post, fewer still will discuss it positively and contribute something, and even fewer will ever reasonably object to a position taken and almost no one will circulate a link to all their friends. Debate towards consensus eludes most of the modern world, so bullies will dominate the decision making.

The real control of municipal direction has always existed within an interested subset of any community and their willingness to get involved in any issue, either constructively or destructively would dictate the relative success of failure of successive Councils.

The cycle seems to repeat, driven by an almost insignificant part of our population that becomes disproportionately noisy for what they see as good reasons. One hundred citizens at a monthly council would represent less than 2% of citizens and half are there for constructive comments and initiatives. Ten angry hecklers at the last council represent less than 0.2% of citizens angry enough to debase themselves with inappropriate action. Only a very tiny percentage will form small groups to circulate angry emails and Facebook posts calling to dismantle and replace the Mayor and Council.

It’s easy for me to draw the logical conclusion that 98+% of Hudson citizens are happy enough with the government by a few elected fellow citizens to just not get involved. An alternative question is: If only 1% care, why should I? As I better understand this process, I begin to question whether what I write will be constructive or destructive. Am I better serving the 1% or the 99% and how might I ever balance both sides when one side remains mostly silent? Am I promoting peaceful progress or fomenting dissatisfaction and disruption?

We need dreamers and idealists. But, it can be too easy to get caught up in passion and belief and begin to lose sight of what is possible within the confines of past failures, existing constraints and the overbearing laws that govern municipal governments. None of those are the responsibility of any current council; government is in fact the political science of bureaucratic checks and balances that limit any government’s ability to move off course too quickly. The system is designed to prevent bold actions that happen in less than the time between elections when the people can speak again. It is painfully easy to overwhelm a municipal government drowning in past problems and red-tape with good ideas or well meaning demands and it is absolutely possible to freeze them to failure with only a small group of angry citizens.

I thank and admire all who serve our community, those have served us and those who will serve in the future as Mayor or Councillor. You undertake to dream of a better future for our town, and to work for low compensation and too little respect within a system designed to keep you from doing anything significant without massive support of a silent majority, while enduring the slings and arrows of a tiny minority. Without citizens like our Mayors and Councils, we’d suddenly cease to govern ourselves and quickly be absorbed and homogenized into a bland mediocrity completely unlike Hudson of past times.

Will Social media, including blogs like this one, improve local politics? I believe that social media will not easily join us into causes or drive progress based on broad vision and consensus. Especially in a small town environment with tightly woven social structures that can become quickly judgmental.

We who create blogs or Facebook groups risk dividing ourselves into significantly smaller and smaller groups of like minded people on narrow focused single issues. Until we find a formula that actually engages significant portions of a population into real respectful debate and discussion towards consensus, we will fail to make ourselves relevant.

I suspect that Bloglord Duff may come back in the near future and that his hiatus may have been pondering many of these same issues. Perhaps, Jim will have found some answers that elude and frustrate me, if so I will happily support his efforts to engage and educate more people in discussion.

There are very few dummies among us, but today I’m attempting to distill the essence of Hudson’s strategic plan to a few simple sentences.

• Hudson can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing because we’re slowly failing financially and not keeping up with the requirements of the bureaucracy of the MRC and Quebec.
• Hudson needs better government, responsive, open, fiscally responsive and completely transparent.
• Hudson has deep passion for arts and culture and has many involved citizens.
• Hudson values the beauty of the nature around us and has many involved citizens.
• Hudson will need more tax paying residents to pay our bills, but we must grow in a planned and controlled fashion that fits Hudson’s image and way of life.
• Hudson needs be more attractive and better maintained, to be a better place to live, to attract more visitors and entice more future residents to buy homes here.
• Hudson needs to encourage and enable transitional living options so that residents can age well in Hudson for as long as possible.

This is basically my simple summary of everything Council has resolved to do when they accepted the Strategic Plan at April’s public Council meeting. The rest of the strategic plan is professional, competent, and comprehensive.

The plan shows that they’ve spent a lot of time and thought this out, put some numbers together and set a timeline and plan for staged implementation. Since it affects our future I suggest everyone read it. My previous posts shared the links to the documents or just go to Hudson’s website.

A meeting May 12^th will provide much more information and form committees on various points.

For the fearful among us, Council can’t simply start spending borrowed money wildly or making deals or rezoning without public approval on anything major. If they did, they would lose the trust and respect of the people and violate one of their own strategic plan pillars.

I will dig deeper into some of the key Hudson Strategic plan issues in future posts, so casual visitors should check back often. As always, we need more discussion and more voices, so please speak up and comment.

I’d like to thank Mayor Prevost and all Councillors for gathering our comments and listening to citizen’s concerns and then spending the countless hours it takes to prepare such a complex and well thought out framework for the future, especially during a time of extreme duress and complex challenges within our municipal government.

The Prevost administration is the first in decades to undertake such a major plan for our future, they deserve our respect and in return we should take the time to read and understand what we need to do together to make Hudson’s future better.

If we fail to plan for Hudson’s future, Hudson will surely fail.

An old sales manager who worked for me often said that the reason God gave us two eyes, two ears and only one mouth is so we can look and listen twice as much as we talk.

I’m trying to build bridges; so I’m asking all sides to leave all baggage at the shore of the swamp that divides us and walk gently and quietly towards common ground.

Hudson tends to be a passionate and opinionated community, so debate can become dangerous at times. Based on recent events, I believe that before we review our future plans we should review some basic rules of engagement for respectful discussion and debate.

Our leaders are our neighbours and friends, the pittance we pay them makes it as close to volunteer per hour as you could imagine. They ask little of us while walking among us and we too often ask the impossible from them. If we continue to waste their time, attack their ideas without fully understanding them, or treat them with disrespect or suspicion at every turn we eventually won’t have leaders willing to run for election. Revisit my recent posts on Designed to Fail and ask how that might serve a Provincial government wishing for fewer municipalities.

Council knows my mind because I don’t expect them to read my mind, so I invite them to read my thoughts here and via emails. Every post I make on this blog, every comment I make on Facebook is shared with our Mayor and Council immediately so they can be the first to read it. I am willing to publish whatever I say and I won’t publish or say anything behind their backs.

You must also know that Council and I don’t always agree. I’m not perfect and at rare times they’ve angered me and I’ve walked the very edges of disrespectful and will try to do better in the future. In the end, I sure do respect them for the mess they took over, what they’ve done already, what they’re trying to do and the difficult challenges that Hudson has always presented to those who choose to lead us.

Frankly I’m impressed for different reasons with each and every Hudson Councillor and especially their willingness to establish a dialogue and try to solve problems with me. When we differ, they usually reach out and together we try to and usually  close in on or come to common ground.

Naturally, I’m confused and deeply ashamed when Council is heckled at monthly meetings like the last one. If that’s the Hudson we aspire to, I’ll have no part of it. I do understand that it is only a few citizens, less than half of one percent, who are apparently frustrated to self-reduced humanity for various reasons. But there’s just no place for any of that type of disrespectful behavior in our town. I’m disappointed that the vast majority of Hudson did not see that behavior, because I know us to be a polite and respectful place and most Hudsonites would as be angered as I was. We’re all equals on the same side here.

A great problem with planning any progress is that we actually need to agree on a few things, starting with the idea that things must change. In the past few posts I’ve tried to be realistic about some of the risks of failure to manage ourselves, and those risks begin with feeling safe doing nothing and end with Hudson mostly disappearing if we do no better than we have done in the past 20 years. Council better understands the fiscal challenges, the bureaucratic challenges and the hole we started from, but they cannot be expected to have all the answers immediately available, nor can they respond to every great idea they get passed. The key to Hudson’s past success is that a citizen with a great idea gathers some friends to help and the group contributes to the greatness  of our community.

Hudson has been lacking on serious long term planning for decades, so the Prevost Administration’s efforts to establish one have been a confusing new experience for many in Hudson. Especially the part where they actually asked all citizens for our input before taking probably well over a thousand comments and distilling them into Hudson’s Strategic Plan. And yes, they paid some local professionals to help them pull the plan together because it must have been a time consuming and daunting task and they didn’t want to miss anything.

I’m confused by many of the reactions I hear, which range from “great ideas” through “How dare they?” through “What were they thinking (or smoking)?” and span the gamut from quiet support through suspicion, distrust, vocal rejection to some seriously libelous statements about who might benefit that I won’t dignify in digital ink.

In the next couple of posts I want to build on positives and make a case for what our leaders believe we must do to ensure the survival of Hudson and help share the Prevost administration’s look beyond to where we could thrive again.

Today, in preparation for discussion, I’m giving everyone some homework.

Don’t believe what you’ve heard, actually take the time to read the Strategic Plan, or at least the summary version. Extra nerd credit will be given for reading the appendix. Then mark your calendars on May 12, 2016 for the Strategic Plan public meeting, which unfortunately I will be out of town for because of a prior commitment.

The links to your homework are:

Strategic Plan: http://www.hudson.quebec/wpcontent/uploads/_conseilmaire/Plan%20strategique/Our%20Town%20Our%20Futur%20Eng.pdf

Appendix:

http://www.hudson.quebec/wp-content/uploads/_conseil-maire/Plan%20strategique/Hudson%20Appendix%202-%20Financial%20Plan%20Detail%20Eng.pdf

Overview:

http://www.hudson.quebec/wp-content/uploads/BOOKLET-ENGlr.pdf

I keep hearing complaints about Hudson Council’s Transparency, and many of those complaints are on legal issues.

Because issues are before the courts or there are threatened actions, Council is simply not able to share specific information on most of our legal issues. It is unfortunate but apparently quite common to municipalities that we’ve got such expensive legal problems and most of them originate from only a couple of places.

I think Council is supplying what they can fairly well and you can go and look for details of what they have shared but I’ll save you some trouble.

Look at: http://www.hudson.quebec/en/services/general-management/ and you’ll find the links below.

Here’s a link to the current Hudson legal files: http://www.hudson.quebec/wp-content/uploads/2016-03-15-Court-cases.pdf. In terms of number of cases it is apparently quite normal, and a number of the actions are simple disagreements that happen in normal municipal business and issues related to employees which must be kept confidential.

It’s not current, and the legal system grinds slowly and expensively so some of these legal files have been active for a long time but here’s a link to last fiscal year’s contracts between $2,000-25,000: http://www.hudson.quebec/wp-content/uploads/Liste-des-contrats-de-2-000-et-total-plus-de-25-000-du-2014-11-01-to-2015-10-31.pdf and you can find our legal bills under Dunton Rainville.

Since this is basically all the information that can be made public, look at and cross reference these two files and you can perhaps gain a sense of which cases are costing what and in some cases who is driving them. Feel free to inappropriately ask any of those involved for a better perspective, but if they’re well advised they probably won’t be any more forthcoming than Council.

At monthly council meetings there is a list of all accounts payable to be approved and it is specific and detailed. I haven’t found those listings on the web, but I’d like to see them placed on the website. The last two months alone we consumed over $100K of legal expenses that the Town almost entirely simply can’t avoid, so our legal costs are rising rapidly for now.

One significant grouping of our two biggest ongoing legal bills is the collection of files related to the various issues with our former Director General Catherine Haulard. The issues are confidential until resolved; Council simply can’t speak on this matter or be more transparent. I presume that if there were an offer of reasonable settlement that Council would pursue that, so I must presume that our leaders and lawyers believe that we’re spending legal dollars to defend ourselves properly against what our leaders and our lawyers believe to be unreasonable demands. We’ll only be able to judge the effectiveness of that when the end of these actions comes by going to court or settling.

The other big legal cost is preparing facts and a legal defense for a complaint of 15 pages containing 151 specific allegations of ethical and other issues against Mayor Prevost and others that Councillor Robert Spencer filed with MAMOT. I understand that MAMOT took no actions themselves but referred these allegations to the CMQ which I understand is the Quebec Court that deals with such municipal issues.

I will always defend any Councillor’s right to object to or raise such things and especially to seek the judgement of a higher level of the law where he or she feels confident in the allegations. This huge pile of allegations has cost a lot of legal dollars and consumed a huge amount of time and energy from the mayor and others. How we as citizens might wish to judge this action and react can only be determined once the CMQ has rendered some decision. Until then we wait and we spend and must simply accept that the Town Council can’t say anything, but must prepare an answer with our lawyers.

Until such a ruling finally comes, I will also always presume the innocence of those who stood up and were elected to serve us. The points of allegation made have apparently become “public” by virtue of a lifting of the publication ban originally in place. The Montreal Gazette and La Presse had challenged the ban, and it appears that Hudson originally challenged it probably to keep the names of citizens mentioned out of the public eye.

At the March Council meeting Mayor Prevost said basically that he wouldn’t further object if the file became public and that he felt he had nothing to fear and would be vindicated. Apparently the publication ban has since been lifted, so I presume the Montreal Gazette knows what the specific 151 allegations are and so far hasn’t deemed them important enough to publish in any detail.

I’ll leave my original as is, but I need to correct one thing, the Montreal Gazette did in fact publish a summary of the Spencer allegations. Thanks to one of our blog readers:  http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/off-island-gazette/hudson-mayor-ethics-complaint-details-now-public

It is not the Town’s place to publish this full list of allegations. But, the Town must prepare to defend itself properly at great expense. The DG suggested at last council that one maybe could ask the CMQ for a copy, personally I have no interest in discussing details of allegations and will wait for an eventual binding legal judgment to decide which side of this bothers me more. That said, this case and these costs will and must simply grind on slowly at an incredibly high cost in dollars, time and morale and the eventual wrong side will deserve some anger.

Until each of these issues are resolved, we’re committed by the actions launched by others to spending money and energy on them that would be better spent elsewhere improving our Town.

I believe that on these legal issues the Mayor and Council have been as transparent as legally and reasonably possible. What more do you think they should do while we must wait for the legal system?

Always I’m stating my studied opinion and thinking out loud. Some will say I’m being alarmist; others are more than certain that I’m crazy and only time and how we manage ourselves will determine if the future finds me correct or completely wrong. I’ve never wanted more to be wrong than on this subject, but I find we keep following a self-destructive path and something will force change upon us.

Let’s examine some simplistic reasons why Quebec might wish small municipalities like Hudson to fail or stumble enough that merger is our only sensible or available option. Simply put communities of 5000 citizens can become a real pain in the ass to big government.

It’s not just Quebec; the evidence clearly shows that wherever possible Provincial governments are joining towns to simplify management of many issues.  Less points of contact and more homogenized needs to service makes their government of us easier on a day to day basis. The Provinces will argue successfully on the possible efficiency gains and cost savings, but in that spreadsheet process our emotions and attachment to a village heritage don’t get any significant weighting or offsetting value.

Provincial governments get significant pushback and endure legal challenges whenever they force mergers, so it’s my opinion that an unspoken part of the long term strategy to create fewer larger merged towns is to weigh municipalities down with bureaucracy and make it more and more difficult to function correctly at too small a size. Of course they won’t publish such an intention, and perhaps the growth of municipal bureaucracy is just natural government evolution that’s unintentionally crushing small towns.

If we fail to administrate to the required government standards or we eventually need trusteeship, we can’t get grants and maybe even we can’t borrow money from banking channels to finance municipal operations. When we fail to function or govern ourselves, we are no longer qualified to control our own destiny, we can get rolled into a neighbouring community and their life gets simpler.

In my dark and cloudy crystal ball I see Nouveau Hudson becoming an attractive quaint waterfront hamlet within the ever growing municipality of Vaudreuil-Dorion. Hudson would no longer enjoy bilingual status; our failure would surely close that option.

Where Hudson now has six Councillors, Vaudreuil Dorion currently has eight municipal Councillors with about seven times our population. Logically, within V-D, Hudson would have a single municipal Councillor and V-D would have nine Councillors as they’d expand Council to a total of ten because it’s usual to have even numbers with the Mayor breaking ties.

Our administration needs would easily fit within the V-D buildings and systems, immediately saving a few million to build a new Hudson Town Hall. It would be difficult to elect a mayor from Hudson to challenge the longstanding V-D dynasty. V-D is successfully attracting the new hospital, senior’s residences, businesses, schools, and government grants, what’s not to like from an upper government or even citizen’s perspective.

Before you discount my forward scenario, look towards some of the players in V-D politics who are good people successfully building an expanding empire and also look to the incentives that the Provincial government and the MRC would enjoy when Hudson fails.

Honestly, in functional terms we’d be more efficient and have less ability to fight among ourselves, so given enough time and enough new villagers in our Hudson village six story condos, I’m not actually sure that such a merger would be completely terrible as growth would drown out the existing population quickly. Potential developers and builders would surely love the new structure; it seems quite easy to get those things done in V-D.

I’ll ask our blog commentators to tell me what value they’re sure we’d lose and why we maybe should actually stop fighting among ourselves and start fighting to avoid such a future.

I believe that the only way we can save Hudson for Hudson is to find the incentive and ways to actually become a cohesive and very well managed community. Fail to do that and we will fail because our failure has already been pre-planned and we’re executing their plan for our failure almost perfectly.