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The turnout rate for municipal elections in Quebec, as in much of Canada, is very low. The most recent round of municipal elections held in 2021 saw turnout of just 39 per cent in the province.

With a minority of eligible citizens voting, it is essential to ask how to make municipal democracy more dynamic and legitimate. To renew democracy, we need to think about electoral reforms and democratic innovations, but political discussions on this subject are often clouded by partisan interests. How can we avoid this trap and ensure that the voices of citizens are heard?

To gain a better understanding of public opinion on democratic reform at the municipal level, we organized a citizens’ assembly in Longueuil in June 2023. The meeting of about 101 participants was held at City Hall, which lent a certain solemnity to the exercise. The participants greatly appreciated the deliberative exercise and were open to proposals for reform.

The event took place over a two-day weekend. This corresponds to the duration of the deliberative assemblies organised in several countries by political scientists James Fishkin and Robert Luskin. It is also the length of time devoted to most subjects by the Irish citizens’ assembly between 2016 and 2018.

The Longueuil assembly focused on four potential reforms: internet voting, compulsory voting, the right to vote for permanent residents (who do not yet have citizenship) and holding municipal elections at the same time as provincial elections. Our decision to cover these four reforms meant that deliberation on each of them was limited to half a day, or just over three hours.

Recruitment proved to be the most difficult aspect of our project. We were asking people to devote an entire weekend to this activity in exchange for financial compensation of $250. We started recruiting by mail, but we had to use social networks to reach our target of around 100 people. The group was finally representative in terms of gender and age, but did not include many people with lower education.

The deliberations took place in four stages for each of the four themes.

First, experts were asked to prepare simple, clear and balanced presentations for each theme. They explained the proposed reform, mentioned where it had been adopted, detailed how it would work in practice and gave the arguments for and against. We then had a question period.

We reminded participants several times that there was no right or wrong answer, that there were good arguments for and against each reform, and that we wanted them to form a personal and informed opinion based on the information provided to them. We asked them to also consider their own values.

Each presentation was followed by a discussion in small groups of around ten participants each, led by a facilitator. We then held a plenary session where participants could ask for further clarification or express their opinions. In the fourth and final stage, participants voted by secret ballot on each of the reforms.

Figure 1 shows the results of the votes. There was clear majority support for internet voting, giving permanent residents the right to vote, and holding municipal and provincial elections at the same time. There was also strong opposition to compulsory voting.

Nearly all participants said they thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Among the 101 respondents who answered the survey that followed the meeting, 75 people said they were “very satisfied” with the overall process, 17 said they were “fairly satisfied” and only two were “not very satisfied”; no one said they were “not at all satisfied.” People listened attentively to the experts’ presentations, asked pertinent questions, exchanged views with their fellow participants, reflected, and finally voted – we have every reason to believe – in a reasoned manner.

Our decision to devote only half a day to each subject obviously limited the deliberations. However, we feel that people had sufficient time to inform themselves and reflect on the specific reforms that were presented to them. It should be stressed that we had chosen simple and precise questions. It would be difficult to apply our approach to highly technical or complex issues.

The main obstacle to recruitment was the considerable time commitment required – a full weekend. This obstacle is inherent in the citizens’ assembly, which requires people to take the time to inform themselves, reflect and exchange views if they want to form an informed opinion. However, we believe that recruitment would have been much easier if the event had only lasted one day.

All in all, we believe that such an exercise in citizen deliberation is highly desirable. Citizen deliberation is a valuable instrument of democracy that should play a greater role in consultation and decision-making processes – particularly when it comes to democratic reforms. Citizens can express themselves at elections, in opinion polls, through petitions and demonstrations.

Why not also invite them to express themselves in a setting where everyone is encouraged to listen to others and to inform themselves about the arguments for and against a policy before taking a position?

The full report can be consulted on the Discutons démocratie à Longueuil website.

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From improving its housing options to making municipal services universally accessible, the city of Longueuil says it's ready to do more to help people experiencing homelessness.

On Monday, Longueuil Mayor Catherine Fournier presented two documents that are supposed to guide the city's efforts to address homelessness: One of them is called the Cadre de référence municipal de lutte à l'itinérance, which outlines the city's broad vision.

She also presented Longueuil's action plan for 2024-2026, which includes a short-, medium- and long-term to-do list.

"We want to engage with people who are experiencing homelessness in those actions," Fournier said Monday during a news conference. "We want to build a vision that takes care of their needs and to adjust our strategy based on them."

The guiding principles for the city's plan include addressing homelessness in a proactive and preventive way. It also wants to make sure people who are homeless and those who aren't are co-existing. Those principles also include looking at the issue through an intersectional lens, which means a person's gender, ethnic origin, disability are among the things that should be considered when analyzing their situation.

Here are some of the notable parts of Longueuil's action plan for homelessness for 2024-2026:

The city says there are about 15 people living in tents in the city, with most of them being in the Vieux-Longueuil borough.

Fournier said Longueuil does not intend to dismantle any of them, pointing to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and her city's limited resources.

"We think that if we can't house someone who is homeless, we can't dismantle camps," the mayor said.

Dolly Shinhat was present during Monday's news conference.

Her organization, Our Harbour, is a non-profit group in the city of Saint-Lambert on Montreal's South Shore that provides long-term housing to people with mental illnesses.

Shinhat welcomes Longueuil's long list of initiatives but says the city should always keep its focus on the main goal, which is to find permanent housing solutions.

She said her organization rents apartment units and doing so — as opposed to buying property and being responsible for renovations and maintenance — could be an effective way for Longueuil to help people in need.

"When you rent an apartment, you're just responsible for that small [unit]. It's a more sustainable way, I would say, of addressing this crisis," Shinhat said.

Homelessness data for Longueuil

Last fall, the Quebec government published its second provincewide survey on homelessness, which provided a picture of the situation as of October 2022.

At that time, the number of people experiencing homelessness in Quebec had doubled since 2018.

Out of a total about 10,000 people, 4,690 of them lived in Montreal. The number for the Montérégie region was 798, though Longueuil's mayor said she has stressed to the province the need to have numbers specifically for her city.

On Monday, she said the city believes the large majority of the 798 people mentioned in the survey were in Longueuil.

The city estimates that there are now between 200 and 1,000 people in Longueuil experiencing homelessness.

The action plan is expected to cost the city $825,000 in 2024. The mayor said the cost is expected to go up in 2025 and 2026.

The fight against homelessness is mainly the province's responsibility and Fournier said she wants to talk with the Quebec government about the needs in her city.

To learn more about the city's vision and its action plan, you can click here and here.

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The city of Longueuil will be able to allow controlled crossbow hunting in order to counter the overpopulation of deer in Michel-Chartrand Park, as initially decided by the Superior Court on Aug. 31.

Court of Appeal Judge Robert Mainville rejected the request of the organization Sauvetage Animal Rescue and plaintiff Florence Meney, with the support of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), who wanted to block the decision of Quebec’s forests, wildlife and parks department to grant the city authorization to kill deer.

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The herd exceeds 100 animals, while experts estimate the capacity of the park at around 20.

The appeal essentially revolved around the interpretation of Article 898.1 of the Civil Code of Quebec, which emphasizes that “animals are not things” and “they are sentient beings and have biological needs.”

In his judgment, the judge wrote that the applicants argued that Article 898.1 “would require government authorities to only consider slaughter in cases of animal nuisance after having excluded all other solutions, such as sterilization or relocation.”

But according to the judgment, Longueuil offered several opportunities to the applicants to express their point of view “on the question of the measures to be taken in order to resolve the problem of overpopulation of deer within the park” and that the decision to slaughter animals “is part of the legitimate exercise of the powers that the law attributes to the city in matters of parks, the environment, nuisances, health and safety.”

The plaintiffs, according to Judge Mainville, “have not succeeded in demonstrating the unreasonable nature” of the municipal administration’s decision and this decision is “the result of a long process of consultation and reflection that integrates important considerations for the well-being and sensitivity of deer.

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The judgment also emphasizes that the ministry ensures that the permit to kill deer includes “all the conditions allowing the operation to be carried out while respecting animal sensitivity.”

In a statement sent to the media, Longueuil Mayor Catherine Fournier welcomed the decision.

“Now that the Court of Appeal has confirmed the absence of grounds for appeal of the decision of the Superior Court of Quebec rendered on Aug. 31, and in accordance with our expectations, our teams will continue the work to complete the livestock reduction operation and thus restore the ecological balance of Michel-Chartrand Park, as we quickly undertook in the weeks following our taking office at city hall, in the fall of 2021.”

The municipal councillor of the sector, Jonathan Tabarah, added that the decision “reassures the population” while “the state of Michel-Chartrand Park continues to deteriorate rapidly due to the overpopulation of deer, which worries citizens, in addition to the road safety issues inherent to the surroundings of the park.”

The mayor’s office indicated that the timetable and the intervention plan for killing the park’s animals will be communicated to the population soon.

This saga began in 2020 when the city, wanting to control the deer population, estimated that it had to capture and euthanize around 15 animals.

The decision aroused strong opposition from some residents and animal rights groups, dragging it out long enough for the white-tailed deer population to explode and exceed 100.