Author name: Brome County News

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

People who are experiencing homelessness this winter will be able to warm up and contact support services at warming centres (haltes-chaleur) in Farnham and Cowansville this winter.

The warming centres, in their third year of operation, will be open from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. whenever the wind chill drops below -15. The Farnham centre will be in its usual location at 525, rue Saint-Édouard; the Cowansville centre, after two years on rue Albert, is at a new location at 217 rue Oxford. The centres are run in partnership with the Maison des Jeunes de Farnham and funded by various sources including the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS, the Brome-Missisquoi-Perkins foundation, the MRC Brome-Missisquoi, local elected officials, Centraide and individual donors. The centres opened for the first time this year on Dec. 5.

The centres are not shelters with beds, but people visiting the centres will be able to rest, stock up on warm clothes, have a meal or a snack and speak with an outreach worker, according to Tania Szymanski, community development and immigration co-ordinator at the MRC of Brome-Missisiquoi. “There will always be an outreach worker asking about people’s needs in terms of mental health, medical care and food security and bringing them toward services. [The warming centres are] a pretext to intervene and help people.”

“In the past, we opened the shelters at -20 during the day, but there are already organizations that welcome people during the day, and we saw there was more of a need at night,” she added. “We don’t know how many nights we’ll be open – it depends on the temperature.”

Szymanski said she had seen rising demand for the centres’ services since they first opened two years ago. “There are more and more people [in the region] who are in situations of either hidden or visible homelessness,” she said. “It’s definitely something we need to work on.”

There is no permanent homeless shelter in Cowansville or Farnham. The project has a transport budget to bring people in need of a shelter bed to Granby, Sherbrooke or Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, but Szymanski said that was not an option for everyone. “The [warming centres] help, but they aren’t the only solution,” she said. “We want to house people in Brome-Missisquoi, because not everyone wants to leave the region.” She said the MRC is exploring the idea of establishing a shelter, but she expects funding and determining the right model for the shelter to take time.

If you or someone you know need a warm place to spend the night in an emergency, check the Halte-chaleur Farnham & Cowansville Facebook page to see whether the warming centres are open. No reservations are needed. To donate money or supplies, contact the Maison des Jeunes de Farnham.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

All of the 17 provincial prisons in Quebec, including the Sherbrooke detention centre, were placed in lockdown for several hours on Dec. 3 as correctional officers staged a spontaneous protest in solidarity with an officer who suffered severe injuries after a beating by an inmate at the Sorel-Tracy detention centre. Detainees remained in their cells all morning and were unable to attend court appearances, go to medical appointments, have meals or take part in educational or recreational activities from 7 a.m. to noon.

Mathieu Lavoie, president of the Syndicat des agents de la paix en services correctionnels du Québec (SAPSCQ-CSN), the CSN-affiliated union representing prison guards, said the protest was also intended to draw attention to guards’ longstanding concerns. “We’ve seen a lot more violence and infiltration [of contraband] into prisons over the last few months,” he said. “There’s also a labour shortage – the Sorel-Tracy centre has 30 unfilled positions, and while those positions are empty, people are doing overtime.” The union has been negotiating with the Ministry of Public Safety (MSP) for a new collective agreement; the previous agreement expired in 2023.

Prison guards, like nurses, police officers and paramedics, are considered essential services and normally don’t have the legal right to strike. The MSP called union representatives to an emergency hearing before the Quebec Labour Arbitration Tribunal (Tribunal administratif du travail; TAT) on the day of the protest.

According to Judge Sylvain Allard’s ruling, released Dec. 9, union representatives said the protest had been planned by the union the night before, and acknowledged their actions constituted an illegal strike. Allard found that “the prison population and the population in general were deprived of services to which they were entitled” and “security at the prison was not assured” during the protest. Allard noted that the protest disrupted court proceedings, impacted the health of vulnerable detainees, delayed prison maintenance work and disrupted the schedules of teachers and delivery workers.

Allard ordered SASPQ-CSN members to return to work “in the usual way” and ordered the union to inform its members that further work stoppages wouldn’t be tolerated.

Provincial prisons house detainees serving sentences of less than two years; those serving longer sentences are sent to federal prisons. Correctional officers at the ten federal prisons in Quebec, including the medium-security Cowansville Institution, are represented by a separate union and didn’t take part in the protest.

As of this writing, neither the SASPQ-CSN nor the MSP had commented directly on the ruling.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Town officials in Waterloo say the municipality’s current water network is sufficient to respond to growing demand “without major investments in the medium term” but current water resources won’t last forever. According to studies commissioned by the town, the water treatment plant could reach capacity within a five to 11-year horizon, assuming a construction rate of 150 new housing units per year.

In February, the municipality mandated engineering firm Tetra Tech to evaluate the capacity of its drinking water and water treatment systems. Currently, 5,333 people are connected to the water network. Studies presented at a public meeting on Dec. 3 indicate that the town’s water filtration plant, built in 2001, and the three underground wells and two reservoirs that supply it can serve more than 960 additional homes – just over 2,000 people. The sewage treatment facility on Rue Allen should be able to safely handle waste from 1,365 homes. Town officials had hoped the facilities could serve 2,738 additional homes.

“Although the facilities are adequate for the current population, significant upgrades will be necessary to meet future needs. Given that the [water treatment plant’s] production capacity limit will be reached within five to 11 years and that this horizon could be shorter if some of the assumptions made prove more restrictive, it is recommended that the city conduct a feasibility study to determine the work required to meet future demand for drinking water production,” the author of the two studies, engineer Philippe Chouinard, warned.

Mayor Jean-Marie Lachapelle presented the findings in a positive light at the Dec. 3 meeting. “Water is an essential and precious resource in a context of growth like that of Waterloo. It is crucial to understand exactly where our limits are,” he said, adding that the town needed a “clear picture of the water situation” as it began work on its next urban plan. “The goal of the analysis was to determine how many residents our current infrastructures could serve while maintaining water quality. The studies confirm that the town has enough water for its current needs, and we have significant room to manoeuvre to welcome new residents.”

Director general Louis Verhoef presented the data from the two studies, explaining the processes in place to aerate, filter and disinfect the town’s drinking water. He noted that consumption had gone down by 28 per cent since 2009 despite the rising population, due to the patching of leaks, replacement of outdated equipment and changes in residents’ water use habits. He estimated that the plant was functioning at 66 per cent of its current capacity. “For the moment, neither the drinking water nor the sewage plant is an obstacle for our development,” he said.

Verhoef said the municipality planned to install a backup manganese filter in the water treatment plant and continue proactively testing water for PFAS (the “forever chemicals” found in some fire retardants) in response to public concern and strengthening provincial norms. Upgrades to the system will be funded in part by a “development fee” which companies or people requesting building permits for new builds will have to pay starting in 2025.

He added that the town had not made a decision on whether to reintroduce a proposed water counter requirement for residences, which was scrapped amid a public outcry this summer. “That will eventually be a question for council,” he said.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

After a failed attempt to persuade the health and social services committee of the National Assembly to take another look at the shelved CHSLD expansion project, members of the Bedford Pole Health Committee (BPHC) and their supporters are looking at alternative ways to bring attention to the project and push for a policy change.

In May 2022, after several years of advocacy from community groups, Brome-Missisquoi MNA Isabelle Charest and then-seniors’ affairs minister Marguerite Blais announced details of an expansion plan which would allow the residence to accommodate up to 49 residents in private rooms and create a protected unit with eight places for people with cognitive disabilities who are susceptible to wandering, as the BCN reported at the time. However, in June of this year, officials from the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS announced the project was off the table, although smaller renovations would go ahead in consultation with a users’ committee.

Members of the BPHC and the Bedford Pole Economic Relaunch Committee launched a campaign to revive the expansion project, holding a protest in front of the CHSLD and gathering over 3,300 signatures on a petition which was tabled at the National Assembly on Oct. 10. Liberal seniors’ affairs critic Linda Caron, who tabled the petition, said she formally requested that the health and social services committee of the National Assembly hold a hearing on the issue, but that request was turned down. In mid-October, representatives of the Fondation Lévesque-Craighead, which had raised tens of thousands of dollars toward the project, met with officials from the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS and confirmed that the project was officially dead.

However, the BPHC is continuing to push for the project to be revived in some form. At a public meeting organized by the committee in Bedford on Nov. 29, local resident Marielise Deschamps announced plans to table a second petition in hopes that the National Assembly would hold hearings on the issue and pass a bill. “It’s clear that we won’t get the $15 million [initially promised for the project] but if we can get back $10 million, that will help.”

Lawyer François-David Bernier laid out a plan to send a “symbolic mise en demeure” to the Ministry of Health and Social Services denouncing what committee members see as its lack of investment in eldercare services in rural regions. Mises en demeure are formal letters asking the recipient to correct a perceived injustice, and raising the prospect of legal action if nothing is done.

Bernier acknowledged that the committee wasn’t in a position to sue the government over the cancelled project. “The legal sphere can’t dictate the political sphere; even if politicians have made promises, we can’t constrain them to follow through,” he said. “A mise en demeure to the government would be symbolic, but we want to tell them not to trivialize this issue. It’s a newish concept, but we want to denounce the inaction – the things that were said and not respected.”

“There are a lot of issues with our elders, there are a lot of budget cuts, and this is an important cause,” Bernier added. “Any self-respecting society is obligated to treat their elderly people with respect and give them appropriate care in their region. It is rare that you see people get mobilized like they have.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

On Dec. 5, Minister for the French Language Jean-François Roberge announced an investment of $10 million in provincial funding to reopen French-as-a-second-language classes for adults known as francisation, offered by school boards and service centres in underserved regions, in January 2025. However, the Eastern Townships School Board (ETSB) and Centre de services scolaire Val-des-Cerfs (CSSVDC) won’t receive any of the money. 

Both the ETSB and CSSVDC were forced to suspend francisation courses in November because of a mismatch between high demand for the courses and insufficient funding. They were among many school boards and service centres around the province that invested heavily in adult francisation because of rising demand and were forced to close or drastically cut course offerings, laying off teachers and sparking weeks of protest by immigrants’ rights groups, unions and students and teachers. Ten service centres were funded.

“We were expecting to be on the list [to receive funding], but neither we nor Val-des-Cerfs are on it,” ETSB board chair Michael Murray told the BCN. “We were hoping to get funding for 50 or 60 students who depend on French to find employment.”

Roberge surprised many when he told reporters at the National Assembly that the funding top-up had been planned since September, using money the government saved after ending a financial incentive program for part-time francisation students. “It’s too little, too late – they’ve disrupted the lives of educators and students for no particular reason,” said Murray. “To say $10 million solves the problem [provincewide] is a joke.” He added that only “a fraction” of the students and teachers affected by cuts to the ETSB francisation program had been reassigned.

There are no plans to revive the school board’s adult francisation program, which was enthusiastically launched ahead of the 2024-2025 school year despite funding uncertainty, in the short term. “We were forging ahead thinking we would receive the money, and it turns out we won’t,” Murray said. “We are closing the book on a program we thought was a great success.”

Roberge said other courses offered by community organizations in partnership with the Ministry of Immigration, Francisation and Integration (MIFI) would become available in the coming months. He said he hoped to offer more “predictability” to French language learners in 2025, although he couldn’t promise that everyone who asked for a place in a classroom would get one. “There are way, way, way too many people in Quebec, mainly temporary workers, who don’t speak French, and our capacity to [teach French] isn’t bottomless, Quebecers’ capacity to pay isn’t bottomless,” he said. “We’re going to do the best we can with the money we have.”

Since the closure of the ETSB program, there are no longer any full-time, in-person subsidized French courses available in Brome-Missisquoi, according to the MRC of Brome-Missisquoi.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Two local nonprofits confronting the housing crisis in Brome-Missisiquoi held a free film screening and round-table discussion at the Princess Cinema in Cowansville on Monday evening to talk about creative ways to make housing more affordable.

The Table de logement de Brome-Missisquoi and Sutton-based Territoires Solidaires presented the documentary Le Dernier Flip, produced by Territoires Solidaires cofounder Samuel Gervais, and hosted a roundtable discussion with Gervais and Table du logement spokesperson Cédric Champagne.

In the film, Gervais, the executive director and cofounder of Territoires Solidaires, and coproducers Diane Bérard and Mathieu Vachon travel to Vermont to meet U.S. Senator and former Burlington, Vt. mayor Bernie Sanders and explore different ways of taking property off the speculative real estate market, notably community land trusts (CLTs), which Sanders backed during his time as mayor. A CLT is a nonprofit which holds land on behalf of a community and ensures its management; a CLT can encompass and collaborate with a housing co-op. “It’s a model coming from the States to make housing more affordable and accessible,” Gervais said.

Territoires Solidaires is currently working on two CLT pilot projects in Sutton, one on Western St. and one on the former vineyard now known as the Terrain du Vieux-Verger; Gervais said the organization is also looking into a possible project in Abercorn. Gervais said his organization’s “mission” is to create and manage CLTs around the region, keeping at least some housing affordable amid skyrocketing property resale values. 

Gervais said he and his colleagues wanted to make the CLT model, which is already used in the Montreal area and elsewhere in the country, better known around Quebec. “We’re not building on something completely new. We’re building on something that has decades of existence, huge impacts in the US, where it started, but now across the world, so we feel lucky to be part of that movement,” he said. Co-ops, CLTs and social utility trusts are complementary to each other and are different ways of “decommodifying real estate,” Gervais said.

In light of the Sutton pilot projects and of other initiatives which Territoires Solidaires is hoping to launch around Brome-Missisquoi, Gervais said he hopes the documentary screening will get people talking.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Cowansville-based adult literacy organization Le Sac à Mots is actively looking for area residents to help teach newcomers French on a volunteer basis after the Centre des services scolaire Val-des-Cerfs and the Eastern Townships School Board were forced to suspend subsidized French classes over a lack of funding.

Caroline Plaat is the coordinator of the long-established nonprofit, which serves the entire MRC of Brome-Missisquoi except for Bedford and Farnham (which are served by a separate organization). Its primary raison d’être is adult literacy – helping francophone adults who never learned to adequately read or write in their first language to improve their skills. However, for at least two decades, the organization has had a twinning program, pairing adult French language learners with fluent speakers who volunteer to either tutor them formally or provide practice opportunities.

Plaat said the program has helped anglophone Townshippers and newcomers improve their French for years. “Since a few years ago, we’ve had a lot of people from Latin America, Spanish speakers, who come here to work in the fields. We’ve had a few Ukrainians. We’ve had a lot of immigration in the last few years, and we’re hoping to be able to offer more ‘twins’ to help these people in light of the disappearance of [subsidized] courses.”

“At Le Sac à Mots, we facilitate the meeting, support the volunteers, help them find a room if they need it, but then people organize themselves. We’d like it to be in person as much as possible, but if it’s winter and people want to do a Zoom meeting so as not to have to drive, that’s fine. If your idea of ‘class’ is to go grocery shopping together so the person can work on their vocabulary, then go for it,” she said.

She emphasized that the volunteer tutoring program does not replace a francisation course. She said many of the remaining francisation courses are not accessible for the most vulnerable immigrants, who may not have a ride to Granby or a stable internet connection.  “Whatever happened, the result is the same – whoever’s fault it is, whatever logic they use, the courses aren’t there. We want to continue to put pressure on the government to fund francisation. It’s not coherent to say ‘Vive le français’ and then shovel [the responsibility] into the backyard of community organizations.”

She said the twinning program “won’t fill that gap, but we want to tell people, ‘Hey, if you want to help newcomers, here’s a way to do it.’”  The current volunteer roster is “super varied” and there’s no need to be a retired teacher or a native French speaker – just a person with room in their schedule who feels comfortable helping someone learn the language.

A partial solution

The Deux par deux online twinning program, started by the Fondation pour la langue française (FFLF) at the height of the pandemic, is also seeking volunteers to offer more French language learning opportunities. They hope to recruit as many as 3,000 conversation partners across the province, to work with advanced beginner, intermediate and advanced learners – people who are already capable of holding a conversation in French but who might be shy.

Like Plaat, FLF board chair Marie-Anne Alepin said formal courses were “necessary,” especially for beginners, but that conversation opportunities were important for language development.

“We don’t offer courses – what we offer is complementary to a course,” said Alepin, who is also president of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste and an established actor and theatre producer.  “There’s nothing better than a little chat!” 

In November, the Provincial Employment Round Table (PERT) launched a linguistic mentorship program for anglophones looking to improve their French, in partnership with Townshippers, the Regional Development Network and Concordia University. The Circonflexe program pairs English-speaking professionals with French-proficient mentors from a variety of fields in order to help them improve their proficiency in professional French, and ideally in their field, willing to meet in person or online and chat in “la langue de Céline.” PERT is seeking volunteer mentors who are fluent in French and have good leadership and communication skills.

“The objective is to twin people who are in the same industry, in the same sector and in the same region,” said PERT communications director Chad Walcott. Mentors will also have access to an online “toolbox.”

Walcott mentioned that many anglophones have a high level of French but struggle with shyness when using the language, especially in professional situations. He said the organization hoped to “expand French language learning programs with informal, immersive experiences” like language twinning.

For more information on Le Sac à Mots, Deux par Deux or the Circonflexe mentorship program, visit the programs’ respective websites.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

After a five-month pilot project, Transdev has announced plans to make its on-demand shuttle service in Brome-Missisquoi permanent.

The shuttle service can pick up and drop off users at any one of 37 stops in Cowansville, Dunham, Frelighsburg, Sutton, Brome Lake, Bromont, Brigham, Ange-Gardien, Farnham, Bedford, Saint-Armand, Stanbridge East, Saint-Ignace-de-Stanbridge, Notre-Dame-de-Stanbridge, Stanbridge Station, Sainte-Sabine, Pile River and Abercorn. Riders can travel from one municipality to another and to the Autoparc 74 park-and-ride in Bromont where they can catch onward Limocar buses to Sherbrooke or Montreal.

During the “testing period,” which began in June, the service was free. As of Nov. 25, riders will have to pay $15 per ride ($30 for a round-trip ticket).

The shuttles run from 6 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. seven days a week but do not have a fixed schedule; riders need to reserve at least an hour before their planned departure via the Link Transit On-Demand mobile app or the bilingual Transdev website (limocar.ca/brome-missisquoi) and the shuttle will come to them. Riders are advised to arrive at the stop at least 15 minutes before their scheduled departure, with proof of payment. Any changes or cancellations must be made at least an hour before the scheduled departure, and if a rider books a ride and does not show up at the scheduled time on more than three occasions, he or she may be blacklisted.

“We thank all the customers who have, in recent months, contributed to making the service more efficient and reliable and we promise that we will continue to improve the service in the coming months,” Danny Charpentier, head of Limocar operations at Transdev, said in a statement.

The changes to the service offered by Transdev will not affect the on-demand shuttle service already offered by the MRC, MRC Brome-Missisquoi communications co-ordinator Mariève Lebrun said.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The nonprofit overseeing a former religious retreat centre in Sutton is seeking a court order forcing the municipality to grant a permit for a drug and alcohol rehabilaitation centre on the site.

The Villa Châteauneuf was built in 1911 on a 25-acre plot donated by philanthropist and politician Eugene Dyer, who stipulated that it should be used for educational purposes. It initially housed a convent and school. In 1971, it was transferred to the Foyers de la Charité, a network of religious retreat centres-slash-utopian communities based in France and affiliated with the Catholic Church. In June 2023, amid declining religious participation and the impact of COVID restrictions, the papal delegate of the Foyers de la Charité decreed the closure of the entire network; the last six permanent residents of the Sutton centre moved out that September. Since then, the complex of eight buildings has sat empty, overseen by a nonprofit board of directors.

The board of directors initially planned to cede the property to Le Chaînon, a Montreal-based organization for domestic violence survivors, but that plan fell through amid opposition from the town of Sutton. Sutton Mayor Robert Benoit has previously said the town intends to use its right of pre-emption to take the complex over and move local services there, replacing the aging Centre John-Sleeth. In November 2023, then-papal delegate Msgr. Michel Dubost wrote to Benoit and Villa Châteauneuf Inc. board chair Serge Poirier, saying both proposals seemed “motivated by community well-being” and the organization would not intervene to support or oppose either one.

In May 2024, Villa Châteauneuf announced plans to rent the property out to Maison La Passerelle, a Montérégie-based nonprofit, to house a rehabilitation centre for women dealing with addiction.

According to the Villa Châteauneuf court filing, Villa Châteauneuf signed an agreement with La Passerelle that would have allowed it to take the centre over that July. La Passerelle applied for an occupancy permit on May 8 and paid the $55 fee a week later. The town didn’t grant the permit, initially raising concerns about fire safety and missing documentation. On Aug. 20, Villa Châteauneuf sent a mise en demeure to the municipality, raising the possibility of a court case if the permit wasn’t issued. Three months later, on Nov. 18, the nonprofit filed a request for a protective order.

“Our request for a permit was in accordance with the rules, we meet all the requirements and the town doesn’t have discretionary power,” said Victor Marchand, vice president of the governing board of Villa Châteauneuf. “The town can’t just refuse. We’re asking the court to order them to grant us a certificate of occupation.”

Diocese challenges legitimacy of nonprofit

The Diocese of Saint-Hyacinthe has sent a mise en demeure of its own to the town, stating that Villa Châteauneuf Inc. should have been dissolved when the retreat centre closed in 2023, and the former convent and all associated property should have become the property of the diocese. Consequently, lawyers for the diocese write, the request for a permit is illegitimate.

They further argue that the La Passerelle proposal does not respect the conditions laid out by Eugene Dyer. “The granting of the permit by the city may lead Eugene Dyer’s family trust to retake possession of the building, to the detriment of our client,” diocese lawyers write.

“That’s very surprising for Holy Mother Church; I’m not sure what they want to accomplish with that,” Marchand said.

A sense of urgency

Marchand argued that it was urgent for the town to grant the permit, which was required for the rehab centre to get approval from the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS. He said the costs of heating and maintaining the sprawling complex for another winter would be prohibitively expensive for his organization; the nonprofit’s lawyers argue that it may cost as much as $200,000. “La Passerelle will assume all of the operating fees [if it takes possession of the property]. We have no other revenue.”

Amélie Lemieux, executive director of La Passerelle, said in a court filing that the rehabilitation centre had outgrown its current premises in Saint-Siméon-de-Bagot and needed a larger space.

The demand for a protective order will be presented in court in Cowansville on Dec. 17. “Normally, if the request is made in accordance with the requirements, the town doesn’t have discretionary power – I’m confident we’ll win,” Marchand said.

The municipality of Sutton, the diocese of Saint-Hyacinthe and the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS were not able to comment before the BCN went to press on Monday.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The Centre d’action bénévole (CAB) de Cowansville will be up and cooking in 2025 thanks to a crowdfunding campaign that has raised around $650,000.

Expansion project manager Nathalia Guerrero Vélez cut the ribbon on Nov. 21 to formally open the centre’s new MAPAQ-standard kitchen and cold storage room. Local elected officials including Cowansville Mayor Sylvie Beauregard and Frelighsburg Mayor Lucie Dagenais, representatives of the Fédération des centres d’action bénévole du Québec and sponsors attended the ceremony.

The centre currently operates a food bank, transport services for seniors who need help getting to medical appointments and errands, a phone outreach program for people unable to leave their homes, programs for caregivers and new immigrants, and income tax services. It provides services in both official languages to residents of Cowansville and surrounding municipalities including Frelighsburg, Dunham and East Farnham. Until recently, the CAB ran its food bank out of rented premises in a shopping centre basement; it did not have an onsite kitchen, refrigerator, cold room or food storage space. The kitchen can also be repurposed as a multipurpose room. Guerrero Velez said bringing the food bank onsite and adding a kitchen would allow the CAB to cut down on food waste, start offering prepared meals to organizations serving people in need, potentially bring back its communal meal programs and attract more volunteers eager to get cooking.

The expansion has been several years in the making; the CAB first bought land adjacent to its current premises in spring 2020, with plans to fund and build an annex. Although “a few details still need to be worked out,” Guerrero Velez said that dream was now a reality. “We would like to thank all of the donors who supported the project, and Athena Construction, for helping us make a difference.”

“The food bank has been working out of the new space for two weeks already,” she said. “It’s been working really well. We’re happy to offer this big, bright new space to volunteers and users. Now that we have our own space, everything is simpler.”

The CAB is still seeking donations to cover $100,000 in outstanding costs related to the expansion. Although Guerrero Velez said they “have a super solid team” of around 200 committed volunteers, extra pairs of hands are also welcome. “We have a nice space, but we don’t necessarily have more people … we’ll do the best we can with what we have.”

Guerrero Velez said she was expecting a busy winter at the food bank. “This time of year, demand for food goes way up, and we’re already starting a waiting list for the food bank,” she said. “We have been [providing food aid] for 50 years, and last year was the first year we had a waiting list. The cost-of-living crisis is having an impact on people who can’t get by anymore, including working people… it’s very worrisome.” 

To volunteer or make a donation, call the CAB at (450) 263-3758, visit their website at cabcowansville.net or drop by their premises at 201, rue Principale.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The Bedford Pole Health Committee (BPHC) hasn’t given up on the long-planned CHSLD expansion, despite the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS and the Fondation Lévesque-Craighead, the local hospital foundation which had raised funds for the project, declaring it formally dead last month.

The $15-million expansion, announced by then-seniors’ affairs minister Marguerite Blais in 2022, was cancelled by the CIUSSS two years later, amid financial pressure and what CIUSSS officials deemed a lack of sufficient demand. Despite a large-scale mobilization campaign piloted by the BPHC and a petition with more than 3,400 signatures tabled at the National Assembly by Liberal seniors’ affairs critic Linda Caron, the CIUSSS confirmed the cancellation of the project.

The committee plans to hold a public meeting on Nov. 29 at 7 p.m. at the Centre Georges-Perron to discuss potential alternative ways forward for the project. A representative from the local Liberal riding association and a lawyer will be present to talk to participants about procedural options.

“We want to give the population an update,” said BPHC spokesperson Pierrette Messier. “We’re not expecting [the CIUSSS] to put the project back on the table – we’re aware that there are so many cuts around the province – but we want to keep it alive. Many people have been asking us what’s going on. We’ll give the chronology of everything that’s been happening since May.”

“We are afraid [the CIUSSS] will close the CHSLD if nothing changes,” added co-spokesperson Normand Deragon. “We want people to be at home with their family and friends for the last few miles of their lives.”

An initial announcement last week mistakenly implied that a representative from Caron’s office would attend, but Caron said no one from her office had been informed or was available. Messier said a representative from the local Liberal party would attend to help explain the political process.

“We don’t really have anything new to share,” Caron said. “I tabled the petition [on Oct. 10] and I requested for it to be taken up by the health and social services committee of the National Assembly.” Caron said she requested that representatives from the BPHC, the Fondation Lévesque-Craighead, seniors’ advocates and local elected officials be given the opportunity to plead their case before the committee. On Oct. 24, the committee decided not to move forward with her request. “From here, we don’t really have any leverage to try and unblock the project.”

Deragon said the committee was grateful for Caron’s support. “She’s done her job, and she undoubtedly has other fish to fry at this point.”

Caron said she would continue to “keep an eye” on potential opportunities to revive the project.  “I haven’t forgotten about it, and sometimes there’s a window that can open.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Adult literacy advocates in Brome-Missisquoi held a protest outside the office of Brome-Missisquoi MNA Isabelle Charest on Nov. 25, drawing attention to the impact of cuts to subsidized French-language courses across the region.

As the BCN reported earlier this fall, subsidized courses offered by the Eastern Townships School Board at the Campus Brome-Missisquoi adult education centre and by the Val-des-Cerfs, Des Sommets and Région-de-Sherbrooke school service centres elsewhere in the region were cut due to a mismatch between skyrocketing demand and limited funding offered by the Ministry of Education and Higher Learning (MEES), based on far lower demand from previous years.

As a result, hundreds of students across the region and the province found themselves out of class on Nov. 26. Many have been placed on waiting lists for other language-learning programs offered by the Ministry of Immigration, Francisation and Integration (MIFI), although it may be months before they set foot in a classroom.

The MRC Brome-Missisquoi mayors’ council signed a memorandum protesting the service cuts and the MRC agreed to publicize the Nov. 25 protest.

As of Nov. 26, there will be no in-person francisation courses offered anywhere in Brome-Missisquoi, said Tania Szymanski, community development and immigration co-ordinator at the MRC. “There are classes offered in Granby, but that presents a major transport issue. There are at least 50 people in our region who have lost access to classes, and five teachers losing their jobs. It’s important for people to have access to French language courses because it is our primary language in Quebec.” She noted that over the past four to five years, an influx of asylum seekers and temporary foreign workers into Brome-Missisquoi has made access to language classes particularly important.

She pointed out that in addition to struggling to find work and integrate socially, non-French-speaking immigrants may run into difficulty accessing government services. “The law now requires that immigrants no longer have access to services in languages other than French after six months.”

Szymanski said MRC representatives met with community organizations to see what could be done to help, but “it’s very hard without additional funding.” She said local organizations such as Cowansville-based literacy nonprofit Le Sac à mots were setting up volunteer language twinning programs, but despite their best efforts, a twinning program is “very minimal” compared to full-time classes.

The MRC is calling on the MEES to reverse the cuts to in-person courses, allow students who started courses this year to finish, prioritize current students on MIFI waiting lists and fund stopgap services to maintain local course offerings. “Francisation is the key to successful integration and a more inclusive community. These people have a great desire to integrate into Quebec society and contribute to it. We must give them the means to do that,” prefect Patrick Melchior said in a statement.

The BCN was unable to speak to Le Sac à Mots, the MEES or the MIFI before publication on Monday.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Brome Lake Mayor Richard Burcombe will not seek a fourth term in 2025, he confirmed last week.

“I had already decided, but I hadn’t made it public yet, because I wanted to make sure to be fair to the other candidates and the population,” said Burcombe, a Mansonville native who moved to Brome Lake with his family when he was in high school and served 43 years as a police officer before entering municipal politics. “It’s time now. We all have to read the writing on the wall.”

Burcombe was elected in 2013 on a platform of restoring trust and stability to the town hall. He said he and the cohort of councillors elected that year “came in to a climate that wasn’t the best for the town. My objective was to bring peace and trust back to the community, and we accomplished that; to me, that’s my biggest accomplishment. We hired great people, and I take my hat off to them.

The mayor said he was proud of having made conservation, active transit and infrastructure improvements top priorities. “I’ve had a great run; in the first eight years, we got a lot done, like the two bridges, like the rebuilding of the dam, renovating the Town Hall and the [revitalization of] Coldbrook Park. We are waiting for the [Pettes] Library expansion and then we will be able to do [everything we’ve planned for] the park,” he recalled. “Bringing the Marché public back, [improving] the infrastructure on Victoria Street and Mill Road and Rue Montagne. We got a lot of good things done, and then of course COVID came and that slowed down the dam and certain other things.”

“Navigating COVID was stressful; you couldn’t have meetings, you couldn’t do this, you couldn’t do that, everyone just seemed distracted, and everything slowed down,” he said. Since the pandemic, he and others have observed that interactions between public officials and citizens have changed. “Seven to twelve per cent of elected officials have resigned [since the 2021 election]. That was unheard of – it was because of the way people approached elected officials, a lot of aggressiveness and disrespect. That’s not just here, it’s everywhere.”

Burcombe said his biggest regret was not being able to integrate Brome Lake into the Service de Police de Bromont coverage area, which he said would save the town hundreds of thousands of dollars and ensure better police coverage.

He said one of the things he has enjoyed the most is meeting and helping constituents.

Leaving the mayor’s office “is going to be a chapter that closes,” he said.

“Ever since I was 20 years old, as a police officer, I was in public. I left the SQ at the end of September [2013] and I started campaigning on the Monday after,” he remembered. “I didn’t even get time to reflect on leaving the police – I was campaigning seven days a week and then all of a sudden I was mayor.” After his term ends, he plans to take some time to “relax and wind down” and spend time in his workshop learning to make historically inspired cabinets.

Deputy mayor Lee Patterson has said he is interested in running to succeed Burcombe, although he doesn’t plan to make a final decision on his political future until the new year.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

A new outdoor education space will take root in the Parc des Colibris in Cowansville next year through the city’s participatory budget initiative. Up to $50,000 of city funds will be invested in the project.

A wooded area of the park will be “transformed into an improved natural space focused on outdoor education, environmental preservation and the promotion of healthy lifestyles, specifically by putting in trails and creating a meeting corner,” Mayor Sylvie Beauregard said at the Nov. 18 council meeting. “Small groups can use this space for workshops and for holding classes outdoors.” Work on the space should be complete by the end of 2025.

Similar initiatives, where cities earmark $50,000 for citizen-driven projects, have been established in Montreal, Longueuil, Laval, Granby and several smaller towns over the past few years; the town of Sutton launched its first participatory budget in 2023 and funded a turtle crossing and a new dog park.

The Cowansville project was announced in May and 19 projects were submitted, Beauregard said. Submissions were reviewed by a joint committee of councillors and concerned citizens to make sure they met key requirements – projects had to be on public land; to be submitted by a resident or residents; to be legally, technically and financially feasible within a year and within the $50,000 budget; and to have a strong sustainable development focus.

Five projects passed the committee’s scrutiny and were put to a vote in an online poll, open to Cowansville residents of all ages. All of them involved improving municipal green spaces – along with the Parc des Colibris project, other proposals involved greening traffic islands and planting trees in city parks; planting an herb garden in Parc François-Tanguay; installing a public “conversation bench” (placottoir public) and planters on Rue du Sud; and replanting the lawns of certain municipal buildings with wildflowers. Nearly 900 people voted.

“For a first-time project, there has been great citizen participation, and hopefully this will give people ideas for the future,” Beauregard said.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) is adjusting the hours of 35 land border crossing points across the country, including 10 in Quebec, as of Jan. 6. The agency made the announcement on Nov. 18.

“Today’s announcement, determined in collaboration with the United States, will enhance overall security for both countries. It will allow the CBSA to use its resources more efficiently by deploying officers at busier ports of entry. This will support the CBSA’s ability to process travellers and goods as well as to manage enforcement activities,” the agency said in a statement. “The U.S. is also adjusting service hours at many of its ports of entry. This alignment will also allow both countries to return inadmissible travellers and goods to the other country, which is more difficult when one side of the border is closed while the other remains open.”

For the ten Quebec border crossings affected – Chartierville, Clarenceville, Frelighsburg, Herdman, Hereford Road, Highwater, Lacolle Route 221, Lacolle Route 223, Noyan and Trout River – this will mean reducing opening hours. The Chartierville crossing, previously open from 8 a.m. to midnight, will close at 8 p.m. after the changes take effect. The Clarenceville crossing, currently open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., will close at 4 p.m. The Herdman and Trout River crossings, now open 24-7, will operate from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. The Frelighsburg, Hereford Road, Highwater, Noyan and Lacolle Route 223 crossings currently open 24-7, will operate from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. The Lacolle Route 221 crossing, also currently open 24-7, will be open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.

“Better alignment of service hours between Canadian and U.S. ports of entry increases the overall security of the border. Both Canada and the U.S. are making changes to hours of services to better align with each other,” CBSA spokesperson Karine Martel said in an email exchange with the BCN. “The new hours will put more officers at busy ports of entry where there are higher volumes of travellers and potentially high-risk activities.”

She added that the changes were made based on analysis of travel data. “Data indicated that most of these ports of entry process an average of two or less cars or commercial trucks per hour during the hours that will no longer be in operation,” said Martel. “For the majority of these ports of entry, there is an alternative crossing option within 50 kilometres or less, and others have an alternative within 100 km at the most. Commercial impacts of these changes are further minimized through pre-arrival and electronic reporting of goods.”

The CBSA declined an interview request.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

As the holiday season approaches, the federal government has announced plans to pass a two-month moratorium on goods and services tax (GST) for many common household products.

From Dec. 14 to Feb. 15, GST will no longer apply to  prepared foods, including pre-made meals and salads, vegetable trays, and sandwiches; restaurant meals, whether dine-in, takeout, or delivery; snacks, including chips, candy, and granola bars; beer, wine, and cider; children’s clothing, footwear, car seats and diapers;  toys including video games and puzzles; books and print newspapers; and Christmas trees. People who worked and earned less than $150,000 in 2023 will also get a $250 lump sum payment, to be sent out in early spring.

“With the Working Canadians Rebate, we are putting money directly into the pockets of the middle class, those who have worked so hard to beat inflation,” Brome-Missisquoi MP and Minister of Canadian Heritage Pascale St-Onge said in a statement. “This [tax moratorium] will deliver meaningful savings for all by making essentially all food GST-free, providing real relief at the cash register. We encourage Parliament and all parties to get this legislation passed quickly and unanimously, so workers and working families get more money in their pockets.”

“The economy is picking up strength in Canada, as well as in Brome-Missisquoi, but grocery prices don’t seem to be keeping pace. With the holiday season just around the corner, expenses are adding stress to what should be a festive time. To help you take a breather, we are offering a new grocery and seasonal shopping tax holiday, as well as a new $250 rebate for workers. We hope this boost will allow people in Brome-Missisquoi and across Canada to fully enjoy the magic of the holidays with their loved ones.”

The rebate, according to federal government calculations, would allow a family to recoup $100 for every $2,000 spent on eligible goods. It is expected to cost the government $1.6 million.

Although Ontario, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island will stop charging harmonized sales tax on eligible goods during the moratorium, according to a federal government statement, Quebec does not plan to stop charging its own 9.975 per cent sales tax.

Opposition leaders predictably panned the proposal. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre called the tax break a “trick.” Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet told reporters he didn’t understand the intentions behind the proposal, saying, “When the Liberals need billions of dollars to literally buy votes, they find it.” Blanchet did not say whether his party planned to support the proposal. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh pledged to remove the GST permanently on basic household goods and monthly bills such as household internet should his party eventually form government. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business, for its part, said it was in favour of tax cuts in principle, but was concerned the brief rebate would create bureaucratic and administrative complications for businesses.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Reduce, reuse, recycle, recirculate; the ten-year sustainable development plan released by the MRC Brome-Missisquoi earlier this month aims to do a bit of all of that. The plan is focused on the circular economy – the idea of an economic system based on the reuse and regeneration of materials or products.

In an introductory note, prefect Patrick Melchior explained that the ten-year plan had become necessary in light of the sweeping changes the MRC has experienced in the last few years, notably an increase in population, a housing shortage and climate challenges including drought. “It has become essential to update the plan to show resilience and innovation, while staying true to our values.”

MRC representatives met with businesspeople, citizens’ groups and elected officials and conducted a public opinion survey and a consultative forum while piecing the plan together.

Although economic and ecological objectives are often presented in opposition to one another, the MRC took a different tack, framing the economy as a means of improving social and environmental conditions, within the limits imposed by natural resources and conservation imperatives. “Preservation of biodiversity, ecological connectivity, conservation and restoration of natural environments, sustainable and integrated management of water resources [and] social inclusion” are among the plan’s stated aims.

The plan also “aims to establish conditions conducive to innovation and the development of growth sectors, while encouraging the adoption of responsible and sustainable economic practices.”

Melchior said the MRC aims to “work on new economic projects” integrating economic and environmental imperatives. Several years ago, shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, he and three colleagues travelled to Denmark to learn more about “industrial symbiosis” – powering one industry with the otherwise-unused byproducts of another. In the intervening years, this approach has gained more attention in Quebec, notably in Quebec City, where a new composting program sends food waste to be processed into natural gas to heat homes and agricultural fertilizer, and in the Lower St. Lawrence, where grain residue discarded by microbreweries is processed into animal feed.

“We want to be a sort of transmission belt to support these kinds of projects in Brome-Missisquoi – how can we manage to help a company reduce its carbon footprint [and find uses for its byproducts]?”  he speculated.

The plan contains a long list of intended actions over the next decade, notably making green spaces more accessible, preserving and restoring wetlands, improving the region’s wastewater management strategy, developing sustainability guidelines for development projects, encouraging businesses to adapt “green” practices and improving public transit in Brome-Missisquoi and Haute-Yamaska

The full plan can be consulted on the MRC website.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Mayors in several Brome-Missisquoi municipalities are facing unpleasant budget decisions after learning the cost of Sureté du Québec (SQ) service for 2025. In Brome Lake, the bill the municipality received was about 11 per cent higher than last year, Mayor Richard Burcombe told the BCN; in Sutton, the increase was just under 10 per cent, and in Farnham, nine per cent. Farnham mayor Patrick Melchior told the BCN previous year-on-year increases were about five per cent.

Half of the SQ’s estimated $850-million annual budget is paid by municipalities, using a formula based on each town’s population, tax base and the planned number of police officers serving the region. The tax base itself is calculated based on property values, which have shot up in Brome-Missisquoi in recent years – particularly in Brome Lake, which saw an increase of over 50 per cent in its most recent tax roll. In that light, Burcombe said, the increase “is not really surprising.”

“We’re going to reduce the [property tax rate], but we’re still going to have to make up the $269,000 [SQ fee increase],” he added. “We’re paying for the towns that have a smaller tax base but a higher workload due to certain needs.”

Burcombe pointed out that municipalities in the region are paying a higher cost for fewer police officers than in recent years. “It was probably at the beginning of this year, we lost three [SQ] patrol people,” he said. “I know salaries have gone up, but this is an increase [in the service fee] while services are being cut. … If there’s a serious incident, the [local] SQ can call on [their counterparts in] Haute-Yamaska or Waterloo or on the highway patrol, but for things like visibility and speeding, it’s as if they don’t exist.”

“They are reducing the number of officers, but at the same time, there’s a growing population, more traffic, longer patrol routes, more problems like homelessness and mental health. The equation isn’t working,” said Melchior, who is also prefect of the MRC of Brome-Missisquoi. “We have passed resolutions, tried to talk with [the Ministry of Public Safety], they have said they would review service in 2026 but other than that we haven’t had any echoes.”

Burcombe’s counterpart in Sutton, Robert Benoit, said the town’s budgetary breathing room has been “almost erased” by the increase in SQ costs, which will have to be borne by taxpayers. “We have to defend that to citizens, saying, ‘We don’t have the choice.’” He acknowledged that the impact on taxes and other town services won’t be fully clear until the budget comes out next month.

There is no procedure in place for municipalities to contest their SQ bill. The Union des municipalités du Québec (UMQ) has written an open letter calling on the province to “take measures to reduce the impact” of the increased costs. Joé Deslauriers is the mayor of Saint-Donat in the Mauricie region and the head of the UMQ local municipalities caucus. “More than 30 municipalities have had increases of over 20 per cent and more than 150 have had at least 10 per cent. In Saint-Donat, the bill went up by 15 per cent and we have two fewer police officers,” he said. “I’m not putting in doubt the workload of a police officer, I’m not putting in doubt the new collective agreement or the increase in costs, but we need more predictability.”

According to Deslauriers, 1,040 municipalities in the province rely on the SQ for policing. All of the municipalities in Brome-Missisquoi are on this list, with the exception of Bromont, which has its own police service. Brome Lake dismantled its police service in 2002. Although reviving it would end the town’s reliance on the SQ, Burcombe said that would be easier said than done. “There’s a cost that comes with having your own police service. It would be a whole different ballgame, we’d have to build a police station, we’d have the whole problem of recruitment…and according to the Police Act, we don’t have a large enough population to have our own police. It’s not as easy as just saying, ‘Bring back the police.’”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Nearly 95 per cent of candidate nurses who took their exams on Sept. 23 passed, the Ordre des infirmiers et infirmières du Québec (OIIQ), the professional order which regulates nursing in the province, announced late last week. The pass rate was 98.1 per cent for graduates of Quebec nursing programs and 83.8 per cent for those who had studied outside Canada. The pass rate for the CEGEP Champlain-Lennoxville nursing program was 100 per cent.

“Clinical service centres can now welcome 2,760 new nurses, to the greatest benefit of the Quebec population,” the OIIQ said in a statement.

In January 2023, the province’s commissioner of admission to professions, André Gariépy, launched an investigation into the exam, concerned about its quality and reliability.  Gariépy’s report found the exam was flawed to the point that its “validity was questionable.” In November of that year, one in every three candidates failed. Although candidates get as many as three attempts to pass the exam, the OIIQ later decided that attempts between September 2022 and March 2024 would not count, and announced plans to overhaul the exam. The order initially announced plans to administer a Quebec version of the US-based NCLEX-RN exam before putting those plans on an “indefinite pause” amid translation and interoperability concerns.

“The ongoing work to review the admission examination process, resulting from the recommendations of the latest report of the Commissioner for Admission to Professions, is to the satisfaction of the Office des professions du Québec. The OIIQ continues to work with its collaborators to support candidates for the practice of the nursing profession in the preparation and success of their path,” the order said Nov. 8.

“These emerging nurses are in a position to play a real pivotal role in health in all regions of Quebec. I welcome them to the profession and wish them great success! Furthermore, I would like to thank the OIIQ work teams and all the partners involved in this process,” said OIIQ president Luc Mathieu in a press release.

Both the OIIQ and the Fédération interprofessionnelle de la santé du Québec (FIQ), the province’s largest nursing union, said they would not comment further on the exam situation.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The Coalition Avenir Québec government intends to table a bill requiring new graduates of Quebec medical schools to work for a certain period of time in the province’s public medical system before the holiday recess, a spokesperson for Health Minister Christian Dubé has confirmed.

On Nov. 6, Premier François Legault said in a National Assembly news conference that he was ready to use the notwithstanding clause, if necessary, to make sure the new law was applied and new doctors graduating from one of the province’s four medical schools either practiced in the public system or reimbursed part of their tuition. “This is too important. We have a lack of doctors. There’s a lack of doctors everywhere. Well, the doctors who are trained at Quebec taxpayers’ expense must practice in Quebec.”

In a statement, the Ministry of Health and Social Services (MSSS) noted that 775 of the province’s 22,479 practicing doctors practiced exclusively in the private sector, “a tendency that was particularly pronounced for new doctors.” It’s also possible for a doctor to alternate between public and private practice multiple times a year, or to leave the province and practice elsewhere.

“While too many Quebecers are still waiting to be treated, too many doctors decide, early in their careers, to leave the Quebec public network. We will take steps to ensure that the population has access to the care they pay for. Our government has the courage to take all necessary steps to strengthen doctors’ commitment to the population and our public network,” Dubé said in a statement. “This measure is part of a series of other measures to strengthen our public network and attract our professionals to work there, early in their careers.”

“We remind the government that the best way to retain specialist physicians in the public health network is to give them the means to provide care. Currently, the lack of technical platforms and personnel, among other things, too often prevents specialist physicians from practicing properly. And let us add that if this type of obligation were to apply to physicians, it should also apply to other health professionals, many of whom are also leaving the public sector for the private sector,” wrote the Fédération des médecins spécialistes du Québec in a statement. The Fédération des médecins omnipraticiens du Québec, the province’s family doctors’ union, preferred not to comment until the bill was tabled.

Dr. Pierre Fontaine is a resident pediatrician and a consultant doctor on the board of Médecins québécois pour la régime public (MQRP), which advocates for increased investment in the public medical system. “We were very surprised when this came out,” he said. “It’s a good thing that the minister is realizing the importance of the problem of young doctors going private.” MQRP also called on the government to consider expanding the law to other health professions.

“Ideally, we want the only medicine to exist to be public medicine,” he added. “The more doctors that leave the public system, the longer wait times will be.” Fontaine also said Quebec should consider overhauling its permit delivery system, which sometimes creates situations where “people who want to do family medicine [in the public system] are offered a permit for a CHSLD or to do obstetrics.”

Fontaine said he doesn’t think most graduating doctors will “desert” the province if new requirements come into force. “It will be a minority of doctors who have already made a prior decision to practice elsewhere.”

“When doctors’ training is financed with public funds, it’s normal that they give back,” said Pierrette Messier of the Bedford Pole Health Committee, who, like Fontaine, said she believes the only medical system should be the public system.

She said she believed the bill would help bring doctors to underserved regions of the province. “We’re a big, big province where there are a lot of remote regions, and this will probably help. I think [the new proposal] is sensible. We’ll see how it’s put into practice.”

“I can’t comment on a bill I haven’t seen, but we really want to solve the problem of getting doctors into the region,” said Townshippers’ Association executive director Denis Kotsoros. “It’s expensive to train doctors, and to see them jump out of the system right away is disappointing. I can understand [the government’s] frustration, but we have to be rational.” He pointed out that it remained to be seen how the bill would affect anglophones, graduates from out of province or doctors from francophone communities outside Quebec who study in Quebec as part of university partnerships. “What does this mean for francophone communities outside Quebec?”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

If your child’s daycare opened half an hour late on Monday, you’re not alone. Thousands of in-home daycare centres across the province opened late as members of the Fédération des intervenantes en petite enfance du Québec (FIPEQ), a CSQ-affiliated union which represents 12,000 educators in subsidized in-home and public daycare centres, sought to put pressure on the provincial government to reach a satisfactory collective agreement. Public daycare centres staffed by FIPEQ members are expected to open late on Fridays starting Nov. 15.

Union representatives say they have been working without a collective agreement since April 2023. They are calling for salary increases above inflation over the next three years, additional vacation and training days and the possibility to hire more support staff and special education technicians.

They say entry-level educators in particular (whose starting salary is $21.60/hour) struggle to make ends meet, and current salaries and working conditions make it hard for public daycare centres to attract and keep early-career educators. The union wants the lowest pay grade eliminated and other pay grades increased by $2.86/hour retroactive to April 2023, inflation + 3 per cent retroactive to April 2024 and inflation + 4 per cent in 2025.  “There’s a lack of places in daycare centres, so we can’t allow ourselves to lose any educators,” said FIPEQ-CSQ vice president Sylvi Boisclair. “We need to protect our centres from inflation so they stay open.”

FIPEQ-CSQ president Anne-Marie Bellerose made a connection between working conditions for educators and a May 2024 auditor general’s report that stated that over 40 per cent of day-care centres (public, private and in-home) failed provincial quality evaluations.

“We understand that parents are worried about late openings, but it’s high time that the government chooses to concern itself with early childhood education,” said Bellerose at a press conference in Montreal. “We’re the first link in the chain of the education system, and we work with children during a crucial period in their development that will affect them for the rest of their lives. However, the network has been neglected to the extent that the auditor general’s office is worried about the quality of service.”

Bellerose said government subsidies to cover operating expenses also need to go up. Some subsidized daycare centres may leave the public system and go private if a solution can’t be found, she said.

The FIPEQ-CSQ is not the only early childhood educators’ union raising concerns about pay and working conditions. Daycare educators at a CSN-affiliated union are also in negotiations, and recently voted to launch a five-day strike “when the time is right.”

Bellerose said the Treasury Board “didn’t necessarily have a negative attitude” at the table, but negotiations were progressing extremely slowly. She added that the union had invited Treasury Board secretary Sonia LeBel to spend a day at a daycare centre “so she can see what it’s like.” Their invitation had not received a response as of this writing.

“We know parents are going to have to deal with repercussions. We’re all aware of that – we’re all moms here, so we’re going through the same thing. But if [parents] want service tomorrow, next year, five years from now, for their grandkids, we need to act now,” she said.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

On Oct. 31, Quebec Minister of Immigration, Francisation and Integration Jean-François Roberge announced an eight-month moratorium on two popular programs aimed at giving skilled workers and international students a pathway to permanent residence and eventual Canadian citizenship.

Roberge said no applications for a Quebec selection certificate (CSQ) through Quebec’s regular skilled worker program (known by its French acronym PRTQ) or for the Quebec Experience Program for recent university graduates (known as the PEQ-Diplômés) would be accepted until June 30, 2025. Immigrants living in Quebec who want to apply for permanent residence must first have a CSQ issued by the Quebec government.

A spokesperson later clarified that applications submitted before Oct. 31 would be processed; 3,090 applications for the PEQ-Diplômés and 9,261 applications for the PRTQ were being processed as of Oct. 1.

The moratorium “gives us room to maneuver to carry out a thorough reflection for the next immigration plan,” Roberge told reporters. He also said the freeze would allow Quebec to keep the number of permanent immigrants for 2025 “controlled, at around 64,000 people,” adding, “If we hadn’t taken this courageous decision, it would have been around 70,000.”

Employers’ groups and advocates for immigrants expressed alarm at the news. “The lack of qualified employees is the number one obstacle to sales and production for small- and medium-sized businesses,” said François Vincent, Quebec vice-president responsible for Quebec affairs at the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, in a statement. “It’s true that we are facing pressure on housing and that it’s appropriate to adapt immigration to the needs of the labour market. However, given Quebec’s demographic profile …  hasty decisions that significantly reduce the level of immigration will leave their mark. There will be negative impacts for employers, employees and the regional economy.” No one from the Chambre de commerce et d’industrie de Brome-Missisquoi was available to comment at press time.

Le Québec, c’est nous aussi (LQNA; “We too are Quebec”), a provincewide youth-led immigrant rights group, expressed its “profound worry.”

“To be eligible for either of these programs, a person needs to show a certain level of French proficiency. Those who are eligible for the PEQ-Diplômés program, by definition, are already in Quebec and have obtained a diploma from a Quebec post-secondary institution. This freeze [is not] an efficient measure to counteract the so-called pressure put on the system by immigrants. It … brutally slams the door on a number of workers already established in Quebec,” LQNA said in a statement.

Frey Guevara is executive director of Solidarité Ethnique Régionale de la Yamaska, a Granby-based nonprofit which helps immigrants in the greater Granby region and Brome-Missisquoi find housing and navigate bureaucracy. He said the freeze on the two programs would likely result in an uptick in applications in other categories, as people look for legal ways to stay in the province. “We haven’t gotten many calls yet, but we’re expecting a wave of calls,” he told the BCN a few hours after the announcement.

“There are a lot of international students whose families have invested a lot for them to study and stay here, and to have everything fall apart like this is dramatic,” he added. “People have done a lot to qualify for an existing program and then from one day to the next, it’s not there anymore.”

Guevara suggested that “it might be a good idea” for the government to inform affected people of policy changes in advance, to give them time to plan. “There are whole families here, and we need to give them a chance to get organized.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The Bedford Medical Clinic, a long-established clinic near the CLSC La Pommeraie, will close on Nov. 25 after more than 60 years, its last remaining family doctor has confirmed. The public clinic is one of two service points for the Groupe de médecine familiale (GMF) de La Pommeraie, along with the nearby CLSC, and serves over 2,000 patients.

“I’ve been here alone for the last two or three years, since my partner retired,” said Dr. Jean-Philippe Peck. “There used to be four or five of us, then we were two and we could not rectify the situation. It’s almost impossible to recruit when you’re alone, because the person knows that when you retire, they’re going to have to do everything alone. We weren’t able to recruit at the old clinic, and even when we got a nice new clinic [in 2017] we couldn’t recruit. I was pushing to have the CLSC take over the offices, but they never followed up. It was inevitable that the clinic would close.” He also noted that doctors at the nearby CLSC don’t have to pay the same office fees as their counterparts at the clinic, another incentive for new doctors to choose the CLSC, which has seven family doctors, over the clinic.

Peck said he plans to move to Clinique Santé Saint-Alphonse, in Saint-Alphonse-de-Granby, to practice alongside his son and daughter-in-law, who are also family doctors.

In a letter shared with the BCN by one of Peck’s longtime patients, the doctor writes that he “will be happy to continue providing quality care at my new office” after Nov. 15, and will continue to make house calls to care for vulnerable patients.

Bedford resident John Craighead founded a group called Friends of the Bedford Clinic, which spearheaded a campaign to save the clinic. He said the clinic had a patient-centred approach that was hard to get at the CLSC.

“The clinic has always [had] the more patient-focused approach where the doctor meets with the patient and follows them through and even does house calls or [visits] to old folks’ homes or residences. The one at the hospital has three layers in order to see the doctor,” Craighead said. “They also do very few of the other things [Dr. Peck] does, like house calls and visits to residences.”

Craighead said Friends of the Bedford Clinic looked at various strategies to keep the clinic open, including opening a co-op and asking the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS to assign a doctor on a short-term contract. “We found a few [interested doctors], but the administrator for the Groupe de médecine familiale wouldn’t allocate patients to those people.” Craighead said he believed that by pouring resources into the CLSC, local health authorities had essentially let the clinic wither away.

“The reason we wanted to keep the clinic open was because of the level of care [Peck] provided, a very personal level of care. He was the last in a long line of doctors at the clinic who have all practiced that way.”

“For the last two years, whenever we’ve gotten a new doctor, they have gone to the CLSC,” said Bedford Township Coun. France Groulx, who has also been active in the search for ways to keep the clinic open. “There’s a conflict of visions of the medical profession. A lot of [patients] are going private now.”  

When asked about the philosophical difference between the CLSC and his own practice at the clinic, Peck said only, “There is one.”

The CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS referred a request for comment to the clinic. No one from the CLSC La Pommeraie was available to comment at press time.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS will not move forward with a plan to enlarge the CHSLD de Bedford, despite a dogged pro-expansion campaign waged by the Bedford Pole Health Committee (BPHC). Christiane Granger, president of the Fondation Lévesque-Craighead, which raises money to support public health facilities in the region, told the BCN.

In May 2022, after several years of advocacy from community groups, Brome-Missisquoi MNA Isabelle Charest and then- seniors’ affairs minister Marguerite Blais announced details of an expansion plan which would allow the residence to accommodate up to 49 residents in private rooms and create a protected unit with eight places for people with cognitive disabilities who are susceptible to wandering, as the BCN reported at the time. However, in June of this year, officials from the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS announced the project was off the table, although smaller renovations would go ahead in consultation with a users’ committee.

Members of the BPHC and the Bedford Pole Economic Relaunch Committee launched a campaign to revive the expansion project, holding a protest in front of the CHSLD and gathering over 3,300 signatures on a petition which was tabled at the National Assembly on Oct. 10.

On Oct. 17, CIUSSS officials met with the foundation. “The meeting was suggested to us by the CIUSSS,” Granger said. “The decision [to cancel the expansion] is maintained. They wanted to meet with us in person, explain the reasons and close the loop on the whole thing. They were in good faith but the [situation] changed. We are disappointed, but glad to have had the meeting. There is interest in another project, but nothing concrete as of yet. If there’s a new project [proposed], we’ll discuss it with the CIUSSS.” As of press time, the CIUSSS had not responded to a request to independently confirm details of the meeting.

Granger said the sum of $250,000 raised by the foundation to contribute to the proposed expansion will be reallocated, potentially toward equipment upgrades to local family doctors’ offices.

She said the foundation plans to keep working with the BPHC and the Economic Relaunch Committee in the future. “We’re confronted with the reality [of the cancellation] – we’re not making the decision,” she added.

BPHC spokesperson Pierrette Messier said she was “doubly disappointed” by the project being shelved, saying it reflected the government’s disinterest in seniors and in rural regions as a whole. “They were short of money, and they chose other priorities,” she said.

Home care on the rise

CIUSSS officials have cited rising demand for home care as one major reason they decided not to invest in the CHSLD expansion. “The number of home support interventions has increased over the past two years, with 124,903 interventions carried out in 2023-2024, compared to 90,012 interventions in 2021-2022. In addition, intensive home nursing follow-up interventions have increased by 30 per cent in two years,” said CIUSSS spokesperson Nancy Corriveau.

Normand Roy, director general of the Coopérative de soutien à domicile du pays des vergers, a home care services co-op serving the MRC of Brome-Missisquoi, confirmed that demand for home care services has risen in recent years – partly, he speculated, due to the closures of private seniors’ homes due to regulatory requirements.

The co-op offers house cleaning, respite care and basic personal care – helping an elderly or disabled person get up, bathe, dress and take their medication. If a person requires less than 40 hours per week of home care and is not a danger to themselves, Roy explained, they can stay in their home rather than moving to a CHSLD, although if the person requires more care or “starts wandering in the night and is not wandering safely,” a move can become inevitable. 

“During the pandemic, we didn’t have deaths [among seniors in the region receiving in-home care], and in CHSLDs, people died,” he said. “You have a lot more of a chance to catch the virus in a building than in your own home. You also have more freedom – you’re not going to be stuck in your room. We all want to grow old at home.”

Messier maintained that home care and CHSLDs had two different vocations. “We want to stay home as long as we can [but] CHSLDs are there for people who need a lot more care.”

“We’re waiting to see if the CIUSSS will offer anything else; we don’t know the next steps,” she said.

Photo courtesy Town of Brome Lake
Kevin Robinson

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Hudson native and Navy veteran Kevin Robinson is the new fire chief and public safety director at the Town of Brome Lake.

“I’ve always loved the area around Brome Lake, which I would visit on bike trips. I kind of jokingly said I would retire there…and it turns out I don’t even have to retire,” said Robinson, who took office at the beginning of summer.

Robinson has had a decades-long fascination with firefighting and fire prevention. “I served in the Navy, and everyone in the Navy learns to be a firefighter, because when you’re on a ship at sea and there’s a fire, you can’t just come out on deck and wait for the fire department,” he said. “I found firefighting really interesting; I knew it was something I wanted to do in the civilian world as a volunteer, and from there I managed to turn a hobby into a job.”

Robinson served in the Navy until 2012, when he took a civilian job as regional emergency and security co-ordinator with what is now called Public Services and Procurement Canada. He later worked with the Canadian Space Agency, in a role he described as “very managerial.”

“The pandemic gave me time to reflect on the fact that I didn’t really enjoy [that job] because I didn’t have much contact with people,” he said. “I thought maybe it was time to go back to school and train as a fire prevention technician.”

Robinson, who is bilingual, worked in fire prevention in Sainte-Angèle-de-Monnoir for several years before applying for the open Brome Lake position. In Brome Lake, he oversees both the on-call fire department and the paramedic service, a total of about 50 people. He said one of the major challenges the fire department faces is finding people who are willing to be on call 20 hours a week, willing and able to step away from school, work or family commitments to respond to calls.

“It’s also a challenge to make sure that everyone is trained properly, and to get to know everyone,” he added. “I’m the outsider – I just got here at the end of May.” He said he kept a line of communication open with the newly accredited firefighters’ union “so that if there’s anything that’s problematic, we can get it on the table and talk about it.”

He said he’s looking forward to inaugurating the long-awaited new fire hall, working with a state-of-the-art truck the town recently ordered and potentially running a recruitment drive.  In closing, he reminded Brome Lake residents to avoid distracted driving and check their smoke detectors regularly.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

About 100 students and teachers took part in a protest in front of the Centre régional intégré de formation (CRIF) adult education centre in Granby on Oct. 25, calling on the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government to fund more subsidized French classes for adult learners, known as francisation.

Several school boards and service centres which offer the free classes, including the Eastern Townships School Board (ETSB), the Centre des services scolaire (CSS) de Val-des-Cerfs and the CSS de la Région-de-Sherbrooke, have announced drastic cuts to francisation programs in recent weeks due to a funding shortfall.

The classes are funded by the Ministry of Immigration, Francisation and Integration (MIFI) through the Ministry of Education and Higher Learning (MEES). As officials from the two service centres previously told the BCN (see article in Oct. 22 edition), funding for the 2024-25 school year was allocated based on student numbers from the pandemic years of 2020-21 and 2021-22, when enrolment was much lower. Boards and service centres opened classes this fall based on current demand, believing either that there was a mistake in budget projections or that the government would provide additional funding to make up the difference. The government has shown no indication that it will provide additional funding, and the ETSB and CSSVDC have announced plans to close their entire francisation programs in November; the Sherbrooke CSS intends to close 23 of its 28 classes.

The Granby protest was organized by the Fédération autonome de l’enseignement (FAE), the teachers’ union of which the Syndicat de l’enseignement de la Haute-Yamaska (SEHY), which represents CSSVDC teachers, is a member. Across the FAE’s 12 member unions, 85 teachers will lose their jobs if new funding doesn’t arrive, according to Annie-Christine Tardif, vice president of professional life at the FAE. Teachers on short-term contracts will pick up work as substitutes, and those with permanent contracts will be shifted to fill other positions.

“There was a lot of confusion from the beginning – service centres usually have room to maneuver, but this time they were told they could not reallocate money set aside for other purposes [to francisation], and they were told they could only teach a set number of people,” Tardif said.

Minister of Immigration, Francisation and Integration Jean-François Roberge has argued that funding for French-language training has not been cut. However, Tardif argued that while that is technically true, current funding doesn’t take into account increases in teacher salaries and enrolment over the past several years.

SEHY president Sophie Veilleux attended the protest. “What kept coming up was [students’] desire to learn French and integrate in society,” she said. “If we ask [newcomers] to learn French, we need to give them the opportunity.”

On Oct. 18, Esteban Payares, a recently arrived immigrant who started learning French in Sherbrooke about a year ago, launched a petition to stop francisation class closures. It had received over 1,000 signatures as of this writing.

Liberals call for investigation

Over the weekend, Liberal immigration critic André A. Morin and French language affairs critic Madwa-Nika Cadet called on Quebec’s newly appointed Commissioner of the French Language, Benoit Pelletier, to launch a formal investigation into the CAQ’s “mismanagement” of francisation, “so that the right to learn French, included in the Charter of the French Language, is respected.”

“Instead of promoting, enhancing and protecting French, which is what the Minister of the French Language should do by virtue of his mission, the CAQ is completely preventing people from integrating into Quebec society and strengthening the use of our language,” Cadet said in a statement.

The BCN reached out to the MEES and MIFI for comment. MIFI spokesperson Emmanuelle Allaire said the immigration ministry “does not intervene in the determination of [MEES] budgetary rules, or the allocation of resources.” The MEES had not responded to a list of questions by press time.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The Centre des services scolaire (CSS) de Val-des-Cerfs and the CSS de la Région-de-Sherbrooke (CSSRS) became the latest school service centres to cut French language courses for adults, amid a funding shortfall caused by a change in the way the Ministry of Education and Higher Learning (MEES) allocated funding to boards and service centres offering the subsidized courses, known as francisation. The Eastern Townships School Board (ETSB), the Magog-based CSS des Sommets and several school service centres in the Montreal and Quebec City area have also announced cuts to francisation in recent weeks.

Funding was allocated based on student numbers from 2020-2021 and 2021-22, which, as union and school service centre representatives have pointed out, were pandemic years, with relatively low student enrolment; they predated the entry into force of Bill 96, which opened courses (formerly reserved for recent immigrants) to Canadian students.

The CSSVDC will end its entire francisation program as of Oct. 8, costing 20 teachers their jobs, according to Sophie Veilleux, president of the Syndicat d’enseignement de la Haute-Yamaska, the union representing CSSVDC teachers.

CSSVDC director general Carl Morrissette confirmed that the service would be “interrupted.”

“We have offered francisation services for many years, but over the last two years, we’ve had a strong increase in enrolment,” he said. In July, CSSVDC employees noticed there were “gaps” between enrolment projections and funding projections. Like their ETSB counterparts (see article in Oct. 8 edition), CSSVDC staff initially believed there was a mistake. “We talked to our colleagues, and the ministry, and the federation of school service centres, and we had confirmation that the numbers we had were correct,” Morissette said. “We are focusing on a transition for employees and students … we hope we’ll get more funding next year.” School service centres are not the only francisation service providers – community organizations also provide the subsidized, standardized courses in collaboration with the Ministry of Immigration, Francisation and Integration (MIFI) – but students may have to wait several months before being placed in a course.

In Sherbrooke, Donald Landry, secretary general of the CSS de la Région-de-Sherbrooke, confirmed that of the 28 classes that were opened at the beginning of the school year, only five would continue for the rest of the year.

“We thought [the funding] could be reviewed [by the ministry] at the beginning of the school year, so we started by offering courses according to demand,” he told the BCN.  “After the first session, we realized we had to reduce our course offerings.”

Richard Bergevin, president of the Fédération des syndicats de l’enseignement, a provincewide federation of teachers’ unions, said it was “unacceptable” to tell teachers in October that their contracts would end in November, when demand for French courses was “overflowing.”

“The MIFI can’t immediately take up the slack – they are not going to open 200 classes overnight,” Bergevin said. “On Sept. 1, the wait time was four months, and we can expect much longer wait times now. We need to do all we can to get [the MEES] to change its mind in the next two weeks.”

MIFI public affairs advisor Emmanuelle Allaire told the BCN that students whose courses have been cancelled “are redirected to the Francisation Québec registrar. Francisation Québec ensures that these students are given priority in another French learning service in an institution that suits the person, which may be a CEGEP, university, non-profit organization or online courses. Francisation Québec quickly contacts these students concerned to reassure them and inform them that their file is being processed as a priority, that they will be assigned a place as soon as possible near their place of residence when possible and that they will not need to submit a new application for admission.”

No one from the MEES was available to comment at press time.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Brome Lake residents who need to provide blood, stool and urine samples for lab tests will once again be able to do so by appointment at the CLSC Lac-Brome as of Oct. 15.

However, nursing care services will not be offered for the time being, the BCN has learned.

The CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS announced in late May that the CLSC Lac-Brome would close from June 17 to Sept. 8 due to summer staff shortages. The closure was later extended until Oct. 15. The CIUSSS announced the return of lab test services by appointment earlier this month. The services will be offered Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.

“As for other services, a community consultation committee will be set up to clearly define the needs of the population and reassess our service offering. This committee will be composed of members of community organizations, members of the community and will be led by a representative of the CIUSSS de l’Estrie – CHUS,” CIUSSS spokesperson Nancy Corriveau told the BCN.

Before the closure, the CLSC was open four days a week until 4 p.m. and offered nursing care, including vaccinations, wound care, cancer treatment and prenatal care consultations. Until further notice, patients who had been receiving nursing care in Brome Lake will have to go to clinics in Bromont, Sutton, Cowansville or surrounding communities.

Brome Lake Mayor Richard Burcombe was clearly frustrated about the “lack of communication” from the CIUSSS. “We found out about this [partial reopening] from a citizen who went to make an appointment on Clic Santé,” he said.

“I can’t believe it will only be open for two mornings a week, and for any other service, you’ll have to go to Cowansville,” said Burcombe. “There’s nothing else available in the community. We will still work on getting it open four days a week. We’re happy about the two days a week, but we wanted normal service.”

As for the consultative committee proposed by the CIUSSS, Town of Brome Lake spokesperson Ghyslain Forcier told the BCN, “that is not something that’s been communicated to us.”

The CLSC Lac-Brome serves residents of the town of Brome Lake, Brome Village, West Bolton and parts of Potton and Sutton.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The Bedford Pole Health Committee (BPHC) and Bedford Pole Economic Relaunch Committee brought their fight for the expansion of the CHSLD de Bedford to the National Assembly last week.

In 2019, the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS announced plans for a $15.1-million expansion of the facility, to increase its capacity to 49 residents, create a protected unit with eight places for people with cognitive disabilities who are susceptible to wandering and allow residents to move into private rooms. The project ran into delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but in 2022, then-seniors’ affairs minister Marguerite Blais said the government planned to move forward with the planned expansion. In June of this year, however, the CIUSSS announced that the project was off the table. A lack of demand, a cultural shift to home care, the growth of the Maison des Ainés network and the CIUSSS budget deficit have been among the reasons cited.

The facility’s catchment area covers the greater Bedford region – Bedford, Bedford Township, Notre-Dame-de-Stanbridge, Pike River, Saint-Armand, Saint-Ignace-de-Stanbridge, Stanbridge East and Stanbridge Station – with an estimated population of 8,000 people. Over the summer, BPHC members circulated a petition around the region in favour of the project which received more than 3,400 signatures. On Oct. 10, Liberal seniors’ affairs critic Linda Caron tabled the petition at the National Assembly. BPHC co-spokespeople Pierrette Messier-Peet and Normand Deragon, Bedford Township Coun. France Groulx and president of the Fédération de l’Age d’Or du Québec (FADOQ) for the Haute-Yamaska region André Beaumont looked on from the gallery.

Caron called on local MNA Isabelle Charest to revive the project and criticized her for not meeting directly with BPHC representatives. “Monday morning, I went to the CHSLD de Bedford, with the [BPHC], CHSLD residents, local elected officials and Bedford residents, to pick up their petition, signed by 45 per cent of the [adult] population,” Caron said during question period. “The CAQ promised to expand and renovate their CHSLD. Unfortunately, nothing has happened in Bedford yet.”

Seniors’ affairs minister Sonia Bélanger responded, noting that Charest had met with local elected officials and representatives of the Fondation Lévesque-Craighead, which raises money for improvements to health facilities in the region and had raised over $250,000 toward the CHSLD expansion. She also noted that the CIUSSS planned to renovate the home later this year with input from residents.

“We want to allow our seniors to live the last stage of their lives in the community that they helped develop. Right now, we have seniors in our region who are being sent 40 minutes or an hour away from their families,” Messier later said. “Do we, as citizens of a [rural] region, not have the same rights to services as people in large urban centres?… We want to have this project back for the good of our region.”

“What do you want when you’re in your last couple of months of life?” asked Deragon. “You don’t want anything fancy – you want people to come visit you. I know people at the CHSLD de Bedford whose relatives come to visit every evening. If you’re sent away, no one will come visit.”

On the floor of the National Assembly, Charest said she had been “engaged and mobilized” on the file, although as a minister, she could not table a petition. She said CIUSSS officials will meet with the foundation on Oct. 16. A spokesperson for Charest, Maryse Dubois, said smaller renovations would go ahead as planned.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Quebecers who want additional protection against COVID-19 and seasonal flu will be able to book vaccination appointments online and over the phone as of Oct. 16, public health officials said last week.

“Every year, it’s no surprise, when temperatures start dropping and people start going back inside, there’s always an increase in respiratory viruses,” Quebec public health director Dr. Luc Boileau told reporters. “Beginning the [vaccination] campaign in October is ideal, because it allows people who are at the highest risk of complications to be protected at the right time.”

Boileau said ministry data indicated that there has been “elevated community spread” of COVID over the past few months; cases of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) “were starting to go around,” and it was expected that flu season would start in a few weeks. He called on people who were experiencing flu-like symptoms to stay home and avoid spreading their illness to more vulnerable people. He pointed out that a negative COVID rapid test did not mean a person wasn’t sick – the test could be a false negative or the person could have another illness. 

“If you have a fever, stay home. If you feel well enough to go about your daily business, wear a mask as long as your symptoms last and don’t visit people who are at risk [of serious complications from COVID or flu].” High-risk groups include seniors 75 and older, babies and young children, people with compromised immune systems and pregnant women. 

Boileau added that although rapid tests are no longer recommended for the general population, people at high risk of complications who believe they have COVID should still get tested in a testing centre, so they can start prophylactic treatment. 

Vaccination campaign to begin Oct. 16

Boileau said vaccination campaigns for COVID, flu and RSV have already begun in long-term care centres and among high-risk populations. He invited healthy adults at low risk of complications from COVID or flu to book a vaccination appointment online via ClicSanté starting Oct. 16. It is possible to get vaccinated against COVID and flu on the same day. Healthy adults under 75 are not systematically vaccinated against RSV, which mainly affects seniors and young children. Babies will be able to receive a preventative antibody treatment against RSV as of Nov 4. The flu and COVID vaccines are free; the RSV vaccine and antibody treatment are free to at-risk groups; free and systematic RSV vaccination may eventually be extended to other groups, according to Dr. Caroline Quach-Thanh, head of Quebec’s immunization committee, who spoke alongside Boileau.

People who cannot or don’t want to make an appointment online can book by phone at 1 877 644‑4545. The phone line is open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekdays and 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekends and offers services in both French and English.

Quach-Thanh noted that antibodies take about two weeks to develop after a person is vaccinated. “Since we don’t exactly know when the season of virus transmission is going to start, it’s better to do it early than late.”

“Thank you for considering the option of getting vaccinated,” Boileau said, addressing Quebecers at large at a press conference that was live-streamed on social media. “It can make a difference for you and a lot of people around you as well. Vaccination is free and accessible – there’s no reason not to do it.” 

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

It may be possible to get from Cowansville to Granby, Waterloo or Bromont without a car by the end of 2025, if a joint project between the MRC Brome-Missisquoi and the MRC Haute-Yamaska goes according to plan. The two MRCs are planning to put in place a regular bus service linking the four cities, MRC Brome-Missisquoi transit co-ordinator Khalil El Fatmi confirmed.

El Fatmi said the goal was to offer service in both directions between Granby and Cowansville, Cowansville and Bromont, Bromont and Waterloo and Waterloo and Granby. The MRC currently has an on-demand transit service linking Cowansville with surrounding municipalities. “That kept coming up in our discussions [with users of the current service] – they kept asking why we didn’t go to Granby.”

“The main objective [of the partnership] is to link our two territories together,” he said. “The process started last year, there was a call for tenders and the contract was issued in June. We’re now in the needs assessment process, looking at the service. We’re looking at the major axes we need to target. We need to work on the schedule and see what works best for workers and students.” The MRC is using anonymized data on travel patterns collected from schools, municipalities and medical facilities to see what routes will serve the most people.

He expects that the MRC will announce the new route or routes in early 2025. “We’re in the planning phase and it’s hard to go into detail … but we would like for there to be a service that responds to people’s needs. We just want it to work and be used.”

The MRC recently announced plans to extend a city bus pilot project in Cowansville; El Fatmi said discussions were underway with two other municipalities about implementing city bus service. The municipality also intends to roll out a mobile app next spring that will allow users of the existing on-demand transit service to reserve trips online a few hours in advance – rather than the 24 hours currently required. “The more attractive public transit is, the more people are going to use it…and things are moving,” he said.

Cowansville Mayor Sylvie Beauregard said a bus service between the four cities is “definitely a need for the population,” especially for CEGEP students and people getting medical treatment who have to travel regularly between Granby and Cowansville. “For a lot of people, this will be easier than having a car, it’ll reduce traffic and additional greenhouse gases,” she said. “This has been on the table for many, many years, and now we’re moving toward realization.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The Eastern Townships School Board (ETSB) francisation program is expected to close in November unless it receives additional funding from the provincial government, school board and teachers’ union officials have confirmed.

If no solution is found, the program will end on Nov. 25, the last day of the fall session.

ETSB president Michael Murray explained that the way adult education is funded is at the heart of the matter – funds for a given year are allocated based on the number of students that were enrolled three years previously, he said.

As a result, the provincial government has “reduced our capacity back to the level of 2021, when we had the equivalent of 25 full-time students. That was before francisation took off.”

In the intervening years, the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government passed Law 14 (better known as Bill 96), which allowed English-speaking Quebecers and newcomers from English Canada to enrol in subsidized French language classes alongside new immigrants and imposed a new six-month deadline for immigrants to adapt to receiving government services in French. The CAQ also put in place a now-discontinued cash incentive program to encourage enrolment.

The ETSB hired additional staff and promoted the program heavily on the assumption that additional funding would be forthcoming. The program now has nearly 450 students across full-time, part-time and online programs, the equivalent of about 150 full-time students, according to Murray.

“We were part of a minority of school boards that ramped up our volume in response to the government’s public statements [encouraging newcomers to learn French]. We attracted a lot of newcomers who were quite successful in following the courses, and we thought, perhaps naively, that the government meant what it said,” said Murray.

Murray said the board learned in July that funding would be lower than anticipated. “We thought there might be some mistake,” he said. “Only in September did we learn the intention was to cut.”

If the program closes, 26 teachers, most of whom are based out of the Campus Brome-Missisquoi vocational training centre in Cowansville and the New Horizons adult education centre in Sherbrooke, may lose their jobs, said Timothy Croteau, the president of the Appalachian Teachers’ Association (ATA), the ETSB teachers’ union. “Some teachers are supposed to stay on, some aren’t; we haven’t gotten word.”

Croteau said that as early as September, teachers began getting emails from centre directors about anticipated cuts, enrolment numbers and changes to employee hours and contracts. “The job postings were put out in June, confirmed in July, confirmed again in August and then the whole story changed in September,” Croteau said. He wondered aloud why the school board put out job postings in summer if they were unsure about the availability of funding.

“People applied for these jobs and got them, and now they’re going to have to stop working … and they’ve missed the opportunity to apply for other [teaching] jobs.” Croteau said the union was trying to get “as much information as possible” from the ETSB and the MEES, but “it’s either no response, or we’re looking into it, or we’ll look at it at a later date.”

The Quebec Liberal Party and Québec solidaire (QS) have been calling for changes to the francisation funding model. “The provincial government is saying they aren’t making cuts, but that’s what they’re doing – they’re cutting,” said Liberal immigration critic André A. Morin. “It’s hitting the ETSB now, but other regions have also been impacted – it’s so wrong.” He blamed the funding model, administrative confusion between the Ministry of Education and Higher Learning (MEES) and the Ministry of Immigration, Francisation and Integration (MIFI) and arbitrary decision-making by the government for the current situation. “We have a minister who just gets up one morning and says we’ll cut … The government is saying French is very important, but if you want to achieve that goal, you have to put in procedures to reach it, which they’re not doing.”

“After running an $11 billion deficit, the CAQ is cutting public services by penalizing those who raise their hand to learn French. This is completely inconsistent on the part of a government that claims to protect the French language,” said QS immigration critic Guillaume Cliche-Rivard.  “Because of these cuts, nearly 500 people are losing an essential resource to integrate into their community in Estrie and work in French. I ask the CAQ to reverse its decision; there are no savings to be made on the backs of people who want to learn French.”

Impact on students

Frey Guevara is the executive director of Solidarité ethnique régionale de la Yamaska (SERY), a nonprofit which connects new immigrants in the Townships with language classes and housing, work and cultural integration opportunities. SERY offers francisation classes which, like the ones run by the ETSB, are coordinated by the provincial government under the umbrella of Francisation Québec. “With Bill 96, we brought in more [students] for francisation, but the resources were diluted,” he said. “Wait times are still going to keep going up, and the six-month deadline [for immigrants to receive government services in French] is still going to be there,” he said. “I know people who have been on a waiting list to get into a class for more than six months. It just isn’t working.”

“Making a doctor’s appointment, asking your landlord for repairs, buying what you need at the supermarket, these are everyday things that you need French for,” he added. “We forget that we’re dealing with the future of human beings here.”

“It’s totally chaotic and unpredictable … and I don’t know if anyone has actually sat down with the students and told them the program would close,” said Croteau, the union president.

The BCN requested comment from the MEES and the MIFI but had not received responses by press time.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Liberal seniors’ affairs critic Linda Caron visited Bedford on Oct. 7 to pick up a petition spearheaded by the Bedford Pole Health Committee (BPHC) against the cancellation of the CHSLD de Bedford expansion project. The paper-only petition received over 3,400 signatures over the summer, according to the BPHC. Caron and the Liberal critic for the Estrie region, Désirée McGraw, plan to table it at the National Assembly on Oct. 10.

In 2022, then-seniors’ affairs minister Marguerite Blais announced plans to move forward with a $15.1-million expansion of the CHSLD, which would have allowed 49 residents to live there in private rooms and created a protected unit with eight places for people with cognitive disabilities who are susceptible to wandering. The planned expansion was first outlined in 2019 before running into delays due to the pandemic. The CIUSSS announced in June of this year that it was cancelling the expansion altogether, ostensibly due to a cultural shift to home care. The CIUSSS announced plans to consult residents about smaller upgrades to the facility, which the BPHC and the Fondation Lévesque-Craighead, which raises funds for various projects at the Bedford CHSLD and CLSC, said were insufficient.

“The CIUSSS misled us, and we trusted them. Statistics can be manipulated to suit any narrative, but one thing is undeniable: they are depriving our regions of essential services, and this is simply unacceptable,” said Yves Lévesque, vice-president of the foundation. Lévesque and BPHC spokesperson Pierrette Messier-Peet have cited cases of seniors who would prefer to live in Bedford being relocated as far away as Longueuil for long-term care.

At the CHSLD de Bedford, Caron spoke to reporters alongside Bedford Coun. France Groulx and representatives from the BPHC, the foundation, the Bedford CHSLD residents’ committee, the FADOQ of the Richelieu-Yamaska region and the Bedford Pole economic relaunch committee. Caron accused Brome-Missisquoi MNA Isabelle Charest of having “chosen to abandon” the citizens of Bedford, stating that she and McGraw “have decided to take matters into our own hands and represent their voices.” About 50 people attended the press conference, including residents.

“We are five organizations working together for the same goal, which is to make the CIUSSS go back on its decision to cancel the expansion,” BPHC spokesperson Pierrette Messier-Peet said. “We worked on this project for years, only to be told at the last minute it wasn’t necessary – it’s a 180-degree turn by the government.”

Messier-Peet and a BPHC delegation plan to accompany Caron to the National Assembly. “We’re going to tell all of Quebec about what’s happening here; I’m persuaded that there are a lot of regions like ours that feel like they’ve been put on the back burner because resources are going to the cities.”

“This is a disaster for the people here. Seniors are relocated to Granby and even Sherbrooke, far away from their loved ones and support systems. Beyond the broken election promise, there is a persistent lack of humanity from this government,” Caron added. “I wanted to show my support for the people who have been working very hard to raise money and get involved. As a member of the opposition, I can’t make any promises, but I’ll keep hammering away at it.”

In a statement, Charest said she “saluted” the efforts of the BPHC and the foundation, which “show their attachment to their community.”

“Since the beginning of the summer, I have been following up with the ministries, my fellow ministers and the CIUSSS de l’Estrie to ensure that the change in direction of the project is indeed justified,” Charest said. “One thing is certain, the [CHSLD] will remain in Bedford.

She said Minister for Seniors’ Affairs Sonia Bélanger has asked that the CIUSSS meet with the foundation and with reporters to explain its decision. These two meetings are scheduled for Oct. 16 and 17. Her office has so far declined to meet with the BPHC.

 No one from the foundation was available to comment further at press time.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

After more than a decade of waiting, of bureaucratic struggles and false starts, the Coopérative de solidarité des Voisins de Sutton housing complex was formally inaugurated on Sept. 23. The complex, built on land once owned by the Anglican Church, will provide housing below market rates for 18 local families, 16 of whom have been moved in since July.

“It took ten years to get the project off the ground,” said former Sutton mayor Ken Hill, a longtime board member of Habitations Abordables Sutton (HAS), the nonprofit which was the driving force behind the co-op’s creation. After several false starts and amid worrisome inflation, construction began last year and was finally completed June 29. “Everything took more time than we thought it did because of the bureaucracy, but we’re so happy that it’s finally accomplished,” he said.

Hill explained that a few committed volunteers launched HAS in 2013; he joined the organization a year later, while serving as a town councillor under then-mayor Louis Dandeneault, to help the group find a new piece of land after the first plot they chose turned out to be contaminated. He remained on the board after his departure from municipal politics, to see the project through. On March 1, HAS formally turned over control of the co-op to a board made up primarily of residents. “We were there to build, not to manage,” Hill said. “There’s nothing better than having residents taking care of their own buildings.”

Hill said HAS received about 40 applications for the 18 units, which are all reserved for families with children living at home. Applicants had to commit to staying involved in the day-to-day management and maintenance in the co-op. Some applicants who had grown up in Sutton but found themselves priced out of the rental market were able to move back to town, Hill said. “The average rent for a 5 ½ in our buildings is $900 … but it’s more than just below-market rent; it’s a community.”

Sutton Mayor Robert Benoit and his administration have been among the project’s backers, granting $338,000 in funding (including $101,000 for the purchase of the land) and a 25-year property tax break with an estimated value of $370,311 over the life of the project. Benoit estimated the total cost of the project at about $8 million, the bulk of which came from the Quebec government. “The development of this project was very difficult … and that’s why I think we need to congratulate the people who put in volunteer work because they were believers, because they had a vision for affordable housing.” He also thanked Brome-Missisquoi MNA Isabelle Charest for the provincial government’s involvement.

Benoit said the project was “interesting” for the municipality because it would allow young, working-age people to live in town, “who will live and work in the community, and also work toward our collective wellbeing.” 

The co-op is the second housing co-op to open in Sutton after the Co-op Vive Sutton, a six-unit shared house for active seniors that opened in 2021, according to Guillaume Brien, director general of the Fédération des coopératives de l’habitation de l’Estrie (FCHE). A third project, piloted by a homeowners’ group and dubbed La Vie Au Boisé, is in development.

Brien said of the 55 co-ops that are members of the FCHE, around three-quarters are in Sherbrooke, but projects are emerging in every MRC in the region; a co-op for young families is taking applications in Frelighsburg. 

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm [around] living in community,” Brien said. “With the housing crisis and the climate crisis and all the other crises, there’s constant insecurity. If you build trust and security with your neighbour, that’s security, that’s belonging.”

Brien said anyone interested in working toward establishing a co-op in their municipality should find other interested people in their community and get in touch with Entraide Habitat Estrie, a nonprofit created by the FCHE which guides groups through the many administrative and logistical steps involved in creating a co-op.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The blue-green algae bloom which made the water of Missisquoi Bay undrinkable and unsafe for swimming at the end of summer was “nothing new” for Saint-Armand Mayor Caroline Rossetti.

The water treatment plant in Philipsburg, the bayside village which merged with Saint-Armand in 1999, is owned by the city of Bedford and supplies water to Bedford, Saint-Armand, Bedford Township and part of Stanbridge Station. The plant is the only plant in Quebec that draws drinking water from Lake Champlain. “Every time there’s a heat wave, we get the cyanobacteria again,” Rossetti said. “It costs a lot to treat the water, and even when we do treat it and it’s considered drinkable, it might still smell fishy.”

The mid-September algal bloom made headlines around the province. “The lake turns green every summer…and it’s kind of sad that it has taken this long to have some sort of reaction,” Rossetti said. “I’m happy that Bedford and Clarenceville and Venise-en-Québec are joining forces with us to say there’s a problem.” Bedford Mayor Claude Dubois, Rossetti and the Organisme du Bassin versant de la Baie Missisquoi (OBVBM) have linked the growth of the blue-green algae blooms to phosphorus runoff, mainly agricultural, and campaigned to reduce farmers’ use of phosphorus. However, longer, warmer summers and stagnant water in the bay don’t help.

Dubois and Rossetti have been among those working toward getting a new pipe built, to draw water from a deeper and less stagnant part of Lake Champlain. That’s easier said than done. “Water quality is provincial jurisdiction, navigable waterways are federal, and we’re also one of the few lakes on an international border,” Rossetti summarized.

Rossetti said she had been in contact with Brome-Missisquoi MP Pascale St-Onge, MNA Isabelle Charest and Iberville MNA Audrey Bogemans to try to clear some of the bureaucratic obstacles that stood in the way of getting the new pipe built.

Charest said the “Missisquoi Bay situation” had worrisome impacts on water quality, on access to water and on the region’s socioeconomic vitality, and that she, Bogemans and representatives from the provincial environment ministry had been in touch with town officials in Bedford, Saint-Armand, Stanbridge Station and Pike River to discuss water quality improvement efforts.

“Since this is a cross-border lake, the authorization to move the water intake further into the bay is up to the federal government,” she said. “This step must be resolved first.”

“As soon as the City of Bedford needs the support of the Quebec Ministry of Municipal Affairs to replace the water intake, Ms. Charest will support their request related to the construction of a new pipeline,” added a spokesperson for Charest, Maryse Dubois.

St-Onge, for her part, did not directly address the idea of replacing the pipe. “We know how essential this source of drinking water is for the region, and we are closely monitoring the progress of this issue. As soon as Minister St-Onge, as an MP, was informed of this issue, she committed to addressing it. Collaborative discussions have been initiated with several mayors, as well as with communities, municipalities and organizations to find the best possible solution,” Charles Thibault-Béland, a spokesperson for St-Onge, told the BCN in a statement.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

No eligibility certificate or other proof of identity will be required to access health care services in English, according to a new directive released last week by the Ministry of Health and Social Services.

The directive replaces a previous directive, published in July, which laid out a detailed list of case studies in an attempt to explain when health care professionals could use English or another language with patients or their family members. The list alarmed advocates for access to health care in English, who feared it could be used to restrict care. The first directive also mentioned eligibility certificates for English public education as one basis for serving patients in English, although many English speakers – particularly immigrants, seniors and people who grew up outside the province – don’t have one. After English-speaking community groups raised concerns, Minister for the French Language Jean-François Roberge said he planned to scrap the directive and publish a new one. More than two months later, that promise is now a reality.

The new directive – a compact five pages compared to its 23-page predecessor – states that “no verification of a user’s identity is needed to access services in English or in another language” and that a language other than French “may be used when the user or their representative requests it, expresses that they do not understand or do not seem to understand French, or according to the judgment of the [health care professional].” It states that health care professionals can communicate in English or another language with a patient or their representative if they have the capacity, or work with an interpretation service if they don’t.

“The Charter of the French Language contains all the tools necessary to preserve the status quo in terms of access to health care for the English-speaking community,” it states.

The directive applies to the entire spectrum of health and social services programming, including emergency services; public health; services for vulnerable youth, seniors and people with disabilities; addictions services and mental health, and to both spoken and written communication. It also states that a patient who is unsatisfied with the services they have received has the right to file a complaint with the local complaints commissioner.

Advocates for access to health care in English reacted to the new directive with relief. “This directive is a complete rewrite; it answers a lot of the questions that people have had,” Townshippers’ executive director Denis Kotsoros said. “The question is now, ‘What language do health professionals decide to use with patients,’ not ‘What language are they required to use?’ Any directive that tries to finagle itself into that relationship is doomed to fail.”

“This was the right thing to do and we consider the matter closed,” Kotsoros said.

“The revised directives on language permissions go a long way toward assuaging the fears and concerns of the 1.3-million-member English-speaking community of Quebec,” said Eva Ludvig, president of the Quebec Community Groups Network. “They also more closely reflect the promises this and previous governments have made that changes to language legislation would not affect the availability of nor access to health and social services in English. Critically, they clearly confirm that the only card you need when you visit a doctor or go to the hospital

is a health card, not an identity card.”

“This basically puts the whole issue to rest,” said Jennifer Johnson of the Community Health and Social Services Network, which advocates for accessibility to health and social services in English in the regions. “The original document was really flawed, and thank goodness the efforts made by the community have had results.”

 “The client is the person who determines if they want to receive services in English, and then they ask for it. It’s also clear that if a client asks for services in Spanish or another language, the professional needs to do the best they can to provide those services to the patient,” Johnson noted. The directive states that health professionals can communicate directly in any language with a patient if they have the capacity, or use an interpretation service.

“Don’t be shy – ask for documentation in English, and ask for interpretation services if you need them,” Johnson said. “It’s not a common reflex for anglophones to ask for an interpreter, but we need to make sure people understand that they can.” In the event that no health professional is available to speak to you in your preferred language, she said, using an interpretation service is a better option than relying on family members or taking the risk that you won’t fully understand.

CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS spokesperson Nancy Corriveau said the agency had received the directive but did not comment further. Despite the uncertainty surrounding the language directive over the past few months, Kotsoros said Townshippers’ had a “very, very good” working relationship with the CIUSSS, which was investing in programs to improve employees’ language skills and make it easier to spot bilingual employees in regional hospitals. “The CIUSSS has been very positive about providing services to the best of their ability … that is ingrained in the culture of the CIUSSS. We will stay aware of the situation and keep working with our partners.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Property values in Brome Lake will rise by an average of 51.8 per cent when the new evaluation role goes into effect in 2025, town officials announced last week.

“The value of Brome Lake’s taxable real estate holdings has risen from $2.14 billion to $3.25 billion. These values reflect market conditions on July 1, 2023, as stipulated in the Act respecting municipal taxation. The average value of a house thus rises from $507,700 to $772,200,” Town of Brome Lake spokesperson Ghyslain Forcier said in a statement.

Property tax bills for individual properties are calculated based on property values, determined by independent evaluators contracted by the municipality, and tax rates, determined by council and released along with the town budget each year. As a result, officials said an increase in a property’s assessed value might not automatically mean a higher tax bill. “While some may rejoice at the increased value of their assets, council understands this announcement may raise concerns among many of our citizens. I would like to reassure you that our elected officials will adjust tax rates downwards to reduce the impact of this new roll on taxpayers’ bills,” Mayor Richard Burcombe said in a statement.

Letters containing information on the new assessment notice will be sent out to property owners no later than Nov. 1. In the meantime, owners can consult specific data for each property on the GOnet portal, accessible via the town website. Information on how to contest a property assessment is also available on the website.

The town will hold an information session about the property assessment process on Nov. 6 at 6 p.m. at Centre Lac-Brome; representatives of Jean-Pierre Cadrin et Associés, the independent firm which carried out the property evaluation, will attend. Forcier said further information on how to participate in the session will be forthcoming.

Brome Lake director general Gilbert Arel explained that property values for the years 2025-27 are based on a property’s presumed resale value in July 2023. At that time, he explained, the housing market was still facing the effects of a pandemic-driven bidding war and relatively low interest rates. “When the government raised interest rates, it gave people a break, but prices are still high,” he explained.

Arel said the rise in property values in Brome Lake “was not surprising at all – I was expecting closer to a 60 per cent increase.”

“It’s an opportunity for the city; when property values grow up it means the city is in a good economic situation; if we were losing vitality, we would not have had that rise … but we also need to be careful to avoid people being overloaded with new taxes,” he said.

Rates expected to rise across the region

Patrick Lafleur is the coordinator of the property assessment department at the MRC Brome-Missisquoi, which handles property evaluation for the smaller municipalities in the MRC. “This year, we’re doing Bedford Township, Notre-Dame-de-Stanbridge, Pike River, Saint-Armand, Sainte-Sabine, Saint-Ignace, Stanbridge East and Stanbridge Station,” he said, adding that Bedford and Dunham will also release new tax rolls this year. “Even in the smaller municipalities, the value of land has exploded.”

Assessment roles for the ten municipalities will be released between now and Oct. 30. Lafleur said he is expecting property value increases of about 60 per cent in the western part of the MRC.

Marie-Hélène Croteau is the director general of the municipality of Saint-Armand. She said data from the provincial ministry of housing and municipal affairs suggests property values in Saint-Armand have gone up by an average of 69 per cent from 2022 to 2024, although the town’s 2025 role has not been released. “We’ve rarely seen rates that high – everything that happened during the pandemic is catching up with us,” she said.

Lafleur said property values usually fluctuate in cycles of seven or eight years. “We’re expecting prices to stabilize for the next few years and then rise again, but not on the scale of what has happened over the past couple of years,” he said. “In 23 years in the industry, I’ve never seen anything like that.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

As employees and volunteers settled into work-from-home routines during the pandemic, Townshippers’ Knowlton office sat mostly empty. Not anymore. Townshippers’ executive director Denis Kotsoros told the BCN the organization plans to get the facility – set up on a converted squash court in the local indoor tennis centre –  up and running again, as an office and community events venue.

“During the pandemic, we ran into funding issues and we lost a lot of people,” Kotsoros said. “The office went unused for a couple of years, but the board wanted to make sure the office was kept running because it’s important to maintain that relationship with people in Knowlton.”

Kotsoros, who works out of the Knowlton office at least one day a week, said he intends for the office to be used as a hub for the Townshippers’ Wellness Program later this year and possibly other programs. He also envisions it as a meeting room and event space for nonprofits. After consulting with various community organizations, he realized that there was a lack of reliably available space to organize meetings, information sessions and training sessions. “Before the pandemic, we used it as an office and event space and a bit of a hit-or-miss desk space for program managers,” he said. “Now it fills the need for a small community space.”

The Lac-Brome Men’s Shed has been renting the space two days a week since August, for meetings, training sessions and get-togethers over coffee, where members can “socialize or vent or talk about what they need to talk about,” said Lac-Brome Men’s Shed vice president Robert Elhen. He said the nonprofit men’s group has had difficulties acquiring an affordable, large enough space over the past few years, which made it hard if not impossible to apply for grants or to hold events with more than a handful of people.

“We got a space, and then we lost it, and now we have one again,” he said. “Now we’re fully equipped to build things in our workshop and hold meetings and events at the Townshippers’ office. We have our own space instead of trying to get one at the community centre [or] using our wood shop, which is not conducive to hosting 20 or 30 people.”

Kotsoros said other nonprofits and local elected officials have shown interest in renting the space as well. “Anyone can rent space, but priority will go to organizations helping the English-speaking community or helping the community as a whole, not necessarily English-exclusive.”

No formal launch event is planned for the new space, but community organizations that are interested in renting it are encouraged to contact Townshippers’ by phone or email. “We’ll set up a meeting, and the main questions will be, ‘Does your organization fit with our mission, and when do you want to start?’” Kotsoros said.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Cowansville residents who enjoyed their experience with the city’s bus service over the past few months can keep on riding for at least another year.

With funding from the Quebec ministry of housing and municipal affairs, the MRC Brome-Missisquoi and the municipality of Cowansville launched the city bus loop as a pilot project this past April. It was originally to have ended on Oct. 1. However, the MRC announced late last week that bus service would continue until at least Oct. 1, 2025.

“We now have the most optimal version of the service,” said Khalil El Fatmi, transport services coordinator at the MRC Brome-Missisquoi. “We ran several tests [over the past few months] to find the most appropriate formula that would be easy to put in place and would meet the mobility needs of citizens. We wanted to prolong the project for a year in order to measure how people are moving year round, and see how the weather and the school calendar affects the way people use the service.”

The MRC opted for a single bus line, running on a loop, approximately once an hour between 6:30 a.m. and 5:40 p.m, Monday through Friday. There are 24 stops on the current route, compared with 20 at the beginning of the pilot project. The loop begins at the bus shelter at the corner of Boul. Deragon and rue Spring and ends at the corner of rue des Pivoines and rue Brock; Massey-Vanier High School, the Campus Brome-Missisquoi vocational training centre, Davignon Park, the MRC office, Brome-Missisquoi–Perkins Hospital and several major stores are stops on the route. Tickets are $4 each, payable in cash only; riders can pay the driver on the bus or buy tickets in advance at the MRC office. There is no service on weekends.

“We had a taxibus service [in Cowansville] beforehand, but you had to reserve a day in advance to use that,” El Fatmi said. “The advantage of a regular bus service is that you don’t have to reserve – the user can just come to the stop at the given time and get on the bus.”

El Fatmi said a robust public transit system had the potential to encourage people to swap “l’auto solo” for other means of transportation. He said ridership data from the past six months is “very promising for long-term cultural change.”

“We are competing against cars, which have a lot of advantages. The more we invest in public transit, the more attractive we make it,” he said.  “So that we can develop that culture [of using public transit], we need to scale up the frequency of bus service and do a lot of promotion. The weather will be an important variable, but we see that the enthusiasm is there, the need is there and people are getting on board.”

Over time, El Fatmi hopes the MRC will be able to roll out similar services in other municipalities, “depending on how negotiations go with participating cities.” He said the transit department has “a lot of projects in the planning phase which will be announced very soon.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Residents of Bromont can now access fresh fruit and vegetables for free when they need them, thanks to a free food fridge installed outside the Lucien-Parent Community Centre in Adamsville.

The fridge, known as the Frigo Partage, was formally plugged in late last week. It is accessible 24 hours a day for the moment, although it will be moved inside the community centre when the weather turns.

Councillor Jocelyne Corbeil, the town councillor for the borough, spearheaded the project in collaboration with the Centre Marguerite-Dubois. The refrigerator itself was donated by a concerned citizen. Volunteers from the centre, which has existing agreements with supermarkets and local farmers to supply surplus food, will keep the fridge stocked, Corbeil explained. She emphasized that the fridge is open to all residents of Bromont, not just those who live in Adamsville.

“The way I see it is, we live in a world where there’s a lot of abundance, at least for a certain number of people,” said Corbeil, a longtime public school teacher who kept cereal boxes and snacks around for students who didn’t get enough to eat at home. “I’d like for everybody – especially those who need a little help, who are juggling with tighter budgets, who sometimes have to make very difficult choices between feeding themselves and paying for something else – to have access to food. Yes, Bromont is rich, but not everyone here is rich.”

The Adamsville food fridge is the latest in a growing, informal network of free food fridges across Brome-Missisquoi and the province. In the last several years, community groups, volunteer action centres and town administrators in Brome Lake, Brigham, Cowansville, Frelighsburg and Sutton have put in place fridges of their own. In some communities, including Cowansville and Brome Lake, the food is supplied by volunteer action centres and local farmers; in others, citizens can drop off surplus fresh food.

“Every Tuesday, from June to October, a member of the advisory committee or I come to collect surpluses from the Cowansville [volunteer action centre] to deposit them in our fridge, located outside, at Paul-Goodhue Park (behind the Community Daycare Service). The fridge is also supplied by citizens who occasionally add fresh food from their gardens and is accessible 24 hours a day,” Frelighsburg mayor Lucie Dagenais told the BCN in a brief email exchange.

According to the Quebec City-based organization Sauve ta Bouffe, which provides advice to organizations across the province that want to set up food fridges, Quebec “good Samaritan” legislation protects fridges and the volunteers and organizations that run them from liability. For safety reasons, Sauve ta Bouffe’s guidelines discourage putting meat, fish or restaurant leftovers in a shared fridge.

Serena Shufelt is the coordinator of the Frigo Vert in Brigham, which has been in place for about a year. The fridge stocks food supplied by the Centre Marguerite-Dubois, which gets its own supplies from local farmers and grocery store surpluses. “A lot of people are enjoying the fridge and emailing me and asking if there’s anything left,” said Shufelt, a farmer who responded to a call for volunteers from the municipality to monitor the fridge. “The purpose of the fridge being there is to prevent food waste, but if we are helping people [who are struggling to put food on the table] then that’s awesome.”

The town of Brome Lake established a food fridge of its own at the community centre last year as part of its food waste prevention efforts, said Brome Lake family resource agent Claire Citeau, who maintains the fridge along with a core group of three dedicated volunteers. Most of the food comes from the Centre Marguerite-Dubois and from a local bakery. “It’s a lot of work – you need to go pick up the food in Cowansville, stock the fridge, clean it…  if I didn’t have the volunteers, I could do it on my own but it would be very hard.”

Citeau said she finds that the fridge is emptying more quickly now than it did earlier on in the project. She doesn’t know if this is due to people taking more than their share, to the project being better known or to people in need relying on the fridge to put food on the table. “I like to think that it’s just become better known…but certainly, unfortunately, there are people in need. This is a waste reduction [project] but it’s also about food security.”

“In a few years, I’d like for there to be no need for a food fridge – I’d like for everyone to get enough to eat, but that’s living in unicorn land,” said Corbeil, the former teacher turned Bromont councillor and food fridge booster. “In reality, it would be nice if there were two fridges, or if there was a community that developed around the fridges and people there came up with other projects to help the community.”

To get involved with an existing food fridge or to establish a new one, contact your local volunteer action centre or your municipality. To find a fridge near you, visit sauvetabouffe.org and click “Frigos.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The boil-water advisory may be over, but the work to protect water quality in Missisquoi Bay – which provides drinking water to Bedford, Bedford Township, Philipsburg (Saint-Armand) and Stanbridge Station – is far from finished, local officials say.

An unusually vigorous cyanobacteria bloom turned the water “green as your grass” for several days last week, Bedford Mayor Claude Dubois told the BCN.

“We have been dealing with cyanobacteria outbreaks for 35-40 years, but nothing like this,” Dubois said.

Agronomist Louis Robert is the coordinator of the phosphorus reduction program at the Organisme du Bassin Versant de la Baie Missisquoi (OBVBM) and the watershed organization’s main point person on the issue of cyanobacteria blooms. “It’s the first time we had such a big bloom that started so early and lasted so long,” he said.

Climate change, he said, was an aggravating factor but not the main cause of the bloom. Robert explained that cyanobacteria blooms, sometimes known as blue-green algae blooms, are fueled by phosphorus in the water, and aggravated by hot weather and shallow, stagnant water. “The situation in the bay is especially bad, because it’s shallow and the water doesn’t move very much, and we have a high concentration of phosphorus in the water.” Phosphorus is a key component in many agricultural fertilizers, and also in animal manure. “This is a wake-up call, the result of decades of inappropriate agricultural processes, too much phosphorus, bigger herds leading to too much manure,” Robert said, emphasizing that he didn’t want to “throw stones” at individual farmers, who he said receive conflicting messages about the dangers of phosphorus overuse from salespeople, government officials and environmental groups. The fact that Lake Champlain straddles the U.S.-Canada border also poses a regulatory challenge.

“Even if we stopped bringing in all the phosphorus [from] chemical fertilizer and manure tomorrow, it would take years for the water quality to improve,” he added. The OBVBM is developing an awareness campaign with “demonstration fields” to show that it’s possible to farm without phosphorus.

Filtration plant struggles

The filtration plant in Bedford, which serves Philipsburg and surrounding towns, is the only one in Quebec which draws drinking water from Missisquoi Bay, part of Lake Champlain. It has struggled to provide clean drinking water for much of the summer. “We had a leak and a pipe that we had to replace [in addition to the cyanobacteria]. Everything has been against us this year, but fall and winter are coming – and we’re kind of impatient for winter, because in winter we don’t have cyanobacteria,” said Dubois. The town put a boil-water advisory in effect from Sept. 14-19 due to a broken pipe; earlier this summer, the town relied on a tanker truck for drinking water for several weeks.

Dubois said engineers have told him that piping in the water from further out in the lake, using a larger pipe and an aeration system, will lead to improved water quality. “For the last two or three years, we’ve been talking about doing something like that,” he said.  However, the municipality needs to get federal approval before moving forward with building a new conduit, which will cost an estimated $1.8 million. Assuming the town receives the necessary approvals and grants, they will have a small window early next year to get the conduit built.

“Our concern is, everyone needs water to live. The population needs this service,” Dubois said.

A spokesperson for Brome-Missisquoi MP Pascale St-Onge told La Voix de l’Est that St-Onge “is very aware of the situation and is working with the different ministries concerned and various stakeholders to find a solution.”

‘Lack of communication unacceptable’: Mayor

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The CLSC Lac-Brome will remain closed until at least mid-October, the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS has confirmed.

The CLSC, which serves residents of Brome Lake, Brome Village, West Bolton and parts of Sutton and surrounding towns, closed June 17 due to a seasonal staffing shortage It was initially expected to reopen Sept. 9.

“Teams of staff are actively working to allow for reopening around October 15,” Élizabeth Dubé, a spokesperson for the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS, told the BCN. “The details of the reopening are as-yet undefined because we’re currently evaluating the situation. We’ll keep you posted.”

Dubé said the labour shortage and new provincial government restrictions on hiring staff from outside agencies made it “impossible to consider a reopening at this time.”

Town officials in Brome Lake realized the closure might go on longer than initially planned in early September, when they started receiving calls from worried constituents unable to book appointments for blood tests or nursing consultations at the CLSC in the fall.

“The communication has not been that great with the CIUSSS,” Mayor Richard Burcombe acknowledged. “Back in June [when the closure was first announced], we questioned whether the CLSC would reopen. We are not very hopeful, based on what we’ve heard for the last three months. We got no prior notification from the CIUSSS [of the extended closure]. The lack of communication is unacceptable.”

Burcombe said he was “very disappointed” with the prolonged closure, especially in light of recent cuts to Sureté du Québec patrols in the area. “It’s very disturbing to see cuts to health care and police and public safety … they’re cutting everywhere.”

“This is a service that’s needed in Brome Lake, with 33 per cent of our population aged 65 and older. Now they have to go to Cowansville for blood tests, wound care and follow-up nursing care.” For those that don’t drive, he added, “it’s not always easy to get a ride.”

Patterson launches petition

Coun. Lee Patterson, acting in a personal capacity, has launched a bilingual online petition calling on the CIUSSS to reopen the CLSC, which has received nearly 700 signatures as of this writing.

“I know Mayor Burcombe and [Brome-Missisquoi MNA] Isabelle Charest are in contact with the CIUSSS, but I thought maybe the CIUSSS underestimated the challenges [that the closure creates],” he said. “Mobilizing the population sends a clear message that citizens support what their elected officials are doing. The political messages have been sent, and now it’s time for the population to say they want services to come back.”

“The CIUSSS is so huge, and I understand why they might want to centralize things like nursing care in Cowansville, but that’s not great for us,” he added. “What might look easy for the CIUSSS on paper is a big disruption in Brome Lake and West Bolton.”

Dubé, the CIUSSS spokesperson, said Brome Lake residents could make appointments at other CLSCs in the region for vaccination, tests and lab work. “Appointment availability and opening hours may be increased to meet the needs of all Estrie localities,” she added.

The CLSC de Sutton, which had its opening hours reduced in June of this year at the same time the Brome Lake closure was announced, was expected to return to its regular hours of operation on Sept. 15, Dubé said.

Those who wish to sign Patterson’s petition can do so at knowlton.quebec. Interested people can also download and circulate paper copies in the community.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

After decades of waiting, several dozen residents of a housing development in Brigham are expected to get reliable running water this week, after the town received a grant of nearly $1.5 million from a provincial government program aimed at shoring up municipal water infrastructure.

Most households in the community of about 2,300 people use water from private wells. According to Mayor Steven Neil, in the 1970s, a developer built several dozen houses with piped-in running water, but the “mishmash” of a water system never lived up to its promise. “It was a makeshift water system using water pumped in from a well. There was no real planning. It was a 1970s-type system done in the days when there was no regulation.”

Over the years, frustrated by poor water pressure, many residents of the area – known as the Guay sector after the developer – went back to using wells. Public works crews also ran into difficulties digging in the area, because no one knew precisely where all of the underground pipes were. 

In the mid-2000s, as stricter regulations came into force, the piped-in water was put under a provincial boil-water advisory.

“They said, we’ll keep [the boil-water advisory] in force until you put in a new water system,” Neil said. “That wasn’t an option for us until the PRIMEAU program came out, covering 95 per cent of the cost.” The remaining amount was covered by a transfer from the federal government. Neil said the owners of the 22 homes hooked up to the water system will pay a small usage and maintenance fee; the town does not plan to increase taxes or fees for the community as a whole. The vast majority of Brighamites will continue to use well water. Neil said the system will have the capacity to hook up an additional five homes, but the town’s focus was on the 22 homes that had previously relied on inadequate piped-in water service.

“It’s a win for the people in the sector – the ones who don’t use the system are not paying for it, and the ones who are will get water almost for free,” Neil said. “They have been dealing with this for the last 17 years and they were looking to be on the hook for thousands of dollars – they are really happy that we got the grant.”

Neil said the grant came through “about a year ago” and allowed the municipality to install 1400 metres of piping, a small treatment centre and a generator to ensure the system keeps working when the power goes out. “Now we know where all the pipes are and we know that they’re not going to freeze or to stop working when the power goes out. We are so happy to finally be done with this file, because it [involved] a lot of time and effort and paperwork over the last couple of years. I have a lot of gratitude toward the government. This really helps.”

“This announcement is excellent news for Brigham! The support of the government of Quebec will allow for the completion of essential work that will improve the quality of life of many citizens. Upgrading the municipality’s assets will meet the needs of the population and help maintain a safe and attractive living environment. I am very proud of our government’s participation in this project,” Brome-Missisquoi MNA Isabelle Charest said in a statement.

By Ruby Pratka,

Local Journalism Initiative

On Sept. 12, members of the National Assembly passed a unanimous motion stating that English-speaking Quebecers do not need to obtain or provide a certificate of eligibility for English education to access health care or social services in English.

The motion, tabled by Liberal health critic André Fortin, called for the National Assembly to declare that English-speaking Quebecers “don’t need to obtain a certificate of eligibility for English-language education to have access to English-language health care and social services in Quebec” and that “clear and explicit” directives to that effect need to be given to local health authorities.

Fortin tabled the motion with the support of Québec Solidaire health critic Vincent Marissal and independent MNA Marie-Claude Nichols. The motion was to have been sent to every regional health authority (CISSS or CIUSSS) in the province.

Although the motion doesn’t have the force of law, Liberal critic for relations with English-speaking Quebecers Greg Kelley said the multi-party support it received “sends a strong signal.”

“Lucien Bouchard said that when you go to the hospital, you might need a blood test, but you certainly don’t need a language test… and the [Coalition Avenir Québec government] should not play with that,” he added.

Kelley, who represents the Montreal-area riding of Jacques-Cartier, said his office has received calls from anglophone constituents concerned about health care access in light of a directive issued by Minister of the French Language Jean-François Roberge in July. The directive, which laid out a list of situations where a language other than French might be used in health care, was widely interpreted in the anglophone community as potentially restricting the use of English with patients, although Roberge has denied that was the government’s intention.

Roberge later promised to issue a new, clearer directive, but no such document has been released as of this writing. Kelley said it was “time for the government to do the right thing” and clarify matters.

Townshippers’ president Don Warnholtz called the motion “a step in the right direction.”

Warnholtz, also a former member of the provincial access committee for English-language health care, said it remained to be seen how the motion would translate into law or into new directives or regulations. “If [regulations] change, people need to be aware,” he said. “If it gets too technical, it’s not easy for health care professionals or for the average person to figure out.”

He was also concerned by the reference to eligibility certificates in the motion. “They are being very specific about eligibility certificates; I would have hoped for them to say clearly that the only thing a patient needs to access health care in English is to request it.”

Kelley, for his part, said patients didn’t have to worry about showing any kind of documentation to get English-language service. “The only type of proof [of membership in the English-speaking community] that exists is the eligibility certificate, which a lot of people can’t get,” he said. “When you go to a hospital, they are obligated to try to serve you in English – capacity is another issue, but you do always have the right to walk in and ask.” He added that initiatives like the “sunflower project” at Memphremagog and Brome-Missisquoi–Perkins hospitals, where bilingual staff can choose to wear crocheted sunflowers on their ID badges to signal that they can serve patients in English, are “a win-win for everyone.” 

A spokesperson for the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS could not say whether a copy of the motion had been sent to the health authority. However, Caroline Van Rossum, point person for English services at the CIUSSS, told the BCN that the “sunflower project” is still in full swing at both hospitals and has not been affected by the directive.

“We are quite fortunate in the Townships, because the CIUSSS has been quite open to providing [bilingual] services to the best of their ability,” Warnholtz said. “They are considering how we can get the best quality health care. That’s what we need more of [in the province] – this idea of ‘Let’s just work together.’”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The Town of Brome Lake unveiled its new strategic plan on Sept. 4, setting out its priorities for the years 2024-2028.

The plan was developed after a wide-ranging survey, three public meetings and consultations with citizens’ committees, the business community and various community organizations over the past year, explained Deputy Mayor Lee Patterson, president of the town’s urban planning committee. Through community organizations, teenagers and seniors were also included in the consultations.

Housing affordability, the health of the lake and access to services for youth and young families were top priorities for a wide range of citizens, Patterson said; business owners also raised concerns about recruiting staff and finding places for them to live.

The plan, released last week in both French and English, lays out a brief demographic portrait of the municipality, its six districts, 206.9 square kilometres of territory, 2,830 households, 192 businesses and 11 public parks. It included data showing that the town’s population growth was expected to slow in the next few years, and its average age, already among the highest in Quebec at 52.8, was expected to increase further. It laid out a brief vision statement for the municipality: “In the heart of nature, Brome Lake is defined by its bucolic living environment, its bilingual and inclusive community, its rich heritage, its healthy lake and its sustainable development.” Its mission statement read, “Proud of its history and natural setting, the Town of Brome Lake offers efficient and responsible services in a desirable living environment to a forward-looking community.”

The mission statement, vision statement and the town’s five stated values – respect, transparency, integrity, resilience and leadership – are expected to inform the next five years of policy.

Concretely, according to Patterson, the town’s priorities include updating its urban plan and making its website more user-friendly and improving tools used for public consultation.

“If you base [participation in municipal life] on the number of people coming to council, there are not that many people, but when you get 1200 people out of [a population of] 6000 to participate in a survey, that’s huge,” Patterson said. “There was a large interest for municipal affairs and learning how local government works, and that surprised us a bit. We’re going to have to develop more ways not just to say ‘thanks for your input,’ but to allow more citizen participation in the evolution of the steps.” 

The town laid out a strategic plan including objectives for social, economic and land development; environment; and governance over the next five years. Listed objectives included maintaining the town’s bilingual status, improving access to the lake, “enhancing recreational offerings” for citizens, adopting a new tourism action plan, revitalizing the downtown core by widening sidewalks and adding outdoor furniture, developing an “architectural guide for investors, developers and citizens,” developing public awareness tools on lake protection, implementing further protection measures for water sources, installing more electric vehicle charging stations, enhancing the participatory budget program, making council meetings more accessible and adopting a formal citizen participation policy, all within the next five years. 

“We have to do things a bit differently on how we present [projects] to citizens, because if we have a long-drawn-out Powerpoint presentation, people are not going to stay engaged for that long,” Paterson said. It’s important to stay abreast of what’s going on …  if we maximize public participation [when decisions are made], it avoids surprises in the future,” Patterson said.

Patterson advised citizens who want to get more involved in town affairs or keep track of the evolution of the strategic plan to “subscribe to our newsletter, attend a council meeting or two, ask questions, speak with your councillor or get in touch with the town clerk’s office.”

The full strategic plan is available on the town website.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The former Knowlbanks retirement home in Knowlton will be converted into a 42-unit apartment complex. Excelsoins, the Pointe-Claire-based private company which managed the seniors’ home until its closure in 2023, confirmed its intentions to go ahead with the conversion after a register held last week failed to obtain enough signatures to trigger a referendum.

Excelsoins closed the home in March 2023 after struggling to recruit qualified staff amid a prolonged provincewide labour shortage. Excelsoins director of asset management Patrice Brillon said the decision to convert the building into apartments was made soon after the closure. The project was presented to the town’s urban planning committee in early 2024, and received preliminary approval from council in April.

Current zoning regulations in the area allow for a building with a maximum of 32 units, so Excelsoins had to apply to the Town of Brome Lake (TOBL)  for a zoning exemption (known by the French acronym PPCMOI) to build more than that number. As part of that process, the project was subjected to a public consultation and a register of neighbourhood residents. Of the 39 signatures that would have been necessary to trigger a referendum, only 11 were received, TOBL director general Gilbert Arel confirmed.

Brillon said Excelsoins intends to move forward with construction after the project has been approved by the MRC – usually a formality. The building will include one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments along with a gym for residents and storage space.

“The conversion requires a partial redevelopment of existing spaces to create modern housing, while integrating living spaces for the well-being of our tenants, such as a gym. We plan to redevelop and build 3 ½  [one-bedroom] apartments ranging from 650 to 810 sq. ft. and 4 ½ [two-bedroom] apartments ranging from 850 to 1,175 sq. ft. A wing of the building, which already has modern suites, will be redeveloped to merge certain spaces and quickly create these very large apartments,” Brillon said.

According to an Excelsoins presentation, the company intends to put the first 15 apartments on the market before the end of 2024; the remaining apartments will be available in 2025.

Brillon said Excelsoins did not have a specific target market in mind for the new apartments, and that the rent had not yet been fixed. “From the beginning, affordable housing has been a central part of our plan. We recognize the critical need in the community, and are currently exploring options to effectively address it,” he said. “A final decision on the inclusion of affordable housing will be made shortly.” The company does not plan to set aside any units for social housing.

Arel said the project fit in well with the town’s housing plan, announced earlier this year. “We found that there was not a very good mix of homes available – there are plenty of high-end single-family homes available, but not everyone will buy those homes. This fits in well with the idea of our housing plan, to have a better mix. Part of why the council moved ahead with [the project] was that they thought it was a good way to convert the building in an optimal way, to offer units for which there is a demand.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The Town of Brome Lake and its fire department have signed a collective agreement, town officials announced Aug. 29.

The agreement, which covers the period from 2023 to 2027, is the first such agreement between the town and the union representing its 28 on-call firefighters. It sets out a gradual 15 per cent salary increase over the next five years, including a retroactive 7 per cent increase for 2023. Councillors approved it in early August.

Firefighter and union representative Thomas Bogan said negotiations with the city went exceptionally smoothly. “We couldn’t be happier with how it went – they were very respectful and very polite. We just wanted to make sure everything was covered.”

Bogan said a falling-out between rank-and-file firefighters and a previous fire chief led to friction between the department and the municipality, and led the firefighters to consider unionization. The Quebec labour tribunal approved their application in early 2022.

Bogan, who has been a part-time firefighter in Brome Lake for 15 years, said the department currently has a good working relationship with the town and with its own leadership. “We feel that we have a voice again, and we’re happy to have the feeling that someone has our back. Everyone is going to be comfortable knowing that if things were to go sideways again, we could use the union to talk with the town as the voice of our members.”

He said he didn’t want to go into detail about the falling-out which led to the unionization drive. “What happened happened and I don’t want to open up the past. The town has worked hard with us to make sure everyone is happy and comfortable, and I believe they’re doing their part. I feel we [the firefighters] are in a much better place.”

Like Bogan, Town of Brome Lake director general characterized the negotiations as respectful and the agreement itself as a step forward. “Whenever there’s a collective agreement, it’s there to protect the workers, but it’s also in [the town’s] interest to have a plan that says, ‘Here are the parameters we’re working within, and if we want to go outside those parameters, we need to discuss it first.’ It removes some flexibility, but it defines what everyone’s sandbox is and [makes guarantees] for the employees’ job security.”

Arel added that the town wanted to set clearer salary guidelines and keep local firefighters’ salaries competitive for recruitment and retention purposes. “Even though we don’t have labour issues to the same degree as other towns … we don’t want to nickel-and-dime our employees. We want to make sure they’re paid a salary comparable to others in the region.”

“I would like to underline the professional and respectful atmosphere that constantly prevailed in

the exchanges between the parties,” Brome Lake Mayor Richard Burcombe said in a statement. “The citizens of Brome Lake can count on a highly dedicated team, and we are proud to improve and modernize working conditions, in recognition of the great commitment of our firefighters.”

The Brome Lake Fire and Public Safety Service provides firefighting and public safety services as needed in Brome Lake, in West Bolton and in surrounding communities when needed.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

On Sept. 8, the Centre de prévention de suicide de Haute-Yamaska–Brome-Missisquoi (CPSBMHY) is holding a festive picnic to get people talking about a less than festive topic: suicide.

The picnic will take place from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. in Davignon Park in Cowansville, with a free lunch offered to the first 100 people, and a wide range of door prizes. There will be art therapy sessions, a temporary tattoo booth and yoga sessions to help people relax – as well as a tent with a support worker for anyone who needs to talk and get something off their chest.

CPSBMHY communication and philanthropic development officer Chantale Rivard said she hoped the event would help start difficult but important conversations. “We know it’s not an easy subject – we wanted to bring it to people in a fun and easy way.” She emphasized that the picnic was open to anyone in the area – not just Cowansville residents.

Rivard said the event was an opportunity to discover the services CPSBMHY offered. “We have phone support [for people in crisis], one-on-one meetings, support groups and clinical support groups for professionals [working with people at risk of suicide],” she explained. The centre also plans to run roving drop-in clinics around Brome-Missisquoi in the fall – “One day in Knowlton, one day in some other place … we’ll try to have a schedule to let people know that Mondays we’ll be in this town, Tuesdays we’ll be in that town, and so forth.”

Although the group programs are only offered in French at the moment, the centre has a bilingual support worker who is able to provide one-on-one service in English. The centre is expecting to have more bilingual staff in the fall, Rivard added. “It’s always a challenge to find bilingual people, but [our current bilingual support worker] knows the area and knows how to help.”

Every year, between 1,000 and 1,100 Quebecers die by suicide, and thousands more attempt to take their own lives.  “It’s getting easier, but it’s still a taboo subject; it’s not something people will talk freely about,” Rivard said. “We want to bring people’s attention to the fact that there’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

Vigil planned in Sherbrooke

JEVI, which provides suicide prevention services in and around Sherbrooke, will hold a march and vigil to remember people lost to suicide on the evening of Sept. 10, World Suicide Prevention Day. The event will begin at 6:30 p.m. at the Pavilion Armand-Nadeau, and participants will march alongside Lac des Nations. “We’ll start the march, and then [at around the halfway point, near the Marché de la Gare] we’ll hold a workshop about myths and facts around suicide,’” said Chanel Clément, philanthropy co-ordinator at JEVI. Support workers will also be on site for anyone who needs to talk. “Speaking out about suicide is how we prevent it, and how we reduce distress,” she said.

Although statistics show that middle-aged men face a higher risk of dying by suicide than the rest of the general population, Clément said no one is immune. “You can’t imagine how common it is [to have suicidal thoughts]. We talk to young children, to people who seem to have comfortable lives…there are so many people in deep distress. But there are solutions.”

Clément said JEVI can provide short-term one-on-one counselling in English for people who are in distress, contemplating suicide or trying to cope with the loss of a loved one to suicide. The organization also runs support groups, although numbers aren’t always sufficient to put together a support group in English.

People in crisis who are in need of immediate assistance can call 1-866-APPELLE at any time to speak to a counsellor in French or English.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Canoeists, kayakers and people using other non-motorized boats can now push off from Carke Terrace after the Town of Brome Lake (TOBL) completed the installation of a small dock there.

“This structure allows users to put their small non-motorized boats such as paddle boards, kayaks, sailboards or canoes in the water, in order to be able to access the lake safely,” town officials said in a public announcement.

TOBL assistant director of technical services Marc-André Boivin also said construction would begin shortly on a long-planned “sanitary block” including public restrooms, lockers and changing rooms at Carke Terrace, along with an expanded parking lot, a retaining basin for rainwater runoff and a paved sidewalk leading to the lake. Construction is expected to be finished by the holidays, Boivin said. The new facilities are aimed at people who want to kayak, paddleboard and swim in the lake but who can’t access the lake from their own property.

The municipality took out a $1.3-million loan in April to fund the upgrades to the terrace. The land, where the landmark Terrace Inn stood until the 1970s, was purchased from the Poulin family by the Carke Foundation in 2019 and given to the town for use as a public park.

“Ultimately, we want Carke Terrace to be an access point to the lake for residents and visitors,” Boivin said. “There has been a lot of privatization of the banks of the lake recently, and it’s important to provide a public access point for people who don’t live on the lake, and also a public green space.”

Boivin said the dock, washrooms, changing rooms and expanded parking lot are “phase one” of the municipality’s plans for Carke Terrace. “Depending on how things evolve, we have space to expand the installation with more parking spaces…we’ll see in the future,” he said. 

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The town of Waterloo has scrapped a planned bylaw requiring owners of single-family homes to purchase and install water counters after a public outcry.

The bylaw, tabled at the June 11 council meeting, would have required every building connected to the municipal water network to have a water metre by Jan. 1, 2027. Property owners would have been required to pay out of pocket – an estimated cost of at least $550 – to buy and install the metres.

Businesses, industrial facilities and public institutions have been required by provincial law to have water counters since 2018. Since 2019, the devices have been required for all new constructions. The bylaw would have extended the requirement to older single-family homes and residential buildings. However, at the Aug. 20 council meeting, in front of an audience of several dozen people and with security guards called to the town hall after threats posted on social media, Mayor Jean-Marie Lachapelle and councillors walked back the plan, which they acknowledged had been tabled without dedicated public consultation.

“Water metres are an effective way to promote responsible use of drinking water. However, their cost represents a constraint, both for citizens and for the municipality. We are going back to the drawing board to explore solutions that are respectful of citizens’ wallets, while continuing our commitment to preserving our water, a precious and limited resource,” Lachapelle said in a statement. He thanked homeowners who installed the counters voluntarily and took measures to reduce water consumption. “People are being responsible and reducing their water use.”

“We have heard you,” Coun. Rémi Raymond told attendees. “There are benefits to having a water metre, but we’re not ready to put this plan into action. We want to hear you in greater detail.” Raymond promised a public consultation on the matter, which drew a few cheers from the public gallery but appeared to catch Lachapelle by surprise.

“The council is there to make decisions,” Lachapelle later told the BCN. “We consult on a lot of things, whether it’s culture, heritage, urban planning…we thought we were doing the right thing on this.” He said the metre bylaw had been intended to encourage water conservation and pave the way for a water tax based on individual consumption, replacing the current flat-rate water tax.

“A lot of people objected to the cost, although some people had other objections,” the mayor said, adding that paying for water counter installation out of the town budget, rather than passing the cost onto homeowners, would have cost nearly $1 million in taxpayer money, and the 2027 deadline was intended to help homeowners plan for and absorb the cost. He said the issue would be discussed further at the September council meeting and another bylaw tabled in September or October. No decision has yet been made on whether a consultation will be scheduled.

Lachapelle added that the municipality has so far taken a “delete and move on” approach to threats and attacks on social media, and the town has not sought police involvement.