Author name: Brome County News

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The leaders of Canada’s four main political parties held two wide-ranging debates this past weekend at the Maison Radio-Canada in Montreal. The French-language debate on April 16 was moderated by Radio-Canada anchor Patrice Roy and the English debate the next evening by Steve Paikin, host of TVO’s The Agenda.

The French-language debate was overshadowed by several controversies. Less than 24 hours before the debate, it was rescheduled to avoid a potential overlap with the end of a Montreal Canadiens game; the morning of the debate, Green Party co-leader Jonathan Pedneault was ruled ineligible to participate because Elections Canada had not confirmed a sufficient number of Green candidates. The post-debate press conference attracted nationwide attention when several right-wing outlets asked contentious questions and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh declined to answer; the following day’s conference was cancelled after two arguments between reporters in the press room, leading Michel Cormier, the director general of the Leaders’ Debates’ Commission, to say the commission “could not ensure a propitious environment” for it.

It was centered around five themes – cost of living, energy and climate, trade war, identity and sovereignty, and immigration. All four leaders linked the themes to their respective agendas. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre promised to cut taxes by 15 per cent, eliminate federal sales tax on new homes and reduce regulations to speed the building of houses and resource extraction projects such as mines, and linked Carney’s proposals to those of his predecessor, Justin Trudeau. Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet emphasized Quebec’s resource-based economy and cultural and linguistic distinctions; Liberal Leader and frontrunner Mark Carney emphasized the importance of crisis management and the necessity of countertariffs. Singh repeatedly brought up the health system (which Blanchet emphasized was under provincial jurisdiction) and emphasized the NDP’s role in creating the federal dental care program. Carney pledged to reduce taxes for the middle class but defended his decision to walk back a capital gains tax increase.

The trade war segment led to animated discussion. All of the leaders pledged to maintain supply management in the dairy sector, the French language and Canadian sovereignty, and build more homes.

They all weighed in on Quebec City’s tramway and the proposed “third link” between Quebec City and Lévis.  “Quebec City wants a tramway, the Quebec government wants a tramway, the federal government’s responsibility is to send them the money,” Blanchet said. Singh said the NDP supported the tramway but not the third link; Poilievre backed the third link but not the tramway, accusing his rivals of wanting to “ban cars.” Carney said the federal government would continue to support the tramway, but he couldn’t commit to supporting the third link because he hadn’t seen the project yet.

Issues affecting Indigenous people and linguistic minorities were almost entirely off the agenda, except for Poilievre’s defence of Radio-Canada as a crucial link for francophone minority communities. (He defended his plan to defund CBC and made no mention of Indigenous broadcasting.)

The English debate was centred around public safety, the cost of living, energy, crisis management and “tariffs and threats to Canada.” The four leaders agreed that U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade policies posed a threat to the country, and both Carney and Poilievre said they supported countertariffs, although not necessarily dollar-for-dollar tariffs. Poilievre criticized the previous Liberal government for weakening the economy and making it more difficult to build pipelines which he argued were essential for the country’s energy independence. Singh criticized the short-lived Carney government for walking back the capital gains tax increase while failing to increase EI. Blanchet argued that Carney’s and Poilievre’s plans for reducing red tape around pipelines and other energy sovereignty projects overrode provincial jurisdiction.

Poilievre and Singh criticized the Liberals for the cost-of-living crisis. “Only 10 years ago, you could buy a house for $450,000, but in the lost Liberal decade, housing costs have doubled,” the Conservative leader said, saying a Conservative government would build houses on federal land and train thousands of tradespeople. His NDP counterpart suggested putting price controls on grocery staples and banning corporate landlords from buying affordable rental housing units.

International affairs were also on the agenda, with Singh calling the conflict in Gaza a genocide, Carney calling for an immediate ceasefire and a resumption of aid, and Poilievre coming out in support of a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine. 

Toward the end of the debate, candidates discussed gun control, crime and the notwithstanding clause. Poilievre said his government would use the notwithstanding clause to enact tough-on-crime policies. “In fact, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms exists to protect Canadians from people like us on the stage, politicians who may use their power to override fundamental rights,” Carney argued, before the four leaders made their final pitch to voters.

The full debate can be watched on the CBC website. Advance polls began over the weekend; the final day of voting is April 28.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Councillors in the town of Brome Lake have passed a resolution supporting a southern route for the main transmission line of the new Brome substation.

Although the exact location of the substation itself hasn’t been determined, two routes are under consideration for the transmission line – the “southern line” which would begin in Cowansville and the “northern line” which would begin in Brigham.

“The southern line is currently privileged by Hydro-Québec for economic and technical reasons, [and] it’s also privileged by the Town of Brome Lake, given that it presents the least negative impact on bucolic landscapes and the interests of the Town of Brome Lake,” the resolution reads.

Councillors unanimously resolved to inform Hydro-Québec that the town prefers the southern route, and to send a copy of the resolution to the MRC Brome-Missisquoi, to neighbouring municipalities and to MNA Isabelle Charest.

Choosing the southern route is the “better thing to do financially and environmentally,” Brome Lake mayor Richard Burcombe told the BCN. “The distance of the southern line will be six or seven kilometres shorter than the northern one, and why pass through that beautiful land to the north, virgin forest? The southern route is down lower, the [transmission line] will be better hidden.”

He noted that the area under study for the placement of the substation has been enlarged and now includes some land on the opposite side of Route 139. “If it’s possible to have the [substation] on the western side of that [zone] it would make the transmission line even shorter, so that would be the best option.”

Burcombe referenced a resolution passed earlier this month by the town of Sutton, calling on Hydro-Québec to consider alternative locations and modalities for the substation. A Hydro-Québec representative later told the BCN that the utility was considering some of Sutton’s proposals, including adding new batteries or capacitor banks, but that others – such as adding an additional transformer or additional lines – would leave a larger construction footprint than originally planned. “I don’t want to talk about what another municipality did, but I can’t argue with engineers,” Burcombe said. “If we’re going to do something, we should do it right for the next 70 years.”

The exact location of the substation is currently up for debate. Burcombe, Sutton Mayor Robert Benoit and Cowansville Mayor Sylvie Beauregard have all expressed reservations about a site under consideration in Sutton Junction. According to a timeline on Hydro-Québec’s website, details of the “optimized” project should be announced this fall. Construction is expected to begin in 2027, and the new substation should start providing electricity to Sutton and the surrounding area in 2028. Hydro-Québec representatives were not immediately available to comment over Easter weekend.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The city of Bromont is developing a new public participation policy in partnership with the Institut du Nouveau Monde (INM), and teens will have a front-row seat, city officials announced last week.

“Bromont residents have a strong sense of civic engagement, and this is a real asset for our community. This is why, along with the members of the council, we want to work to foster this proud civic participation by recognizing it in our policies. We will take advantage of this public exercise to collectively reflect on optimizing our methods of dialogue, which we hope will be constructive and ongoing,” acting deputy mayor Tatiana Contreras said in a statement.

A nonpartisan ad hoc committee formed of elected officials (Mont-Brome Councillor Michel Bilodeau and Adamsville Councillor Jocelyne Corbeil), city employees (Ève Panneton, head of the department of culture and community life, and public affairs assistant Audrey Leboeuf), one representative of the INM (former Bromont resident Marianik Gagnon), representatives of community organizations and four citizens in a personal capacity (to be named later) will be formed this month and tasked with developing the policy. Applications are open until April 27, and two of the four citizen spots on the committee will be reserved for 16- and 17-year-olds.

Leboeuf is the spokesperson for the public participation policy initiative. She said the initiative has been on the table since 2023 as part of Bromont’s ten-year strategic plan. She explained that there are three ways of participating in public life in your community – voting, social participation (getting involved with a community organization, school or local social movement) or public participation (taking part in a participative budget process, urban planning consultation or similar event).  “We want to favour public participation and we don’t have a structure for it,” she said. “We want to see how people would like to be consulted, and that’s something we will see with the ad hoc committee.”

Leboeuf, a former employee of the Val-des-Cerfs school service centre, said she and Corbeil, a retired teacher, had pushed especially hard to make sure teens were consulted. “Young people are the citizens of tomorrow, and we want to make sure we have a constructive dialogue with them,” Leboeuf said. “They inform themselves differently and they participate in society differently. They are the spokespeople of their generation, and if we want to get their interest, we should give them the mic.”

“It was very important for us to involve young people from the very beginning of the process. We want to demonstrate our willingness to welcome their ideas and dreams regarding the implementation of this policy,” said Corbeil.

Leboeuf added that the policy was inspired by similar initiatives in Sherbrooke and in several towns in France. “We’re trying to take the best of what has been done elsewhere and adapt it to the issues that are unique to us and our region. Bromonters are really involved with their city, their community and their social fabric. We want to increase and optimize that involvement…to optimize the processes in place.”

The members of the ad hoc committee will be formally named at the May 5 council meeting. As part of the process, elected officials and city employees will be trained on how to facilitate public participation, and residents of all ages will be able to present their own ideas about public consultation at a forum in late May. Leboeuf didn’t want to speculate about the ideas that would come out of the committee meetings or the forum. “I don’t want to speak for residents; let’s give them the microphone instead.”

The final public participation policy, developed with input from the committee and the public forum, will be adopted by councillors in August or September. 

Those who are interested in serving on the committee can apply online at bromont.net or pick up a paper application package at City Hall or at the Bromont Community Centre.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Brome Lake residents who own boats will not have to pay an additional fee to take their boats out on the town’s eponymous lake this summer, town officials have confirmed. A bylaw to that effect was passed at the April 7 council meeting.

Residents must register their boats and get a vignette to benefit from free access. Residents with vignettes will also be able to wash their boats at the municipal boat-washing station for free.

“Vignettes will be free for residents, and residents will have the moral obligation to make sure their boat is clean before using it on the lake,” director general Gilbert Arel said in a video recap of the council meeting. Arel said further information about how to obtain a vignette and how to use the new boat-washing station will be shared later. “I know we’re already in April, but there are still a few things to be worked out, and we invite you to keep an eye on communications from the town. It’s no use coming to get your vignette at the town hall right now because [the vignettes] are not available yet.”

Non-residents will be able to purchase a vignette allowing access for $100.

At the boat-washing station, non-residents or residents without a vignette will pay $20 to wash a motorboat or $5 to wash a non-motorized boat. Non-resident boat owners who use the station regularly and don’t want the inconvenience of paying separately for each washing can buy a season pass for $200.

“Everything is free for Brome Lake residents,” Mayor Richard Burcombe told the BCN. “That was what was changed in the bylaw. The fact is, we heard what people were saying and we decided to make it free of charge for residents if they stay on Brome Lake, and that’s what most of them will do.”

Non-resident users and residents without vignettes must get a washing certificate before taking their boat out on the lake or face a fine. Although washing certificates are not required for residents with vignettes, Burcombe strongly encouraged boat owners to have their boats washed before taking them out on the lake, to prevent the spread of invasive species such as zebra mussels. “I don’t believe we’ve detected any zebra mussels here yet, but there are a lot of boats that come in and use the access points for non-residents … and it’s good to keep invasive species out.”

The same bylaw also made parking free for all Brome Lake residents “in all parking spaces located on the territory of the town of Brome Lake or held by the town,” on the condition that the parked car or truck is registered with the municipality. There is a $5 registration fee. Non-residents using the same parking spaces will pay $6 to park for a maximum of two hours or $20 for a day pass valid until midnight.

Courtesy

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

New Democratic Party organizers in Brome-Missisquoi are breathing a sigh of relief after successfully recruiting a new candidate with just days to go before the registration deadline. The previous candidate, Magog-based artist Joanne Brouard, pulled out shortly before the April 7 deadline for personal reasons. Zoé Larose will now run for the NDP in the riding.

According to Elections Canada, candidates must submit a nomination package including a personal information form, proof of identity, a statement of support signed by 100 voters from the candidate’s riding, signed declarations from a campaign agent, auditor and delegate and a statement of endorsement from their party (unless running as an independent). The deadline to submit these documents was 2 p.m. on April 7; candidates who missed the deadline could not appear on the ballot.

Larose does not have a biography on the NDP website and attempts to get in touch with her through the party and on social media have so far been unsuccessful.

NDP press attaché Olivier Clavet said such situations, where the party had to replace a candidate at the eleventh hour, were unusual but not unheard of. “It’s happened one or two times out of all the candidates we’ve recruited,” he said. “We did have to get all of the signatures again.”

The NDP is polling a distant fourth in Brome-Missisquoi, according to poll aggregator Canada338. The riding last elected an NDP MP in 2011, when “Orange Waver” Pierre Jacob won the riding. Brome-Missisquoi has had Liberal MPs since 2015.

The aggregator estimates that the Liberals, with 47 per cent support, have a greater than 99 per cent likelihood of holding on to the seat left vacant by Pascale St-Onge. The Conservatives are polling second in the riding at 23 per cent, followed closely by the Bloc Québécois at 21 per cent. The NDP and the Green Party have four and three per cent support respectively. Bromont Mayor Louis Villeneuve is running for the Liberals, former CFL player Steve Charbonneau for the Conservatives, actor Jeff Boudreault for the Bloc Québécois, Larose for the NDP, acupuncturist and activist Michelle Corcos for the Green Party and entrepreneur Jack McLeod for the People’s Party of Canada.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

For his 30th birthday last year, Farnhamite Gabriel Laguë invited 400 of his closest friends and neighbours to a party at Microbrasserie Farnham, and booked five local bands.

“When I was 18, I went backpacking with a friend and told him I wanted to make a music festival. It was an old dream. When I turned 30, I thought, why not do it?”

He enjoyed the birthday party-slash-festival so much that he decided to make it an annual tradition. The first official edition of the Festival Belle Banlieue is planned for Sept. 26-27 at the Microbrasserie. Eclectic Quebec folk singer-songwriter Bernard Adamus will headline the festival, alongside the festive country band Tailgate Radio and six yet-to-be-named local acts from around the Townships. The full program will be released April 30.

Laguë, a serving army nurse and former volunteer at Soif de Musique in Cowansville, has been working on the festival on evenings, on weekends and on his vacation days. He said he was motivated by the enthusiasm of Farnhamites for his original idea. “Everyone knows everyone in Farnham, and whenever something is going on, people show up,” he said. “We don’t have a festival in Farnham. I want to create an opportunity for people in Farnham to get to go to a real festival without going to a big city. In Farnham, we have great artists, great local businesses, great beer… there’s no reason we can’t do it!”

Mayor Patrick Melchior and town employees were among the guests at Laguë’s original shindig. “I wanted to show them what we could do with a small budget,” Laguë said. For this year’s festival, the town has provided a grant of $5,000, and the Microbrasserie Farnham will provide staff to sell food and drinks. The rest will be managed by Laguë, with help from his longtime friend and Soif de Musique cofounder Edouard Lagacé, in an advisory role; a technical director; and a security team made up of Laguë’s friends. They have also found a few local corporate sponsors and are eager for other local businesses to get involved “in some way that highlights their strengths.”

“The goal is for it to be festive and fun, with no misbehaviour, for everyone to have a good time, to get the party started,” he said. “It’s a first attempt, and I know there will be some kinks to work out. Financially, our goal is to break even…and potentially do something bigger for the town’s 150th birthday next year.” 

He added that the name “Belle Banlieue” (which translates to “beautiful suburb”) is “both a nod to and a declaration of love for our reality. Farnham is often seen as just a suburb, but it has a strong identity, a vibrant culture and a close-knit community. We wanted to reclaim this pride and show that the suburbs are beautiful, festive and creative.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

A week after the town of Sutton passed a resolution formally calling for Hydro-Québec to consider alternatives for the Brome substation, Hydro-Québec says it is “evaluating” some of the proposals, but others appear technically infeasible.

The Brome substation, which is expected to be built in 2027, will replace the existing Sutton and Knowlton substations and provide electricity to Sutton, Brome Lake and Cowansville. Hydro-Québec intends to build the substation on rural land near the boundaries of Brome Lake, Brome village and Sutton. Earlier this year, the mayors of Sutton, Cowansville and Brome Lake expressed concerns about the proposed location, asking Hydro-Québec to consider alternate locations. “The three municipalities agree that Hydro-Québec’s current proposed site targets a particularly bucolic area where the presence of this substation, much larger than the previous ones, and new towers up to 45 metres high, risk disfiguring a landscape that makes our region so attractive,” according to a statement released in February by the town of Sutton.

On April 2, Sutton councillors passed a resolution asking the utility to look into alternatives to building a new substation, including adding new transformers, batteries or capacitor banks to existing substations; building additional 49-kV or 69-kV lines and increasing investment in solar energy.

Hydro-Québec regional affairs advisor Ève-Marie Jodoin said the utility was looking into the idea of adding new batteries or capacitor banks, although the other solutions proposed by councillors did not seem feasible from Hydro’s perspective.

“When we have space, it’s possible to add new transformers, but even if we have space, it’s not necessarily the best solution in the long term,” she said. “Adding a transformer would need to be part of a scenario that would include other kinds of construction, and we can’t really address that at this stage.” Creating additional 49-kV or 69-kV lines, at a time when Hydro is transitioning from the century-old 49-kV network to a 120-kV network, would “have an even bigger footprint” in terms of construction than the proposed substation.

Solar energy, “cannot replace the scenario we have proposed,” Jodoin said. “Is it something we can do complementarily? Certainly, but not on its own – it takes up a lot of space, we would have to find a place to put [the panels], and it’s hard to have [year-round] in Quebec for climatic reasons.”

Jodoin described Hydro-Québec’s working relationship with municipalities in the area and with the MRC Brome-Missisquoi as “very good,” and said Hydro representatives planned to meet with the Town of Sutton in the coming weeks. She said Hydro intends to finalize the location of the substation and the associated transmission lines by the end of this year. “Hydro-Québec will make that decision … We are the ones responsible for finding the location that will have the least social, economic, environmental and agricultural impact in terms of what we have heard from citizens.”

Sutton Mayor Robert Benoit said in a brief email exchange that no dates had been set for additional meetings between Hydro and the municipality as of this writing.

Jodoin added that citizens who would like to share their concerns and haven’t been able to do so at previous consultations should be able to do so via the Hydro-Québec website, in French or English, at least until the end of April. 

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Quebec’s English-language school boards and education advocates are in a celebratory mood after the Quebec Court of Appeal ruled in their favour in a long-running court battle with the provincial government.

In February 2020, the Legault government passed Bill 40, which replaced elected school boards with service centres overseen by government-appointed directors general and unelected volunteer boards. At the time, the bill’s backers argued that it would increase the efficiency of governance in the educational system and remove the need for costly school board elections that relatively few people bothered to vote in. The Quebec English School Boards Association (QESBA) and its member boards, however, saw an attempt to remove English-speaking communities’ control over minority-language education as laid out in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Several months after the bill passed, a court suspended its application to English-language school boards while a legal challenge, brought by QESBA, Montreal’s Lester B. Pearson School Board and a concerned parent, made its way through the courts. In August 2023, Superior Court Judge Sylvain Lussier struck down large parts of the law as it applied to English boards, in line with QESBA’s argument that the law unjustifiably limited the charter rights of official language minority communities. In September of that year, the government appealed the ruling.

In a ruling handed down April 3, appeals court judges Robert M. Mainville, Christine Baudouin and Judith Harvie essentially upheld Lussier’s conclusion, finding large parts of the bill inoperative with respect to English-language boards. The judges found that the school board governance scheme set out in Bill 40, infringed on the community’s right to control its education system and disincentivized parents and community members from getting involved. The community is “entitled to independent school boards that must, at a minimum, allow minority language representatives to exercise exclusive authority relating to minority-language education and facilities,” they wrote, in a ruling that extensively cited previous rulings involving francophone school districts in other parts of Canada. “The Court cannot accept the argument that the linguistic minority is represented through the staff hired by a service centre.” They also found that Bill 40 “radically alters existing structures…in response to political imperatives specific to the French-speaking majority” and the government failed to show, in its appeal, how the new system would help schools obtain educational objectives.

QESBA president Joe Ortona said the school boards “could not have asked for a better ruling.”

“We have been functioning since 2020 as if Bill 40 did not exist, and we plan to continue functioning that way, since the provisions we challenged continue not to apply for us,” he said. “We have local elected representatives who are accountable to the English-speaking community and that is how it should be. Our Section 23 rights matter.”

Eva Ludvig is the president of the Quebec Community Groups Network (QCGN), which was granted intervenor status in the case.  “The QCGN had reminded the court that although Quebec has broad authority over education, that authority is not limitless,” she said in a statement on the day of the ruling. “If a law interferes with minority-language rights, the burden is on the province to justify it… and that is a high bar to meet. This is why today’s ruling is such a landmark win for our community.”

English Parents’ Committee Association president Katherine Korakakis said the ruling was a “historic victory, not just for parents, but for every member of our community who believes in shaping our children’s future.” Eastern Townships School Board chairperson Michael Murray said the ruling was “very satisfying,” particularly because it imposed a broad definition of the English-speaking community.

He added that the five-year-long legal battle “has been a huge distraction from our primary mission, which is to educate anglophone youth – the energy and the money we have spent to arrive at the same place where we were before the government began imposing Bill 40.  The government is within its rights to make changes where the majority community wants and supports them, but the minority community has protected rights, meaning it should not apply ipso facto to us.”

The Quebec government has 60 days to decide whether to ask the Supreme Court of Canada for leave to appeal. Murray and Ortona said they hoped the government would decide to meet with school board representatives to plan a way forward instead of appealing. “The two-speed system which has been in place since Bill 40 has been working pretty well,” Murray said. “That would be a starting point for discussions … it would be an enormous relief for us to have this succession of legal battles terminated so we can get back to the basics of operating our schools.”

The Quebec government has 60 days from the date of the ruling to apply for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice declined to comment on the ruling “out of respect for the judicial process.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The federal election campaign is heating up in the riding of Shefford, which includes Granby, Waterloo, most of the MRCs of Rouville and Haute-Yamaska and the southwestern section of Val-Saint-François.

Until mid-March, polls suggested that Bloc Québécois incumbent Andréanne Larouche would retain her seat without much difficulty, but the momentum has shifted toward the Liberals in recent weeks, with 338Canada showing the seat as “LPC likely” as of this writing. Polls show the Liberals at 43 per cent, the Bloc at 32 per cent, the Conservatives at 17 per cent and the NDP at three per cent. A Liberal stronghold for much of the 20th century, the riding has alternated between Liberal and Bloc MPs since 1979, although it briefly swung Conservative from 1997-2000 and NDP from 2011-2015.

In alphabetical order, the candidates are Félix Dionne of the Liberals, Patrick Jasmin of the NDP, Larouche for the Bloc, Susanne Lefebvre of the People’s Party of Canada, James Seale of the Conservatives and Audrey-Ann Turcotte-Brochu of the Green Party.

Dionne, who stepped aside from his Granby city council seat to run for the Liberals, is an engineer who grew up in Shefford and worked for ten years for the federal government, mainly for Industry Canada. He moved back to Shefford to help his father and brother run a network of Tim Hortons franchises. Going to community events led him to take an interest in politics and run for city council, where he was given responsibility for commercial and tourism development. “As a civil servant I saw how we could develop programs, and as a business owner, I used the programs,” he said. “I’m very pragmatic, less attached to symbols and more to results. I want to see what we can get for Shefford, to use every program, every opportunity to make sure we don’t leave money on the table.”

“I worked on economic development, housing and infrastructure on city council, and those are the biggest issues in Shefford,” he said. “The other issue is our southern neighbour, the danger that’s stalking us… we have a lot of companies who have cross-border [operations] and we need to protect jobs. We also have a lot of farmers and agricultural communities. Mr. [François-Philippe] Champagne announced the party’s agricultural platform in Shefford, and I was proud that they came here. We explained our commitment to protect supply management.”

Dionne is a self-described centrist who said he believed Liberal leader Mark Carney was “the man of the moment” to “recenter” the party and defend Canadian interests amid the trade war with the United States.

Dionne said he was bilingual but learned English as an adult working in Ottawa; since coming back to Quebec, he hasn’t needed the language as much. “Some people have asked if I’ll do English campaign videos, and they’re right to ask – it’s my job to communicate with [anglophones] and I need to hurry up because it’s a short campaign.”

Jasmin is a communications professional and former paramedic who has lived in Shefford since 2019; he is running for the NDP in the riding for the second time. His mother’s family is anglophone and his children attended English school. He said the “American situation,” the rising cost of living, the housing crisis, the future of the agricultural sector and climate adaptation were the most pressing local issues.

“We’re all worried about climate change and how you can continue to be a farmer, and the support you need for climate adaptation,” he said. “We need a government that is ready to get involved, not saying we have to cut, cut, cut, lower the taxes of the privileged classes and subsidize oil – when we do that, we’re limiting the ways we can help the community. The NDP is the party that is the most ready to assume that responsibility to say, ‘Yes, we’ll invest in social programs.’ We can’t say we’re going all-in on renewable energy and ditch fossil fuels without working with workers on the economic transition and social programs and health care. I’ll keep working, whatever the polls say, and I hope people will hear that message.”

In a brief interview between campaign stops, Larouche said she hoped to continue the work she was elected to do in 2019 and 2021. “Minority governments go by fast, and I don’t feel like I’m at the end of everything.”

She said the housing crisis in urban areas, support for farmers in rural areas, and rising costs and the threat of job losses everywhere were the riding’s most pressing problems. She said the Bloc would work to protect supply management and increase allocations for people living on fixed incomes.

The two-term incumbent described herself as “an on-the ground MP, who would work in everyone’s interest,” and her Liberal rival Dionne acknowledged she was “very present.” She argued that a strong Bloc caucus would be to the benefit of both francophone and anglophone Quebecers. “We are a people of entrepreneurs; we have our own economic model and we need to maintain that. The anglophone community shares our entrepreneurial culture and they can defend Quebec as well.”

PPC candidate Lefebvre is described on the party website as a businesswoman who grew up in a bilingual and devoutly Christian family. She is a mother and grandmother and an advocate for healthy lifestyles and nutrition. “Like other PPC candidates, she opposes unnecessary foreign expenditures and believes that resources should be directed toward Canada’s economic development, healthcare system, and social safety net. She strongly opposes mass immigration and believes that anyone wishing to settle in our beautiful country should go through the legal processes,” her party biography reads. “Susanne stands for a peaceful Canada, where peace, prosperity, and human dignity are at the heart of national priorities and for a better and fairer future for all.”

Conservative candidate James Seale acknowledged an interview request but was not available to comment at press time. Seale ran for the PPC in the Montreal riding of Outremont in 2019. In a Facebook post, he describes his “multifaceted career” with military deployments in Germany, Israel, Bosnia and Haiti. After leaving the military, according to the post, he earned an MBA, CPA, and a master’s diploma in supply chain and operations, alongside becoming a certified fraud investigator. “His focus on fiscal responsibility and transparent governance stems from a deep-seated belief in maximizing value for taxpayers. Seale’s commitment to open dialogue and the defence of free speech underscores his belief in a robust and engaged citizenry,” his biography states.

Green candidate Turcot-Brochu, who did not respond to an interview request, is the director of communications and funding of the federal Green Party. “I’ve been actively engaged in my community for over a decade, serving on boards of directors for non-profits focused on women’s rights, women in sports and food security. These causes are close to my heart and continue to fuel my drive for change,” she writes in a party biography.

The federal election will take place April 28.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The race is on to replace former Liberal Cabinet minister Pascale St-Onge in Brome-Missisquoi. As of early last week, all five federal parties with parliamentary representation have presented their candidates in the riding; St-Onge announced in February that she did not plan to run again. 

In alphabetical order, the candidates are actor Jeff Boudreault for the Bloc Québécois, Magog-based artist and former journalist Joanne Brouard for the New Democratic Party (NDP), former Montreal Alouette and director general of the Fondation pour les sports adaptés Steve Charbonneau for the Conservatives, environmentalist and vice-president of the Ordre québécois des acupuncturistes Michelle Corcos for the Green Party and Bromont Mayor Louis Villeneuve for the Liberals. Entrepreneur Jack McLeod will run for the People’s Party of Canada (PPC). As of March 31, no independent or smaller-party candidates have registered in the riding with Elections Canada.

Since its creation in 1984, the riding has gone to the Conservatives from 1984-1993, the Bloc Québécois from 1993-1994, the Liberals from 1995-2006, the Bloc again from 2006-2011 and the NDP after the 2011 “Orange Wave.” Since 2015, it has been represented by three different Liberal MPs. Although polls late last year suggested the Bloc would reclaim the seat, poll aggregator 338Canada now rates it as a safe Liberal seat, with the Liberals polling at an average of 42 per cent compared to 25 per cent for the Bloc, 22 per cent for the Conservatives and 3 per cent each for the NDP and the Green Party (data for the PPC was not provided).

Boudreault, who has lived in Bromont for the past ten years, became a household name in much of the province when he played journalist Jean Brière on the popular Radio-Canada police drama District 31; he has also worked in special education and managed a microbrewery.  He said he was inspired to run by current Bloc MP for Lac-Saint-Jean Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, a former colleague, and by a former MP who helped him navigate the process of bringing his Haitian-born adopted child to Canada after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. “I want to be that kind of MP.” 

“There are a lot of issues in the riding – housing is very important, border security, water quality in Lake Champlain and Lake Memphremagog, supply management, the concerns of hunters around gun control, making sure seniors have enough money to end their days in peace,” he said.

He accused Liberal Leader Mark Carney and Ontario premier and Conservative standard bearer Doug Ford of being too focused on the auto and financial sectors, at the expense of Quebec priorities like aluminum, wood and water resources. “We know the Bloc Québécois are never going to form the government, but [electing Bloc MPs] is an insurance policy for Quebecers. We’re the guard dogs of Quebec’s interests.”  Although he is not bilingual and has few connections with the English-speaking community, he said he’s open to meeting with anglophones. “Whether you’re anglophone or francophone, you’re a Quebecer, at the root of things.”  

Brouard grew up in a “huge family of farmers” with roots in the Beauce region and previously ran unsuccessfully in a Montreal riding in 2011. In an English-language interview, she cited border security and water quality in lakes Champlain and Memphremagog as the main issues facing the riding.

Undiscouraged by the NDP’s faltering poll numbers, she encouraged voters to choose the NDP as a rebuke to the two-party system. “Both the Liberals and Conservatives have huge blind spots,” she argued. “Both say they want to safeguard the economy, but when they say ‘the economy,’ they mean large corporations. I’m not against corporations – they do provide jobs – but if you focus only on corporations, there’s an imbalance, and that’s what we’re seeing in the U.S. We’re the party making sure that not only the corporations, but also the people who are working and buying the products are taken care of.”

Conservative candidate Charbonneau is a lifelong West Bolton resident who played CFL football in Montreal and Edmonton before becoming involved in the field of adaptive sports. In an upbeat English-language interview, he said he decided to go into politics to help people.

“People are worried about high taxes, inflation and tariffs. We have a lot of farmers, and farmers are worried about keeping supply management, which is a very sensitive issue,” he said.

Charbonneau said he believed a Conservative government was best placed to stand up to the Trump administration and put more money in consumers’ pockets. “We [Conservatives] have always been an ally to farmers and workers. We need to reduce the size of the government and have better financial management, and the Conservatives have always proven that they are better at financial management.”

“I learned English at university in New Hampshire, where I went to play football,” he added. “I’m not a lifelong politician, and [going into politics] is a little scary, but it’s like going to the States to play football – you have to trust life. It’s too easy just to sit at home and complain.”

Green Party candidate Corcos, whose party has yet to elect an MP in Quebec, said in a statement on the party website that she “will work to strengthen access to sustainable and preventive healthcare, support ambitious climate policies and promote transparent and participatory governance.”  She said she also hoped to “advance concrete solutions to improve public transportation in rural areas, reducing dependence on single-occupancy vehicles and providing viable mobility alternatives” and support the growth of green jobs.

McLeod, the PPC candidate, is described on the party website as “an experienced programmer and business owner with a deep passion for technology” who is “committed to applying his analytical and problem-solving skills to politics,” emphasizing efficiency and transparency. “His background in IT and strategic thinking gives him a unique approach to tackling challenges in governance,” the website said.

Liberal candidate Villeneuve, who has taken unpaid leave from his job as mayor of Bromont to campaign, said he believed the Liberals represented steady leadership amid unprecedented threats to Canadian sovereignty from the Trump administration. “We’re facing something we’ve never seen before. We have an expansionist president on our southern border who wants to strangle us economically and make us the 51st state. It’s time to unite [Canadians], not divide them. I think the only one who can do that job, who can protect our economy and sovereignty, is Mr. Carney. That’s why I decided to jump in.”

In addition to Canada-U.S. relations, Villeneuve cited the fight against invasive species and fertilizer runoff in Lakes Memphremagog and Champlain, supply management in the dairy sector and a potential passenger train link between Lac-Mégantic and Montreal as major issues facing the riding. He also hopes to put his municipal politics experience to use addressing issues such as affordable housing and transit, for which different levels of government are responsible for different aspects.

“To be mayor in a city where every [council member] is independent, where you don’t have [municipal] parties, you need to use teamwork,” he said. “I’m a team player. I think I can be a person who brings people together,” he added.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Low-income Townships residents who haven’t yet filed their taxes may be able to get help from their local Centre d’action bénévole (CAB; volunteer action centre). The CABs in Bedford, Cowansville, Coaticook, Magog, Stanstead and Waterloo offer free tax assistance in English or French through the Community Volunteer Income Tax Program (CVITP). Single filers with an income of $35,000 or less and couples filing jointly with a combined income of $45,000 or less are eligible to have their taxes prepared and filed online for free by trained volunteers.

The clinics are not equipped to help self-employed people or those filing after a bankruptcy or on behalf of a deceased person. Most clinics do accept people who have fallen a few years behind on their tax returns, although the one in Magog can only accept returns from the current year. Some clinics, including the one in Bedford, will refer people whose income is slightly above the threshold to a local accountant with relatively low rates.

Sara Martinez is the service co-ordinator at the CAB Marguerite-Dubois in Cowansville. She said the centre has offered the program for many years, and processed 2280 tax returns last year.

“We start recruiting volunteers in October and start preparing in November,” she said. “The volunteers have access to a lot of training,” she said. “In past years, people dropped off their files, but now, because of the new privacy law, we prepare them while you wait, which avoids the risk of losing documents.” People who would like to have a volunteer file their taxes can drop by during the centre’s regular opening hours, from Monday to Thursday; those with mobility issues can contact their local CLSC or CLSC agent, if they have one, for an alternative way to drop off documents. 

Martinez said many of the people who use the tax clinic are social assistance recipients or recent immigrants filing their taxes for the first time, but anyone who meets the criteria is welcome. “People are super grateful for what the volunteers are doing; it shows that there’s an important need,” she said.

Marie-Josée Proteau is the director general of the Centre d’action bénévole de Bedford et environs (CABBE; Greater Bedford volunteer action centre), which offers the CVITP in Bedford and surrounding municipalities, including Clarenceville. She said the CABBE has offered the program for at least 25 years. “The program will always exist. The people who are our clients are low-income and they don’t have the means to pay an accountant…but it’s important for them to do their taxes even if their only [source of income] is their pension or social assistance,” explained Proteau, herself an accountant. “Otherwise, they won’t receive the tax credits they’re eligible for.” 

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The town of Sutton is calling on Hydro-Quebec to consider new locations for a controversial hydro substation.

The Brome substation, which is expected to be built in 2027, will replace the existing Sutton and Knowlton substations and provide electricity to Sutton, Brome Lake and Cowansville. While its exact location has not been determined, Hydro-Québec has narrowed down the area under study to a swath of rural land near the boundaries of Brome Lake, Brome village and Sutton. In a statement in February, the town of Sutton said the chosen site “targets a particularly bucolic area where the presence of this substation, much larger than the previous ones, and new towers up to 45m high, risk disfiguring a landscape that makes our region so attractive.”

At the April 2 council meeting, Sutton councillors passed a resolution laying out the town’s own concerns about the project and setting the stage for an analysis of potential alternatives.

The resolution stated that the project was “oversized” in relation to realistic assumptions of growth in electrical demand in the region. “No other option to serve the municipality of Sutton has been studied in detail, nor evaluated according to technical, economic, environmental and financial criteria; [and] the justification for choosing a new 120 kV trunk line and substation can only be assessed by analyzing other options,” it said. “[T]he residents of Sutton, and in particular those of Sutton Junction, have expressed their concerns about the justification for the project and the location of Hydro-Québec’s proposed new substation.”

The town called on Hydro-Québec to limit the height of pylons and analyze alternatives including the addition of a transformer at the existing Cowansville or Coeur–du-Village substation, reinforcement or extension of the existing 49-kV line line; building a new 69-kV line; adding new batteries or capacitor banks; and developing the area’s solar energy potential, including with a proposed solar microgrid project “to improve community resilience, with solar panels on the roofs of municipal and commercial buildings to reduce pressure on energy demand and peak load management.”

“The solution that Hydro-Quebec is presenting to us is oversized, seven times current peak demand, and even when you add Knowlton, [demand] is still far inferior to the proposed capacity,” Mayor Robert Benoit said at the meeting. “We have no factories and we don’t have an industrial park and we don’t plan to have one. Growth in demand is driven by residences. We build 34 new residences per year on average, 340 over the next ten years – two or three additional megawatts per year. We can’t imagine that we will need an augmentation of 100 or 150 megawatts even over the next ten years, unless the town changes drastically.” He added that it was unlikely that there would be a major residential development in the next few years, due to social acceptability concerns and the strain on the water supply in the mountain sector.

Benoit said he doesn’t believe Hydro-Québec has studied all potential options for the substation.  “I strongly recommend that they do that analysis to show us that this is the best choice.”

Although Brome Lake Mayor Richard Burcombe and Cowansville Mayor Sylvie Beauregard have also expressed objections to the proposed site, Benoit emphasized that the resolution did not intend to speak for any other municipality.

Benoit said the town was in constant communication with Hydro-Québec and intended to meet with the utility in the coming weeks. “The ball is in their court and I’m confident we’re going to find a solution,” he said.

Hydro-Québec was not available to comment at press time.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

After months of lobbying efforts and a series of well-attended protests in cities and towns around the province, the Front Commun pour les Arts (FCA; Common front for the arts) said in a statement that it was “celebrating a major victory” after Finance Minister Eric Girard tabled the 2025 budget.

The budget announced $200 million in funding for the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec (CALQ; Quebec council for arts and letters) over the next three years, in line with the demands of the FCA. The CALQ is the government agency which supports the development of arts and literature across the province; according to its website, it provides grants to more than 1800 artists and 900 organizations every year.

FCA member organizations argued that without guaranteed funding, the survival of Quebec’s unique culture was at risk as artists chose to leave the arts.

“The new funding provides a first step toward stability for the sector and must mark the beginning of sustained collaboration to address the systemic and structural challenges that have multiplied in recent years,” the FCA said in a statement. “These issues have had devastating impacts not only on the working conditions of artists and cultural workers, but also on the quality, accessibility, and the reach of their artistic works across the province and internationally.

“It took a historic mobilization by the artistic communities to achieve these gains,” they said.

“The progress achieved through the actions surrounding le Front commun pour les arts and its allies must now serve as a foundation on which to build a sustainable and thriving cultural sector, in the best interest of Quebec society as a whole.”

Caroline Gignac is director general of the Conseil québécois du théatre and co-spokesperson for the FCA. She said the funding would bring much-needed “oxygen” to give artists “the energy to continue our efforts to preserve our cultural identity, maintain the vitality of our artistic ecosystem and improve artists’ socio-economic conditions.”

Gignac said although the exact use of the funding would be up to the CALQ, the money would give some much-needed structural stability to Quebec’s arts sector amid wider economic uncertainty. “The sector is facing challenges, but it was hard to address the challenges when it felt like everything was collapsing.”

The CALQ is “the best vehicle to ensure that money gets into the hands of artists through grants and support to organizations,” said Nick Maturo, director of programming at the English Language Arts Network (ELAN). Maturo said Finance Minister Eric Girard, who is also minister responsible for relations with English-speaking Quebecers, “definitely gets it when it comes to the importance of culture.”

Maturo emphasized that English-speaking artists can apply for CALQ grants in English if they choose, and ELAN offers free support services to those who may be interested in applying.

“A lot of decisions need to be made from here on out on how [the funding] gets into communities to create compelling quality arts and cultural content –  it is a question of being engaged in the process for community groups, for artists and for English-speaking Quebecers,” he said. English-speaking artists in the regions in particular, he said, needed “to be part of that conversation.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

As Quebecers came to grips with the announcements contained in the latest provincial budget, tabled March 25 by finance minister Eric Girard, representatives of several sectors, including arts and culture and community health, the union representing the province’s farmers said its members were disappointed and worried by allocations in the budget which failed to address their concerns amid threats posed by climate change and uncertainty around cross-border trade and the wider economy.

The Union des producteurs agricoles (UPA) “acknowledges the amounts allocated to the continuation of the Sustainable Agriculture Plan 2020-2030 ($100 million over five years), to the implementation of the Quebec Biofood Policy 2025-2035 ($60.3 million over five years) and to the financing of the Sustainable Growth Investment Program ($42 million over five years), while pointing out that they are well below the expectations and concerns of the community,” a UPA statement said.

“Agricultural and forestry businesses will be among the hardest hit by the U.S. president’s tariffs. This threat adds to the difficulties thousands of them have experienced in recent years. The government’s response, which also reduces the overall budget of the Quebec Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food by 1.7 per cent (from $1,303 million to $1,281 million), will be met with a lukewarm reception,” declared UPA national president Martin Caron.

UPA representatives also criticized Girard’s decisions to table a budget with a record $13.6-billion deficit, and to plan for the impact of U.S. tariffs of an average of 10 per cent rather than 25 per cent.

Christian Kaeser is a dairy farmer based in Saint-Herménégilde, a border community east of Coaticook. He is the UPA regional vice president for Estrie.

He said “nothing in the budget” would help farmers respond to the impact of tariffs, adding that he found Girard’s tariff projection overly optimistic. “Ten per cent is not going to happen.”

Kaeser called on the Legault government to return a larger share of provincial carbon market revenues to Quebec farmers to make it easier to invest in climate change mitigation efforts and scale up productivity. “We have a lot of ambition to grow and export more and feed more Canadians and depend less on food imports. A lot of investment is needed for innovation, productivity, [responding to] new animal welfare rules and climate change and doing better for the environment. This is lightyears away from what we asked for.”

“Seventy-two per cent of our farm exports are to the United States right now,” he added, noting that fluctuating prices and interest rates are also expected to negatively impact farm revenue.  “Both [the provincial and federal governments] need to reassure farmers that they will be there for them.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The town of Bromont has opened an indoor playground to get its youngest residents moving.

The Espace Bougeotte opened March 29 in the multipurpose room of the Bromont Arena, and will stay open on weekends from 8:30 a.m. to noon until May 19, and reopen in the fall. The project is developed in partnership with Loisir et Sport Montérégie, funded by a Quebec government grant and inspired by a similar initiative in Nicolet, near Trois-Rivières. The space includes soft play modules for preschoolers and a “chill space” where children and their parents can rest, have a snack, draw or play with tabletop toys and games.

While a city employee will be on hand to welcome kids and their families, keep the space clean and address any safety concerns, parents, grandparents and caregivers are responsible for their children, explained Laurent Bédard, head of the sports, recreation and events division at the Ville de Bromont. The space might host occasional organized activities in the future, but for now, free play is the name of the game. The facility is free, reserved for Bromont residents and targeted to children under 5.

“With the creation of this new space, we are contributing to the development of healthy lifestyle habits for our children, from a very young age. We invite families and the entire community to come and discover this beautiful place dedicated to our little ones,” Shefford district councillor Jacques Lapensée said in a statement announcing the centre’s opening.

Bédard said city officials wanted to respond to a lack of free and accessible activities for babies and preschoolers that encourage physical activity, as part of the city’s action plan for healthy lifestyles.

Bédard took his own two-year-old son to the Espace Bougeotte on opening day, and said he enjoyed the experience. “He tried it, and after an hour, he got tired and went to the quiet room and built some stuff and had a snack. Then he went back to running everywhere with the other kids.”

The space also gives kids and their parents an opportunity to socialize and get to know their neighbours, Bedard said. “Families are so busy, it’s good to meet other parents and talk and say ‘I’m not going through this alone.’”

“There are a lot of private play centres that are bigger than ours, and they’re excellent – I go there with my family and we enjoy it – but it’s important to have low-barrier access to sports,” Bédard said. “Getting kids into skiing, soccer and hockey is expensive; putting them in front of the TV or giving them an iPad is not. We have a tendency to park kids in front of the TV when they’re little, and then sign them up for soccer when they’re old enough; they might specialize in soccer, but they don’t necessarily learn to jump or do cartwheels. Even when you’re a year old, you should have the opportunity to jump up and down or throw a ball.” He said he believes free play for preschoolers should eventually become a regular part of municipal recreational programs, “like free swim or public skating sessions.”

If you are a Bromont resident and would like to learn more about the Espace Bougeotte, visit bromont.net/loisirs-et-culture/programmation-des-loisirs/espace-bougeotte.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The Brome County Historical Society has received a $2.21-million grant from the federal ministry of housing, infrastructure and communities to carry out a long-awaited expansion of the Lac-Brome Museum.

The expansion will take the form of a 6,000-square-foot extension to the current reception building, which will hold three galleries (including one featuring a new permanent exhibit on the Abenaki people), an expanded reception area, a collections lab, storage space and “flexible spaces” that can be rented out for events, explained Denis Piquette, executive director of the historical society, which oversees the museum. It will also be equipped with an elevator and washrooms accessible for people with reduced mobility, and a heating system which will allow it to stay open year-round.

Piquette said the expansion had been in the works for several years. “The historical society had an ambitious vision that was redrafted in 2020. At the time, [Premier François] Legault was talking about the Espaces bleus, and he made a statement along the lines of, the regions are filled with dusty little museums. We thought that was not very complimentary, at a time when we were aiming to be a leading museum and archive centre.” The historical society had an initial feasibility study done in 2021, but it wasn’t until late last year that the federal government rolled out a grant program – the Green and Inclusive Community Buildings (GICB) program, focused on developing “community spaces” in official language minority and Indigenous communities using energy-efficient construction techniques – that was adapted to their needs and didn’t require a disproportionate investment of time or money to apply.

“I found out about the program in September, and the deadline was Oct. 13,” Piquette recalled. “Of course, I had to supply an engineering report… but somehow we made it. We got a call from [Brome-Missisquoi MP] Pascale St-Onge on March 11 and then we got a letter [confirming the grant] from Minister [Nathaniel] Erskine-Smith.” Before the recent federal cabinet shuffle, Erskine-Smith was minister of housing, infrastructure and communities, the ministry which oversees the GICB program. The $2.1-million grant, which will cover 60 per cent of the costs linked to the new extension, is among the largest given out to a Quebec-based organization through the GICB program.

“We have a huge collection, a strong following, a long list of members and support from the town, but we’re a bunch of old buildings that need repair,” Piquette said. The extension, he said, would give the society breathing room to carry out further renovations in the future, by allowing it to safely store artifacts.

The historical society needs to co-ordinate with the Town of Brome Lake urban planning department and raise an additional $1.5 million from other sources to ensure construction moves forward. Piquette said he hopes the extension will be completed by fall 2026.

Archives/William Crooks
Local MPs Elisabeth Brière, Pascale St-Onge, and Marie-Claude Bibeau meeting with around 40 local mayors to discuss significant municipal issues in August, 2024

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

When soon-to-be-former Brome-Missisquoi MP Pascale St-Onge picks up the phone, the cries of her four-month-old son can be heard clearly in the background. She briefly puts the phone down to go soothe him before hurrying back. A few weeks from now, St-Onge, 47, who became the first lesbian federal cabinet minister to take parental leave when her son was born, will no longer have to juggle her responsibilities as a politician and a mom – and she’s fine with that.

St-Onge announced in February that she would not seek a second term as MP for Brome-Missisquoi, preferring to focus on her family for the next few years.

“I have no regrets,” she told the BCN. “It was a well-thought-out decision. For the next few years, I really want to be present for him. With the fact that [the Liberals are] going up in the polls, it became obvious that this was the right decision at this time.”

St-Onge, a former communications union representative, has had a busy four years. In October 2021, then-prime minister Justin Trudeau appointed her minister for sport – where she stickhandled reforms to Hockey Canada’s governance in the wake of a sexual abuse scandal before restoring its federal funding – and minister responsible for the Economic Development Agency for the Regions of Quebec at a time when the post-pandemic economic recovery looked precarious. In 2023, she was shifted to the Canadian Heritage portfolio, coming under the national spotlight as the federal government negotiated with Google and Meta to compensate media outlets for lost revenue, renewed funding for local media outlets and took steps toward modernizing and reshaping CBC/Radio-Canada. Earlier this year, when Soraya Martinez Ferrada stepped down to run for mayor of Montreal, Trudeau briefly named St-Onge tourism minister as well.

St-Onge looked back on the 2021 campaign, conducted amid COVID restrictions. “It was such an honour to have been elected in 2021 and have the confidence of the citizens of Brome-Missisquoi,” said St-Onge, a native of Saint-Eustache on Montreal’s South Shore who now lives in Orford. “It was a tight race. When I got elected, we were still in the pandemic. We had to support the tourism sector and make sure there were opportunities for sustained growth … and make sure municipalities had public spaces to gather again. That’s a legacy I’m happy with, that the region will have for years to come.”

As heritage minister, St-Onge’s signature piece of legislation is the Online News Act, which aimed to force web giants such as Google and Meta to negotiate compensation agreements with news outlets. While Google paid $100 million to a consortium of news outlets earlier this year in response to the act, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, got around the act by blocking access to news in Canada on its platforms, opening the door to spoof accounts mimicking Canadian news outlets and presenting false stories as fact. “I wish I could have done a deal with Meta, but they are not [acting as] partners, and that will ultimately end up in court,” St-Onge said. “I’m worried about misinformation, but I’m mostly worried about Meta’s attitude, because they don’t comply, they don’t recognize the legitimacy of governments, which is extremely problematic. Not only did they remove Canadian news, but they fired their fact checkers. The quality of information [on Facebook] is going to keep spiralling down, and people need to be aware of what this means for democracy. A lot of people are exposed to misinformation [inaccurate information], disinformation [deliberate falsehoods] and foreign interference from people using these powerful communications platforms, and that should ring alarm bells.”

For St-Onge, CBC/Radio-Canada is a weapon in the fight against disinformation. “Having a strong public broadcaster that is funded appropriately and stable is not only a question of survival of who we are – of Canadian identity – but of national security and making sure Canadians can turn to their public broadcaster in case of an emergency,” she said. In February, she proposed a major boost to CBC/Radio-Canada funding, and changes to the public broadcaster’s governance and funding structures which she believed would make it less vulnerable to political interference. “Even though I didn’t get to present the [proposal] in the House of Commons, I’m optimistic that the next Liberal government will take it up.”

When the BCN spoke to St-Onge, the Liberal party had not yet announced who would run for her Brome-Missisquoi seat. She said that decision was in the hands of the party, but she did point out specific challenges that awaited her successor in light of the Trump administration’s challenges to Canadian sovereignty. “Everything going on with the United States is going to be super important; we have a lot of industries that import-export into the U.S. We know that a lot of Americans come [to visit the region] and we believe a lot of them are going to support us and support the Canada-U.S. relationship. The future [MP] is going to have to fight for that, to fight for supply management for our farmers and for the renegotiation of [the Canada-U.S.-Mexico free trade agreement].”

“I am proud of the work that we have done with [Sherbrooke MP] Élisabeth [Brière] and [Compton-Stanstead MP] Marie-Claude [Bibeau] with supporting English-speaking communities, implementing the Official Language Action Plan and making sure that Townshippers and other organizations would get support; we made a great team,” she concluded. “I thank everyone in Brome-Missisquoi for their support and their trust over the past few years. Right now, I want to spend time with my family. I’m open to opportunities and I still have a lot of passion for the issues, but I’m in no rush. I haven’t picked up my bass guitar in quite a while, so I may do that.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The town of Dunham intends to go ahead with the construction of a new fire station despite concerns from some citizens about the need for and the cost of the facility, Mayor Pierre Janecek said last week.

In December, the project faced a roadblock after more than 300 people signed a register calling for a referendum on a planned $7.9-million loan to finance the project. Rather than move forward with the referendum, councillors went back to the drawing board and devised a new funding formula.

At the March 11 council meeting, councillors approved $6.4 million in spending and a $2.1-million loan to fund the project, to be paid by taxpayers proportionally to their property values. Janecek said the loan, to be repaid over a period of 25 years, would add an estimated $63 per year to the average homeowner’s tax bill, although those with higher property values would pay slightly more. He noted that a provincial subsidy would pay 73 per cent of the cost of the new fire station.

“We made a budget based on what we thought the project would cost, but the bids were lower than we thought, so we had to do a new one, $1.5 million less than the one before,” the mayor said. “We also [became eligible for] a slightly larger grant because we’re going to use wood [in the construction of the firehouse]. Because we have more than half of the project subsidized, we’re not legally obligated to do a register.” The funds were expected to cover construction, furniture, specialized equipment, landscaping, water treatment and professional fees for the new fire station and a contingency amount to cover unexpected cost overrruns, equivalent to 10 per cent of the project’s total budget, town clerk Jessica Tanguay explained at the meeting, which can be seen on Facebook Live.

Tanguay announced that Construction Richelieu, a contractor based in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, had submitted the winning bid, with a cost estimate of $5,547,000. One lower bid, from Athena Construction, was disqualified due to an incomplete application, she said.

The loan bylaw and the bylaw authorizing the construction of the firehouse passed easily at the council meeting, with councillors silently assenting to Janecek’s perfunctory, “Is everybody OK with that?” after Tanguay’s explanations. However, some residents who learned they would not be able to oppose the project through a register or a referendum expressed their concerns during the public question period, about the integrity of the bidding process, the necessity of the project and the qualifications of fire chief Patrick Cournoyer.

“No one has done a needs analysis of our fire safety needs,” argued one resident, Diane Cormier. “You haven’t done that – you said, right away, ‘We need a fire station.’ We need to analyze everything.”

“That’s what was done,” answered Coun. Florencia Saravia.

Another attendee, who didn’t give his name, spoke up to call for Cournoyer to be fired. “I’m not going to impugn anyone’s reputation here, and we’re not going to do that – not to citizens, not to town employees and not to elected officials; it’s totally disrespectful, and we have enormous confidence in our fire chief who has worked on this project for years…and has a whole team around him,” countered Saravia, who had been answering Cormier’s question.

A few other attendees began speaking over Saravia and Cormier, leading Janecek to adjourn the meeting. He briefly reconvened it, giving councillors a few minutes to express their support for Cormier, before wrapping up proceedings. He later said the chaotic council meeting, a first since the current council took office, had been “hard to manage.”

He argued that the new fire station was necessary because the current one, a converted garage, didn’t meet modern standards. “There will be more space for trucks, a decontamination room as required by the CNESST [Quebec workplace safety board], a small kitchen and a break room … it will be more spacious and we’ll be up to code.”

“There are people who are against the fire station and who are worried about the impact on their tax bill. That’s legitimate. We live in a democracy. People will be against it, but I think they’ll understand eventually,” he added.  “When you explain the project well, people get it.”

Construction of the fire station is expected to begin later this spring and wrap up in 2026.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

On March 19, as talk of a federal election buzzed in the air, about 300 English-speaking teens and young adults from around the province, including many first-time voters, gathered at the Coeur des Sciences at Université du Québec à Montréal, for the annual Youth Forum organized by Montreal-based civic participation organization Youth 4 Youth (Y4Y).  The nonpartisan organization encourages English-speaking youth to get involved in their communities and get informed about wider social and political issues,

At the eighth annual Youth Forum, under the theme “Inform, Educate and Empower,” high school, CEGEP and university students and young professionals from around the province discussed anglophone out-migration, the democratic deficit and youth voter turnout, identity in Quebec and media consumption. Although most of the speakers and participants were from the greater Montreal area, participants came from Sherbrooke, Trois-Rivières, the Outaouais region and as far away as Sept-Iles.

Y4Y president Sufia Langevin, a recent Bishop’s University graduate, encouraged participants to “disagree without delegitimizing” other people’s arguments, and enjoy discovering points of view and realities they might not be familiar with.

Policy director Alex Pettem presented sobering data about youth outmigration, showing data that indicated that 14 per cent of Quebec anglophones, including 28 per cent of youth 18-24, were considering leaving the province in 2022. Younger people, people with more formal education and people in rural areas with fewer educational and employment opportunities were most likely to leave; among their reasons for considering a move, anglophones cited wanting to live in a more anglophone environment, discomfort with political dynamics in Quebec, work opportunities and family considerations, in that order, Pettem said. “It has long been a part of [Y4Y’s] message to stem outmigration, to encourage youth to stay in the province,” he said.

Panelists addressed their sense of belonging in Quebec and youth political participation – the merits of lobbying politicians, signing petitions, joining neighbourhood youth councils and lowering the voting age to 16. “Politics belongs to a group of people we don’t have contact with,” said Frishta, a student at CEGEP Champlain-St. Lambert, who didn’t give her full name. Petitions, she said, were a good concept, but “there’s often a gap between the effort you put in and the results you get.”

“It’s not apathy that’s the problem, it’s accessibility,” agreed Charles, a McGill student who also gave only his first name. “Every university should have a polling station.”

Félix Joly, a Secondary 5 student at the Séminaire de Sherbrooke, was one of the few participants from the Estrie region. Unlike most of the participants, he identifies as a francophone. He was eager to share his perspective as a francophone, a person from “the regions” and an advocate for student governance (he is a board member of a provincewide network of student council presidents), and to listen to what others had to say. “I found that on a vast number of points, [anglophone and francophone] participants were similar,” he said. “We have a lot of the same struggles, in terms of social media addiction and buying local. For us [francophones], immigration is a big language and cultural issue … it was nice hearing the other side of the coin; it made me think about my own point of view.” 

Although he and many of his peers will not turn 18 in time to vote in the April 28 election, they encouraged candidates and elected officials to take notice – and encouraged teens to take action on issues that mattered to them. “We don’t have the right to vote, so we’re not useful for anyone now, but we have to live with those policies,” he said. “We have to be like, ‘Hey, you’re working for us too.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Twenty hectares of mostly forested land in Brome Lake and Sutton will be preserved in perpetuity thanks to donations by two local landowners to the Mont Echo Conservation Association (MECA), a member of Appalachian Corridor.

The generosity of the two anonymous donors “ensures the perpetual protection of nearly 20 hectares of additional natural environments of high ecological value in the sector,” Appalachian Corridor communications co-ordinator Frédérique Vuillermoz said in a statement last week.

The larger of the two donations is an 11.4-hectare swath of land in Sutton, southeast of Chemin Parmenter, close to Mount Echo, adjacent to an existing protected area. It “makes a remarkable contribution to expanding the ecological corridor of the Réserve naturelle des Montagnes Vertes,” the statement said. The smaller of the two is an 8.5-hectare forested property close to the centre of the town of Brome Lake; during a ceremony held last August, it received the name Kpiwi Pmossa, which means “wood walkers” in Abenaki, in honour of the Indigenous people who once hunted and fished there.  Both properties “have some [plant and animal] habitats we want to protect,” Caroline Bisson, co-director general for community relations at Appalachian Corridor, told the BCN.

“These two donations were given to a local organization, MECA, and they were interesting because they were very diverse habitats with a lot of ecological value,” Bisson said. “The Sutton one is a [key] habitat in our conservation strategy, and the one in Brome Lake has a stream and some bird habitats we want to expect.”

Bisson said she wasn’t familiar with the details of the discussions that had been ongoing with the two property owners, but that generally, discussions with donors can go on for months or years. “The particularities [of donations] are always discussed with the owner. We meet the owner, we do evaluations and the owner has to consider their options.” 

Christian Godin is the treasurer of MECA, a volunteer-run conservation organization based in Brome which is a member of Appalachian Corridor. He said the donation of the Brome Lake property in particular has been “long in the making.”

“The owners keep on adding access to the property and they are sort of the guardians, but MECA will become the long term fiduciary for monitoring that the land remains a forest and keeps its integrity,” he said.

Donors who make a gift of land to Appalachian Corridor or a similar organization benefit from certain tax advantages. Although land donations do come with transaction and evaluation fees, Appalachian Corridor covers those fees through donations.

Appalachian Corridor intends to leave nature to its own devices on the two properties. “We do develop hiking trails on some of our larger properties, but…these are relatively small. They will be registered as protected areas and evaluated each year. Our goal is to let nature do what nature does,” said Bisson.

“We want to emphasize the contribution of these two ladies, who have so much heart, and who gave their land. Natural heritage is very important to them, and they want this land to remain a forest,” Bisson said.

She added that land donations are not the only way to support local conservation initiatives. “There are a lot of opportunities to contribute as a volunteer as a donor to help us maximize our efforts,” she said. 

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The town of Bromont has set aside $60,000 to fund projects proposed by residents as part of its first-ever participatory budget initiative.

Residents have until April 30 to submit proposals on the city website, via email or in person at the town hall. Proposals will be accepted in three categories: youth (projects submitted by Bromont residents under age 25 focused on improving youth quality of life), collective (submissions by residents or groups of residents 18 and older), and seniors (submitted by people of any age, aimed at boosting quality of life, mobility and access to services for local seniors). Proposals will be analyzed by a city-appointed committee between May 1 and 23; the winning projects will be announced in June, and realized over the course of 2025.

An eligible project “needs to meet the [submission] deadline, needs to be doable over the course of 2025 and within the budget,” Mayor Louis Villeneuve explained. Projects that involve building “fixed infrastructures” must be on public land. “We will also look at the number of citizens who might benefit, the project’s alignment [with] municipal policy and strategy, the capacity of the city to realize it, the impact of any recurrent expenses, and geographical equity within the city. The committee will review all of the projects with a point system, and the projects with the most points will win.”

Similar initiatives, where cities earmark a specific amount of money 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; last year, Cowansville got on the bandwagon and funded an outdoor education space in the Parc des Colibris, to be completed by the end of 2025.

According to a participation document provided by the city, the participatory budget initiative “A “is a unique opportunity for citizens to get involved in community life; develop community-led projects and contribute to [community] development; understand the challenges of city management; create spaces for interaction and strengthening of the social fabric; contribute to the creation of a fairer, more equitable and more responsive city [and] make democracy more vibrant and closer to citizens.”

“I’m very curious and impatient to see what kinds of projects people are going to come up with,” Villeneuve told the BCN. “It’s a democratic process, and the goal is to involve people in town life.” He said he hoped the initiative would allow residents, including children and young adults, to better understand municipal governance.

He added that amid difficult and uncertain economic times, “little things can do us good,” and the participatory budget and the projects that come out of it are one way to integrate “little things” that might ordinarily go under the radar.

“We’re hoping to get the most [submissions] possible, for people to look at this project and think, ‘It’s possible for me to submit something,’” said the mayor. “Our ambition is for Bromont residents to come and sit down with us at the drawing board [and] add a touch of ‘proudly made by and for Bromont residents.’”

Residents can submit projects via the online form at bromont.net/administration-municipale/budget-participatif; download the form on the city website and scan and email the completed form to imagine@bromont.com; or pick up a paper form at City Hall, the Lucien-Parent Community Centre or the Pauline-Quinlan Library. Paper forms must be returned to the City Hall reception desk by the April 30 deadline.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

A local environmental group has good news about Cowansville’s drinking water. Last year, the Comité de sauvegarde du bassin versant du lac Davignon (CSBVLD; Lake Davignon watershed safeguarding committee) completed a two-year water quality sampling campaign covering multiple areas of the lake. The resulting report, which will be presented to the public at the CSBVLD annual general meeting on April 2, shows broadly encouraging results for the lake, which has provided drinking water and much-appreciated swimming and boating and outdoor recreation opportunities for Cowansville residents since soon after it was dug in 1965.

Sampling was carried out in 2022 and 2023 at 20 locations in and around the lake and along its tributary streams. The samples were collected by CSBVLD volunteers and analyzed by biologists and field technicians from the Organisme du bassin versant de la Yamaska (OBV-Yamaska; Yamaska watershed organization).

The 2022-2023 campaign is a follow-up to an initial sampling campaign conducted from 2010 to 2012. “Analyses of data collected in 2022 and 2023 show that the good overall water quality in the Lake Davignon watershed observed between 2010 and 2012 continued through 2023 and even improved for fecal coliforms. All stations demonstrated good water quality for phosphorus, fecal coliforms, ammonia nitrogen, pH and dissolved oxygen,” OBV-Yamaska analysts wrote in a summary of the report. The majority of the samples received an “A” (good quality for most uses, including swimming) rating for most contaminants, although there were a few isolated “B” (generally satisfying quality for most uses) ratings for nitrates and nitrites and suspended particles, and two “C” (suspect, may compromise some uses) ratings for chlorophyll.

The authors cautioned that continued surveillance was needed to monitor levels of chlorophyll, nitrates and nitrites, and suspended particles (sediment) in the water.

They also noted that three specific sites, at the Cowansville beach and the Ruisseau marsh, and in the stream between Brome and Cowansville, had lower overall water quality and had been singled out for further analysis.  “Water quality improvement efforts should prioritize” these areas, according to the report’s authors. They also note that the water quality at sampling stations on the beach is “generally good,” even if it is lower than that observed at other stations.

The authors recommended that the town of Cowansville prioritize runoff reduction and “renaturalization” efforts in the targeted areas; continue to monitor targeted pollutants and continue to monitor fecal coliform and acidity (pH) levels at the beach specifically; start to plan a long-term response to the gradual filling in of the lake with sediment; and plan a similar sampling campaign in ten years.

“We are pleased to see that the majority of the analysis results show good water quality. This indicates that the improvement work carried out in the watershed (e.g., sediment traps that filter runoff and capture sediment) in recent years by the Brome-Missisquoi MRC and the municipalities concerned has borne fruit,” said Gérard Houle, vice-president of the CSBVLD and volunteer responsible for the sampling campaign.

“These results are good, and they show that what has been done over the past ten years [to control runoff] is working, but with climate change and extreme weather, there are a lot more downpours, and we need to think about what’s going down our gutters and into our streams to end up in our drinking water,” Jonathan B-Mailhot, president of the CSBVLD, told the BCN in an interview. “Having the data helps us go to officials and say, ‘This is what you need to do to protect our drinking water.’”

The City of Cowansville had not responded to a request for comment by press time.

Mailhot noted that the water sampling results aren’t the only encouraging trend in lake conservation. “Every year around Earth Day [mid-April], we go and clean the banks of the lake, and every time we go, there is less and less rubbish down there.” He asked residents and people who spend a lot of time around the lake to inform the CSBVLD if they notice anything unusual in or around the water.

Anyone who wants to attend the presentation of the water quality report on April 2 at the Salle Arthur-Fauteux of the MRC Brome-Missisquoi office is advised to reserve their seat in advance at lacdavignon.org/echantillonnage.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Matthew Long hasn’t gotten much sleep since U.S. president Donald Trump began talking about tariffs on Canadian imports.

Long is the owner of a Knowlton-based trucking company, LJH Trucking, which employs 30 people and has a fleet of 24 trucks. He estimates that about 80 per cent of the company’s business relies on cross-border orders.

“In January and February, I’ve been getting a full night’s sleep maybe every three nights – I’m just exhausted, monitoring the tariff situation,” Long said. “The day before the tariffs were [to have been] put in place, 85 per cent of our workload got cancelled or put on hold. We had trucks and drivers without anywhere to go and clients with loads cancelled. It’s a huge challenge for everyone involved.”

On Feb. 1, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing a 25 per cent tariff on all Canadian products entering the U.S., except for energy imports, which would be subject to a 10 per cent tariff. On Feb. 3, the day before tariffs were to take effect, the imposition of the tariffs was suspended for 30 days, leading Canada to pause its own planned retaliatory tariffs. On March 3, the Trump administration confirmed its intention to impose tariffs; three days later, Trump announced another pause until April 2. As of this writing, separate 25 per cent tariffs on steel and aluminum imports were expected to go into effect March 12. Outgoing federal finance minister Dominic LeBlanc has said Canada plans to introduce retaliatory tariffs on April 2.

Long said the on-again-off-again tariffs have made day-to-day operations and planning for the future more difficult. “Demand was really high in February, because people were trying to get shipments across the border before the deadline. We don’t know how March will play out, but it’s probably going to be the same thing. It’s a logistical nightmare.”

The tariffs have also made him rethink his purchasing plans. He noted that car and truck parts usually cross the U.S.-Canadian border several times during the vehicle manufacturing process. “Tariffs are going to increase the cost of everything, including trucks, but I don’t want to let go of my current truck [orders] because if I do, someone else will grab them,” he said.

“The pressure on our staff and the drivers to get everything done is unjustified – there’s no reason for this to happen,” he added.

Pascal Lafrenière is the president of the Chambre de commerce de Brome-Missisquoi (CCBM). He echoed Long’s observations that the ongoing uncertainty is bad for business, especially in sectors where companies are used to planning weeks and months ahead of time. “We’re in the unknown, and everything is changing so quickly,” Lafrenière said. “If you’re a business, it’s hard to adapt on a dime… but it’s time to rethink our strategies. The link of reliability with the United States is broken.”

Both Long and Lafrenière said they were optimistic that the situation would ultimately be resolved as its negative impacts on both sides of the border became apparent. Lafrenière said the CCI was working with its partners on short- and medium-term solutions, including a local purchasing strategy and ways to connect businesses with emergency funding opportunities such as those announced by the provincial government last week. A spokesperson for Economy Minister Christine Fréchette said the emergency measures – including two loan programs for businesses looking to diversify international partnerships and scale up productivity and a 25 per cent bid penalty for American companies applying for Quebec government contracts – would remain in effect until further notice.

CLD offering support for businesses

In response to the uncertainty, the Centre local de développement (CLD) de Brome-Missisquoi announced plans to put in place a “strategic cell” bringing together experts and economic stakeholders.

“Our advisors actively support businesses so that they can assess their exposure to risks. We encourage them to establish different financial scenarios, contact their suppliers and customers to anticipate the impacts and identify opportunities that could emerge from this situation,” said  Marie-Josée Lamothe, director of business services at the CLD.  In addition to risk assessment, the CLD offers support to help local businesses review their business model and update their strategic planning, diversify their markets, find local suppliers, scale up productivity, access existing assistance programs and adopt a “Made in Quebec” marketing strategy. 

“Some sectors can do well in this context, such as tourism, local [food and agriculture] producers or manufacturers of ecological goods. We are also here to support these companies in their development,” said Lamothe.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The towns of Brome Lake and Waterloo have announced plans to expand the service areas covered by their on-call first responders.

Starting later this year, as part of a pilot project, Waterloo first responders will cover Warden, Saint-Joachim and Sainte-Anne-de-la-Rochelle in addition to parts of Saint-Étienne de Bolton and Stukely-Sud. Brome Lake first responders will now cover Brome village in addition to West Bolton.

Waterloo fire chief Patrick Gallagher and Brome Lake fire chief Kevin Robinson said they hoped that expanded 24-7 first responder services would ensure that trained personnel reached rural municipalities more quickly in case of an emergency. “Ambulances sometimes come from Cowansville … our first responders in Brome Lake are usually there quite quickly,” Robinson said.

They explained that ambulances and on-call fire crews are sometimes diverted en route to deal with higher-priority calls, and may not be available for all emergencies. “If an ambulance is going to Saint-Étienne to help someone who has fallen off a ladder, and then someone has a heart attack in Magog, the ambulance will go there first, and the person at the bottom of the ladder might just have to wait,” Gallagher said.

Although on-call first responders don’t have the same level of training or equipment as full-time paramedics, they are able to stabilize and assess patients in a variety of situations. Level 3 first responders such as those in Waterloo, who complete a 60-hour certification course, can help someone who is injured or has suffered a suspected heart attack, stroke, allergic reaction or poisoning before paramedics arrive, Gallagher explained. First responder training, he said, “is basic, but it can make a difference.”

Transition for Brome village

Although the service-sharing agreement was signed last week, in practice, Brome Lake first responders have covered Brome village since the beginning of the year. Brome mayor William Miller explained that Brome had previously had an agreement with Sutton for first responder services, but that coming under Brome Lake’s jurisdiction “made more sense geographically.” Also, he explained, first responder services in Brome Lake, unlike in Sutton, are distinct from fire services, meaning first responders won’t have to be diverted from a medical call to respond to a fire call.

Brome Lake, West Bolton and Brome will share costs for the service according to a formula based on tax revenue and the level of risk in each municipality. “Now, they’re pooling [cost sharing] from three towns instead of two. Brome Lake is not trying to make a profit –it’s to cover costs and help support training of the firefighters. There are a number of people in Brome who work in Brome Lake or who are part of their fire personnel already, so I don’t think it will be a huge transition,” Miller said.

While firefighters generally have first responder training, not all first responders are firefighters, and the two services are separate. Robinson, the Brome Lake fire chief, who also manages the first responder service, said his team of 28 first responders was “quite proud” to serve Brome village.

Objective 75%

The Waterloo service expansion is part of a pilot project that officials hope will be fully implemented by June. “With the recent Quebec government announcement that they want 75 per cent of the province to be covered by first responders by 2030, we asked questions to see what might be possible,” Gallagher said. “We said we would do a pilot project, and once the government puts [formal] parameters in place, we’ll take another look … and see what we can do to assure the continuation of the service. It’s easy to start, but you need to make sure it lasts.”

Waterloo currently covers 100 per cent of the cost of training and deploying 32 on-call first responders. Under the pilot project, 56 per cent of that cost would be picked up by neighbouring municipalities.

“For smaller municipalities, finding on-call first responders for a town with a population of 1000 is impossible,” Gallagher said. “With this project, we can share costs and offer the service to more municipalities. It’s a win-win.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Nearly one-third of the territory of the town of Waterloo could be part of an environmentally protected area by 2037, town officials announced last week.

The municipality commissioned a report from the Granby-based Fondation pour la sauvegarde des écosystèmes du territoire de la Haute-Yamaska (SÉTHY), which promotes conservation initiatives around the Haute-Yamaska region. The report, released Feb. 11, included an inventory of existing natural spaces and threatened animal and plant species in the area, listed areas that should be prioritized for conservation based on a point system and laid out detailed recommendations for conservation, focusing on wetlands and forested areas.

The report found that 12 per cent of the municipality’s territory is made up of wetlands and 35 per cent of forested areas; the latter are particularly at risk from expanding residential development. Preserving the continuity of forest corridors, the report’s authors note, is particularly important for protecting vulnerable wildlife.

The report is the latest among several steps the town has taken to protect green space and forested areas in recent years, according to town spokesperson Marilynn Guay Racicot. With support from Appalachian Corridor, she said in a statement, Waterloo is in the process of having its lots south of Lake Waterloo recognized as a nature reserve. In April 2024, councillors adopted the 2024-2028 sustainable development action plan, which prioritized increasing the area of ​​natural environments subject to conservation measures. The town has also mandated SÉTHY to create an ecological inventory of town land over the next few months.

The SÉTHY report listed eight recommendations, including placing a moratorium on the destruction of natural environments, making it easier to integrate elements of the sustainable development action plan into the revised urban plan, restricting the list of allowable uses for green spaces, passing a bylaw to preserve 50 to 70 per cent of green space in areas earmarked for development, allowing the town to use its right of preemption to preserve ecologically sensitive areas, modifying other development bylaws and adding tax incentives for conservation.

The report also laid out a list of vulnerable plant and animal species present in Waterloo, including the threatened least bittern, wood thrush and chimney swift, the serpentine tortoise and the monarch butterfly.

Mayor Jean-Marie Lachapelle said the town intends to implement the report’s recommendations “as much as possible.”

“Waterloo is growing, and it is essential to preserve our natural environments, which are the richness and appeal of our part of the country. Since they are still numerous and of high quality, we have a great opportunity to act now. Without waiting for our conservation plan to be developed, we will take steps to protect several lots belonging to the city to set an example and ensure their preservation for future generations,” Lachapelle said. The report and the forthcoming inventory “give us an idea of where the [ecologically sensitive] areas are” so that when a developer approaches the town with a plan, the municipality can negotiate. 

“The biggest challenge going forward is to manage progress,” he said. “There’s a lot of construction in the town – where are we going, what are we heading toward? This will allow us to make enlightened decisions.”

Lachapelle estimated that the two SÉTHY reports would cost the town a total of about $30,000.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Mandatory mask-wearing is back until further notice in hospitals, long-term care centres and rehabilitation centres in the Estrie region as flu cases surge.

Masks are obligatory for staff and visitors in general and specialized hospital centers including emergency rooms, oncology, hemodialysis and mental health hospitalization units;

rehabilitation units; and in long-term care and residential centres (CHSLDs), seniors’ homes and alternative homes.

The CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS said in a statement on Feb. 13 that long-term care centres in the  greater Sherbrooke area are most affected, but the situation was worrisome enough to reinstate mask-wearing in health facilities elsewhere in the region.

Masks are not required in outpatient centres, offices or common areas such as hospital cafeterias, nor are they required in CLSCs or other facilities.

On Feb. 14, public health director Dr. Luc Boileau and Santé Québec deputy vice president Robin Marie Coleman briefed reporters on the evolution of the spread of respiratory viruses around the province.

“The good news is that COVID-19 and respiratory syncytial virus [test positivity rates] are continuing to drop. The bad news is that the influenza A curve is still rising,” Boileau said. “A few weeks ago, we said the peak would arrive around the first or second week of February. We are in the second week of February, so the data we have over the next week will allow us to determine whether it’s continuing to rise or if it’s stagnating or falling off.”

Boileau said this flu season is the worst since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and one of the worst in the last ten years. He said the Estrie and greater Montreal regions were the most affected, with positivity rates above 40 per cent, although there was no immediately obvious epidemiological reason why this was the case.

Boileau said elderly people and young children face the highest risk of serious complications from the flu. He encouraged the general population, especially health care workers, future parents and people with chronic illnesses, to take advantage of free flu vaccination, available at most local pharmacies via ClicSanté. “It’s not too late!”

He noted that elderly and at-risk people can get a flu or COVID test at their local pharmacy and receive medication to stave off complications.

He advised people with the flu to isolate at home unless absolutely necessary. “If you must leave home, to go to work or what have you, wear a mask while you have symptoms. You can be contagious seven or eight days after the beginning of symptoms. It’s not measles, but it’s still a very contagious virus. Be careful, wash your hands, cough in your elbow and take all of the other measures you’ve been hearing about.” He also suggested that people who are members of vulnerable groups wear masks in crowded environments, although the health ministry has no plans to impose additional mask requirements.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

A Shefford farmer and a local cycling booster are hoping a new planned mountain bike trail between Shefford and Bromont will help get young people interested in farming and the outdoors and build bridges between the two communities.

Paul Sauvé of GNR Shefford plans to develop and maintain the trail or trails – described in an information document as seven to 15 kilometres of paths for beginner and intermediate mountain bikers – on his land, potentially using trails already accessed by snowmobilers in the winter.

“We came to the realization that rather than fighting the sprawl that’s going on, we wanted to cohabit in harmony … much like Europe where you have farms in the middle of the village,” Sauvé said, noting that in parts of the United States, it’s common for biking trails to cross private land. “We have 42 acres of land and we’ve given access to the snowmobile club for the last 23 years. We could fence it off, or [open it to traffic] and let kids and older people and people who want to go biking have fun with it. There has been a bit of a rivalry [between Bromont and Shefford] over the past few years, but with cycling, you break barriers.”

A quarter century ago, the Sauvé family took over a farm that has been in operation since 1797. Paul Sauvé hopes the children and families cycling across his property will enjoy the landscape and start conversations about sustainable agriculture and “what it is to farm.”

“We’re giving access to our land and hoping others will follow suit,” he added. “Just make sure you pick up your trash and everyone behaves themselves.”

Sauvé’s neighbour, Louis Barbeau, is the director general of the Fédération québécoise des sports cyclistes and a major backer of the project. He says the proposed trails would draw visitors from around the region and allow beginning bikers to have access to easier terrain than the trails in Bromont or on nearby Mount Gale. “If you go to Bromont or Mount Gale you need experience, and not everyone has that,” he said. “Everyone should have a place to practice cycling safely.”

Barbeau said discussions had taken place with stakeholders including the Bromont National Cycling Centre (BNCC). According to the information document, the current project hinges on getting authorization from Hydro-Québec and the Quebec Ministry of Transportation (MTQ) to cross land owned by the utility and use an existing tunnel under Highway 10. He also hopes to get the municipalities of Bromont and Shefford involved. “The main challenge is to get all of the stakeholders together – I don’t know if there will be other private landowners involved, but the municipalities and Hydro, definitely. Before thinking about the money, we need to make sure everyone is on board.”

Barbeau said he hopes the first cyclists will be able to hit the trail by 2026. “There’s some work to be done, but it’s not extensive – a bit of land clearing and maybe some lean-tos and signs. Once everyone is on board and all the administrative things are sorted out, I think it’s something

that can be realized in six months.”

Hydro-Québec regional affairs advisor Ève-Marie Jodoin could not immediately comment on the bike trail project. Isabelle Dorais, a spokesperson for the MTQ, said the ministry “had not received any requests” in conjunction with the project. Audrey Leboeuf, a public affairs advisor for the town of Bromont, said no one from the municipality could comment in detail for the time being because the project was “too embryonic.” 

Shefford Mayor Éric Chagnon told the BCN no one involved with the project had approached the town yet. He noted that a new bike trail linking Waterloo, Shefford and Brome Lake had opened last May as part of the Estriade bike trail network. “Before I say anything [about the Shefford-Bromont trail], I would need to know more – what would the trail be, how long it would be, where the funding would come from – but clearly, we’re at a point where biking is important for tourism and for our economy,” he said.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The mayors of Sutton, Brome Lake and Cowansville are asking Hydro-Québec to reconsider the location planned for the new Brome substation.

The substation, which is expected to be built in 2027, will replace the existing Sutton and Knowlton substations and provide electricity to Sutton, Brome Lake and Cowansville. While its exact location has not been determined, Hydro-Québec has narrowed down the area under study to a swath of rural land near the boundaries of Brome Lake, Brome village and Sutton.

Brome Lake Mayor Richard Burcombe, Sutton Mayor Robert Benoit and Cowansville Mayor Sylvie Beauregard have been openly sceptical of the proposed location.

“The three municipalities agree that Hydro-Québec’s current proposed site targets a particularly bucolic area where the presence of this substation, much larger than the previous ones, and new towers up to 45 m high, risk disfiguring a landscape that makes our region so attractive,” according to a statement released by the town of Sutton.

Benoit and his counterparts are asking Hydro-Québec to consider another location. “The Pearson sandpit site along Route 104, between Cowansville and Brome Lake, ticks all the boxes in terms of the project’s social and political acceptability,” Benoit said. “It would eliminate the need to build the transmission line to Sutton Junction; It would use an already disturbed site; It would benefit from access to a major roadway [and] it would preserve the environment and landscapes,” Benoit said. Brome Mayor William Miller also said he was “looking for answers as to why the site along Route 104 would not be adequate.”

The Pearson sandpit site is north of the current area of study, and would involve an additional transmission line being built through Brigham and East Farnham, according to Brigham mayor Steven Neil. Neil said he has been “blindsided” by his counterparts’ insistence on the Pearson sandpit site. He said it would involve building pylons and transmission lines through agricultural zones in Brigham.

Neil said that at a Jan. 30 meeting with Hydro-Québec, representatives from the utility explained why the Pearson sandpit site wasn’t viable. The three mayors “know why it’s not a usable site,” he said. “Brome Lake, Sutton and Cowansville are the three places that need the electricity, but none of them believe it should have any impact on their municipality. No one wants this substation in their backyard, but [they] need it, not us. If you want electricity, you have to put on your big-person pants and accept responsibility for it.”

Hydro-Québec regional affairs advisor Ève-Marie Jodoin referred the BCN to a Feb. 13 statement, which said Hydro-Québec was “currently conducting detailed analysis” on the sandpit site.

“This analysis will clarify whether the installation of the future substation at this location is technically viable and, if so, to what extent,” Jodoin said in the statement. “To date, Hydro-Québec has evaluated a dozen sites inside and outside the target reception area for the location of the future substation. The sandpit site is located a few kilometres north of the reception area. This perimeter is determined based on several variables to allow the future network to ensure quality of service and meet the long-term electricity needs of the population.”

“Hydro-Québec has said they are ready to go back to work and seriously consider the sandpit,” Benoit said. “If that site doesn’t work, I’m convinced we can find another site that will have less of an impact on our landscapes. Everyone agrees that we need this line, but we can’t put it just anywhere.”

Jodoin said the results of the analysis would be shared with local elected officials “in the coming days.” She said local residents were invited to an online information session about the project on Feb. 26.

Neil said he is confident that the utility “will do their job, look at the options and choose the one with the least impact, in a non-partisan way.” He encouraged landowners potentially affected by the project to attend the webinar and make sure Hydro-Québec was aware of any ecologically sensitive areas on their property. “There’s nothing else you can do, except wait.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Farnham residents who don’t have easy access to a car will be able to get around town using a taxi-on-demand service starting this spring, Mayor Patrick Melchior told the BCN.

Starting in early March, if all goes according to plan, residents will be able to call a single phone number at least 30 minutes before a planned trip and get a taxi to pick them up at any one of 40 stops around town. Teens and adults will pay a cash fare of $4 each way or use tickets bought in advance at the town hall; children 13 and under ride free with a paying adult. The service will be available from 6:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Although the exact locations of stops are yet to be determined, Melchior’s goal is that riders won’t have to walk further than 150 metres to reach a stop.

“This is something I’ve wanted to do for a number of years, and it’s something people want,” said the mayor. “People are coming here from the city, and our population is growing; there were 8,300 of us when I first took office [in 2018] and now there are 11,200. I think it’s important – for example, if you’re a single parent who doesn’t have a car and you need to go do your shopping, you’re going to be able to do it for eight dollars.”

The taxi service is a one-year pilot project being put in place in partnership with the MRC Brome-Missisquoi. The full budget has yet to be released as of this writing; Farnham councillors voted to approve $50,000 in municipal funding for the project. The MRC will contribute to the project through the Laboratoire d’innovation en mobilité intelligente territoriale (LI-MIT; smart territorial mobility innovation lab) initiative.

Farnham is the third municipality in the MRC to launch a taxi-on-demand program. The city of Cowansville has had a similar program for several years. Late last month, Bromont announced plans to launch its own project; Mayor Louis Villeneuve previously told the BCN he hoped the first on-demand taxis in Bromont would be in service by late February or early March.

“The [taxi-on-demand] program seems to work well in Cowansville. They’ve had it for a few years and their population was 12,000 when they started theirs; we have a population of over 11,000 now. We’re inspired by them,” Melchior said. He said other transit projects, such as a shuttle bus service, were “not out of the question” if data from the taxi pilot project showed they might be in demand. “We want to see the demand for this [taxi pilot project] first.”

Melchior said he hopes to arrive at a point where it’s possible to live a full life without a car in Brome-Missisquoi. “One of my dreams is to have a [taxi-on-demand] circuit that covers the whole of Brome-Missisquoi, and I don’t think I’m the only person with that dream – we’re working on it.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Brome Lake Mayor Richard Burcombe has said he is opposed to the location proposed by Hydro-Québec for a new electrical substation.

The precise location of the substation – which would be built in 2027 and replace smaller existing substations in Knowlton and Sutton – has not been determined. When the new substation was first proposed in early 2024, Hydro-Québec was considering locations across a large swath of Brome-Missisquoi, including the town of Brome Lake, Brome village, Sutton, Cowansville, Dunham, Brigham and East Farnham. The current “reception zone” (zone d’accueil) where the substation may be built has been narrowed down to a smaller area straddling Brome Lake, Brome Village and Sutton, according to a map available on the Hydro-Québec website.

“The site targeted by Hydro-Québec for the construction of its substation borders the towns of  Brome Lake and Sutton, in the Sutton Junction sector,” Town of Brome Lake officials explained in a statement. “Under this scenario, feeder lines supported by towers up to 45 metres high would cross part of the West Brome area to the new substation.”

Hydro-Québec regional affairs advisor Ève-Marie Jodoin said the project was first presented to stakeholders in March 2024. “We exposed the reasons we have to modernize and the areas we need to reach,” she said. Public consultations were also held in June and December 2024. However, Burcombe said he found out from constituents, not from the public utility, that Sutton Junction had been singled out as the future home of the substation, and a list of questions sent to the utility by the MRC has not received an answer. “They come to town and they consult, and people ask questions, but they don’t get many answers,” he said. “We’re waiting for Hydro to come back with answers.” An additional webinar for citizens is planned for Feb. 26, and another stakeholder meeting is planned for March, according to the mayor.

Burcombe said he recognized the need for the modernization of the electric network, but was concerned about the visual impact of the substation in an area frequented by tourists and cyclists, its impact on nearby wetlands, forested areas and farms and its social acceptability in the area. “It would ruin a part of our forest…when you have 150-foot metallic pylons installed,” he said. “No one wants to have this in their backyard, and I can’t blame them, especially in an area where there’s beautiful countryside.”

“I’m opposed to the choice of location as presented by Hydro-Québec and ask them to propose a more appropriate alternative,” Burcombe said. “The relocation and consolidation of the Knowlton and Sutton downtown stations into a single, larger station is good news in itself, but it must not be at the expense of the environment and the rural, bucolic character of our territory … It is Hydro-Québec’s job to come up with alternative locations. I understand that they are limited in the choices they can make, but it’s 2025 and technology has come a long way.”

The BCN requested comment from the town of Sutton but had not received a response by press time.

“We’re very much aware that this is a beautiful area with a lot of sensitive considerations,” said Jodoin. “That’s why we’re going step by step. We’re open to hearing suggestions about how we could make this project better.

The Feb. 26 French-language webinar is open to the public and will take place from 7 to 9 p.m. Those interested in participating can register at hydroquebec.com/projets/brome. Jodoin said Hydro-Québec recognized the need to inform the local anglophone population about the project in English, but was still “trying to validate” what English services it was allowed to provide under Law 14 (formerly Bill 96). “We’ll find the best way we can to serve the anglophone population,” she said. “We do want to be able to answer questions in English.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The city of Bromont is planning to test out a taxi-on-demand service for trips within the municipality in partnership with the MRC of Brome-Missisquoi (MRCBM), Bromont Mayor Louis Villeneuve confirmed last week. Villeneuve told the BCN the city was hoping the first taxis would be rolling by February or March.

“This new sustainable initiative, deployed jointly with the MRCBM, will allow Bromont residents to travel via a new on-demand public transit service in our six districts,” Villeneuve said.

City officials said in a statement that the yearlong pilot project “aims to test a new service model … specifically adapted to the needs of citizens.” The stated objective is to “improve the mobility of residents in the territory and to improve the public transit service offer.” The pilot project will be funded by a $300,000 grant from the MRCBM and a $50,000 contribution from the city.

People who want to use the on-demand taxi service will have to reserve trips at least 30 minutes in advance and wait at any one of 40 predetermined stops around the city for their taxi. Each trip will cost $4. “We’ll follow [the rollout] closely, collect data on buy-in and on who is using the service the most and where the in-demand areas are,” said Villeneuve.

“Public transit worthy of the name”

Bromont has launched several pilot projects in recent years aimed at increasing public transit use. In summer 2021, the city trialled a free downtown shuttle bus service. At the time, Villeneuve said he hoped  a taxi-on-demand service would be running by 2022, with a regular bus service in place in 2024. There were also longer-term plans for a commuter transport service in collaboration with major employers and an app-based car-sharing program. However, the program ran into a roadblock when several early calls for tenders received no bids, and it was ultimately shelved.

In June 2024, the municipality and the MRCBM announced they were working with the Green Municipal Fund of the Canadian Federation of Municipalities to roll out an app-based car-sharing service; when asked about the implementation of that project, Villeneuve referred a request for comment to the MRCBM.

“We tested the bus with MOBI and now we’re trying something different,” Villeneuve said. “We’d like to bring in shuttles and car-sharing over the longer term. We have a bunch of initiatives to give us public transit worthy of the name. There’s a lot of trial and error in life, and I’m confident we will have results.”

Villeneuve said he believed public transportation would catch on sooner rather than later. “We are there now with the number of citizens and the industrial park… we have a lot of young people and a lot of older people who don’t necessarily drive. People will find [public transit] practical and I think that will encourage people to use it.”

MRCBM communications co-ordinator Mariève Lebrun said more information on the project would be available in February.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The town of Bromont has no concrete plans to approve a 111-unit affordable housing development in Adamsville, Mayor Louis Villeneuve has said.

Several dozen Adamsville residents attended the Jan. 13 council meeting to applaud the tabling of a petition against the development, which they argued would create congestion and parking difficulties, contribute to school overcrowding and limit current residents’ access to green space. The petition received over 600 signatures from residents of a neighbourhood with less than 800 households. In a later interview with the BCN, Villeneuve said no such project had been tabled.

Villeneuve said the city had sent a letter to the Quebec government before the holidays supporting a grant request by Granby-based co-op Holocie for an affordable housing development in Bromont. Contrary to what was stated in the petition, Villeneuve said city council had not passed a resolution in favour of the project. “We sent a letter to say we supported the request for funding that they were making to the Quebec government, but that we didn’t know the details,” he said. “They came to speak with us later to say they had their eye on a piece of land where it was possible to do 111 units. I have not heard back from them since and there is no such project tabled. There’s no timeline since there’s no project.”

Villeneuve said the city, which recently appointed an affordable housing point person to develop a housing strategy and make recommendations to council, would not approve a project before “taking the time to look at it with residents.”

“For the residents, clearly, 111 units makes no sense,” he added.

Holocie CEO Jean-François Arsenault said the company is waiting for a response to a request for funding before proposing a concrete project in Bromont. “We’re waiting for the government to get back to us and then we’ll look at feasibility; the timeline depends on the funding,” he said, adding that the company did not have its eye on a specific plot of land in town. He said there were “still a lot of things to do” before determining where and whether a potential development would be built. “The projects are for the community, so we want to meet the community’s needs,” he said.

Longtime Bromont resident Jean-François Rousseau launched the petition when he heard about the potential development from a neighbour. He emphasized that he is not opposed to affordable housing. “It’s the number – 111 units – that makes no sense,” he said. “That’s enormous for the land that’s available, and on top of things, it’s an isolated piece of land. The only services nearby are a dépanneur and a school.” Rousseau said potential residents would have to have multiple cars to access services in town, increasing traffic congestion, creating parking challenges and potentially forcing cash-strapped families to buy another car.

“I think that if you have a vacant lot next door to you, you always run the risk that someone will build something, but it’s the size of the project that creates unanimous [opposition],” said Rousseau, a financial planner. “When we were circulating the petition, we had fewer than five refusals … and no one looked us in the eye and said, ‘Hey, what a good idea.’”

“We’ve been told, ‘You might be reacting too quickly,’ but sometimes things can move quickly with urban planning,” he said. “We wanted to make the city aware that 111 units, that just makes no sense. Even if there’s no project tabled, we wanted to make them think. I think the mayor and the district councillor [Coun. Jocelyne Corbeil] had the right reaction when they said, with more than 630 signatures in a neighbourhood with 750 voters, something’s not working. … There’s funding for housing and there’s a huge need for housing, but let’s take the time to do things right.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

A Quebec Superior Court judge has ordered the town of Sutton to grant a permit for a rehabilitation facility for women recovering from addiction to move into the Villa Châteauneuf in Sutton.

At the Jan. 28 hearing, Judge Gaétan Dumas ordered the municipality to emit the permit within two weeks. Élaine Francis, a lawyer for the town, told the court the town would respect the order.

The Villa Châteauneuf, a former convent and school, was built in 1911 on land donated by local philanthropist Eugene Dyer, who stipulated that it should be used for the education of the francophone and anglophone population of Sutton. In 1971, it was transferred from the Soeurs de la Présentation de Marie religious order to the Foyers de la Charité, a network of religious retreat centres-slash-utopian communities 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, elderly laypeople who shared all their goods in common, moved out in September of that year.

Since then, the complex of eight buildings, worth an estimated $15 million in 2023, has sat empty, overseen by a nonprofit board. The board initially planned to donate the complex to Le Chaînon, an organization for domestic violence survivors, before deciding to rent it out to La Passerelle, Quebec’s only residential rehab facility exclusively for women. The court order allowing La Passerelle to move in “allows us to have an occupant that will pay the fees, keep the building insurable, and maintain it,” said board chairperson Victor Marchand.

Amélie Lemieux, the director of La Passerelle, said the organization’s current facility in Saint-Simon-de-Bagot is bursting at the seams. “At the moment, we have 24 beds in nine rooms, people are sleeping two to four to a room and we are refusing two people a day,” she said. “At the Villa, we would have 40 private rooms.” She emphasized that women participating in the rehab program would be there voluntarily and would not be able to leave the property unsupervised. Moving to the larger facility, she added, would allow La Passerelle to hire several local staff members and potentially offer bilingual programs.

“It would have been nice if they had come to see us”

However, the legal dispute over the Villa’s fate is far from over. In court filings, both the Diocese of Saint-Hyacinthe and Ann and Diana Dyer, heirs of Eugene Dyer and administrators of the Dyer family trust, have raised concerns about the legitimacy of the nonprofit board as stewards of the property; the diocese had sought an injunction to keep the town from granting the occupancy permit. If a judge finds in favour of either party, the property could revert to the diocese or to the Dyer family trust. The Town of Sutton has also invoked its right of pre-emption to match any offer made on the property; after initially proposing to move the town’s community centre there, Mayor Robert Benoit has more recently floated the idea of using the villa, which has dozens of small, private bedrooms, to house temporary foreign workers and serve as a community hub along the lines of the former Maison Mère convent in Baie-Saint-Paul. He was adamant that the city had no plans to pursue for-profit residential development on the site.

The permit issued to La Passerelle is temporary, valid until such time as the other legal challenges are resolved – which, according to Benoit Chabot, a lawyer representing the nonprofit board, could take two years or more.

“If another judge decides the diocese has a right to decide what will happen to the building, then we’ll have to leave,” Lemieux said. “We know that’s hanging over our head, but we’re moving forward and we have confidence in the project.”

Benoit said he had not spoken with Lemieux or Marchand about La Passerelle. “We have zero information about La Passerelle – is it a halfway house? Will there be security measures? Are the [participants] going to be able to leave the property? Are citizens going to be able to come onto the property and mix with them? It would have been nice if La Passerelle had come to see us.”

Lemieux said La Passerelle would “definitely develop information sessions to allow people [from the community] to come and ask their questions” if the move – still conditional on approval from the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS – goes ahead.

“Just the first inning”

The mayor said the legal dispute over the Villa’s long-term fate is “just in the first inning.”

“What I really regret is how this has divided Sutton,” he said. “It is polarizing, and there are people who are for and against it for all sorts of reasons. There’s no space to find a compromise that will be acceptable to everyone. We’re trying to defuse the situation … in a context where there’s a lot of misinformation.”

Benoit said the town plans to hold information sessions on its own project for the Villa over the next few weeks. 

The BCN contacted lawyers for the Dyer family and the Diocese of Saint-Hyacinthe but had not received a response by press time.

By Ruby Pratka

Local. Journalism Initiative

Anglophones make up between 10 and 16 per cent of the Quebec population, but only between 1 and 3 per cent of civil servants – a number which has remained stubbornly low since at least the 1970s. A Université de Montréal social psychology professor believes making anglophones a protected group through the provincial government’s Equal Access Employment Program (EAEP) may go some way toward addressing the representation gap.

Richard Bourhis, emeritus professor of social psychology at the Université de Montréal, has written extensively on language and bilingualism in society. In a new research paper published by Concordia University’s Quebec English-Speaking Communities Research Network (QUESCREN), he makes a case for designating English speakers as a protected group under the EAEP alongside women, Indigenous people, members of visible minorities, applicants whose first language is neither French nor English, and people with certain disabilities.

The EAEP, established in 2001, is overseen by the Quebec human rights commission (Commission pour les droits de la personne et de la jeunesse; CDPDJ) and covers hiring practices at 338 government agencies, throughout the health, social services, law enforcement and public education networks; its mandate also covers 71 municipalities, eight transit agencies and 25 crown corporations. Under the EAEP, if two candidates of equivalent skill, knowledge and experience are competing for a position and one is from a protected group and one is not, preference will be given to the applicant from the protected group. Bourhis cites data indicating that the EAEP has helped improve minority representation in the civil service, particularly among visible minority employees, whose representation rose from 2.7 per cent to 11.9 per cent between 2009 and 2022. Bourhis hopes anglophone representation will receive a similar boost if anglophones are included in the EAEP.

“If we succeed in including anglophones in the Quebec public administration [in greater numbers], it will provide more job opportunities and encourage future generations of anglophones to stay in this province,” Bourhis said. “It will also help anglophones in all parts of Quebec to get better services in English from the public sector, if there are more bilingual people. It’s time to add anglophones as an equity-deserving group.” He believes increasing the representation of anglophones in the public service will have a snowball effect. “Anglophones are afraid to apply for these types of jobs because of fear of rejection, because they don’t feel secure enough in a majority French setting … the only way to [combat] that is to have more anglophone representation,” he said.

“Over the past 25 years, many people have said, ‘We would like to have more anglophones in the public service,’ and they have made more efforts, but these efforts were not successful and they were not systemic – they were more pious statements. If you don’t have real targets for inclusion, it won’t happen by itself,” he added.

He acknowledged that in the current political climate, it may be difficult to convince the National Assembly – which would have to approve the addition of a new target group – that anglophones should be considered an equity-deserving group. “We don’t know how this will pan out – we never know why parties take up causes or not – but the point is, let’s put this on the table, because it’s never been done before.”

CDPDJ spokesperson Halimatou Bah told the BCN the addition of anglophones to the EAEP was not currently under consideration, and a separate access-to-employment program existed for anglophones in the civil service.

“For a group of people to be considered one of the groups targeted by the law, people belonging to a group must have historically been victims of discrimination in employment, and they must be underrepresented in the job market,” she said. “For English-speaking people in Quebec, it has been demonstrated that they are underrepresented in government agencies and departments. However, it has not been demonstrated that English-speaking people in Quebec have historically been victims of discrimination in the job market in Quebec,” she said.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The City of Cowansville plans to build a new aquatic centre to replace the current aging building, city officials confirmed on Jan. 24.

“Built in 1967, the Cowansville Aquatic Centre served the community with distinction for 58 years. However, the marked wear and tear of the mechanical and electrical systems in addition to the structure requires us to reflect on its future,” Patricia Néron, communications co-ordinator for the municipality, said in a statement.

The municipality had previously planned to try to renovate the building. However, that option is now off the table. “Over the last few months, the city has evaluated the possibility of a new building, which is now the only possible option,” said Néron.

In 2021, the city of Cowansville obtained a recreational infrastructure support grant from the Ministry of Education, covering two-thirds of the cost of a renovation and expansion project then estimated at $7.77 million. Amid inflation and delays attributed to the pandemic, the province upped its support to a total of $6.7 million, but “the condition of the building has proven to be more critical than expected,” Néron said. Last year, after an additional assessment, the city estimated the cost of renovations at between $20 and $22 million. Mayor Sylvie Beauregard has said the new aquatic centre may cost as much as $30 million, but “we know there have been [equivalent] projects that have been done for less [and] we’ll obviously work on keeping costs down.”

The aquatic centre offers public swim sessions, swimming lessons and lifesaving courses for adults and children from across Brome-Missisquoi, and is used for swimming classes, extracurriculars and sport-études activities by Massey-Vanier High School and local primary schools. It’s also home to the Équipe de natation de Cowansville, a competitive swim club with more than 160 members. It is expected to stay open while the new facility is being built.

Anouchka Guillemette-Pincince, director of recreation and cultural services at the municipality, said the city is “in front of a blank page” with the new facility, and plans to conduct a needs assessment. “We want to determine what we need, align it with the budget of the city, then apply [to the Quebec government] to modify the project so that we can keep our grant. Nothing is set in stone.”

Guillemette-Pincince said she expects the needs assessment to take three to four months. Ideally, calls for tenders for plans and estimates would move forward in the fall. “Under the terms of our grant, the whole project would need to be finished by [the end of] 2028, but there is nothing definitive.” She said the city has accepted an offer to purchase a 31-acre plot of land near Massey-Vanier High School where the new aquatic centre could be built, although that purchase has yet to be finalized. She said the city planned to share information with residents on its website as the project moved forward.

“The construction of a new aquatic centre represents a unique opportunity to ensure a sustainable and functional facility for generations to come. We are undertaking a rigorous process to ensure that this project reflects the needs of our citizens while respecting our financial capabilities,” Beauregard said in a statement.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

For the first time in nearly 40 years, the town of Sainte-Sabine has a new mayor.

Laurent Phoenix, 81, who was first elected mayor of the small municipality next to Farnham in 1987, resigned at the end of November. Members of the town council, called upon to name an interim mayor until the fall 2025 elections, elected second-term councillor Vicky Poulin to the position by acclamation.

Poulin is an engineer and mother of two who grew up in Stanbridge Station and has lived in Sainte-Sabine for the last 16 years. She first took an interest in local governance as a member of a primary school parents’ committee. After an unsuccessful run for town council in 2013, she was named to the town’s urban planning consultative committee. She was elected to council on her second try in 2017.

Poulin had served as acting mayor on a number of occasions over the last two years as Phoenix dealt with health issues and cared for his wife, who has since passed away. “I was a little more present during that period, because he did have to step away. I was acting mayor, but everyone on council was very available, everyone did their part. The plan was for him to finish his term, and that’s not how it happened, but since the idea [of stepping down] came from him, it was easier.”

“It’s a great thing to have access to someone like him – he’s a mentor, a great resource person,” she added.

The town’s budget and infrastructure plan, which were passed before the holidays, are not yet publicly available as of this writing. Poulin, a civil engineer by training, said she wanted to take advantage of her year as mayor to build on her predecessor’s legacy and modernize some of the ways the municipality communicates with citizens, while maintaining a personable leadership style. “You still do things the old-fashioned way here – when something’s going on, the councillors come and knock on your door…and that’s something I want to keep,” she said. 

The town’s 2025 budget and infrastructure plan, passed before the holidays, were not yet available for public consultation as of this writing. Poulin said her efforts in the year ahead will be forced on maintaining existing infrastructure, ensuring the town “gets its money’s worth” from contractors and looking at long-established practices with “a new pair of eyes.”

“Mr. Phoenix, roads and infrastructure were his thing. As an engineer, I can’t say I’m against that…but maintaining infrastructure is a big challenge these days. We have 55 kilometres of roads here; that’s a lot for a small municipality.  Everything has gone up over the past few years, and we don’t want to add to people’s tax burden either. Government grants don’t follow [inflation]… and we’re not always eligible for the grants.  We have to do less with the same amount of money. That’s the big challenge.”

Poulin said she hasn’t decided whether she will run for a full term this fall. “This is a great opportunity I have, to test out [being mayor]. Over the next few months, I’ll see how it works.” 

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Dunham Mayor Pierre Janecek is attempting to reassure citizens that the town’s new proposed fire station will cost less than anticipated after more than 300 people signed a register calling for a referendum on a planned $7.9-million loan to finance the project.

On Dec. 12, 327 residents signed a register calling for a vote. On Jan. 14, rather than moving forward with the referendum, councillors took the proposed loan off the table. Janecek told the BCN he expects councillors to vote on a new, smaller proposed loan by the end of March.

“The first bid we had a year ago was $7.7 million, and when we did a new estimate, it was $1.4 million less, so we’re restarting the project,” Janecek said, adding that lower interest rates and an unexpectedly high number of competitive bids have helped bring costs down. He also expects to defer some planned infrastructure projects, including the purchase of a new fire truck, to be able to move ahead with the fire station project without raising taxes.

“Our old station is obsolete, and it’s a question of time before the CNESST [Quebec workplace safety administration] condemns it, because we don’t have a decontamination room and our trucks are parked like sardines. It’s a converted car garage which was never intended to serve as a fire station,” he said, adding that a fire truck clipped the concrete wall of the station after a recent call and caused further damage. “If the old fire station was adequate, we wouldn’t need another.”

The fire station will be “larger than the one we have” and feature modern decontamination and washing facilities. Janecek argued that the proposed new station would be “good for the next 50 years” and the presence of an up-to-code fire station would bring residents’ insurance premiums down while having a minimal impact on residents’ tax bills. He anticipated that additional residential developments planned in the next few years would also reduce the burden on current taxpayers.

“Some people understand what we’re doing and some don’t, and that’s a shame,” said Janecek, a third-term mayor who hasn’t decided whether he’s running again. “We explain the best we can, and some people are satisfied and some aren’t. You can’t please everybody.”

Janecek said the project was expected to go ahead as originally planned on a slightly smaller budget. “The only thing that is changing is the amount [of the loan].” He said councillors would need to vote on the loan by the end of March so the municipality could apply for a provincial grant covering 73 per cent of the cost. 

He said that if the town’s grant request and the new loan are both approved, construction on the new fire station should begin this summer and finish in 2026.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Councillors in Saint-Armand approved the town’s 2025 budget on Dec. 30, after delaying adoption by two weeks to review last-minute changes, Mayor Caroline Rosetti told the BCN.

The 2025 tax rates were expected to be adopted at the Jan. 13 council meeting – 40.9 cents per $100 of assessed value for residential property and 38.5 cents for agricultural property. Houses adjacent to agricultural property, Rosetti clarified, will be taxed at the residential rate – the agricultural rate only applies to land and buildings used for agriculture.

Rosetti said residential property values rose by 66 per cent and agricultural property values by 56 per cent on the most recent tax roll. “A lot of people are confusing an increase in property values with an increase in taxes,” she said. “We lowered the tax rate, but it will probably result in a higher payment because property values are so high.” The town expects the average homeowner’s property tax bill to rise by about five per cent. Residents will be able to pay property taxes in five instalments this year.

“If people are not happy with their property value, they have until April 30 to contest it with the MRC,” the mayor added.

Major investments planned for the coming year include the hiring of a new fire prevention specialist, whose services will be shared with Frelighsburg, Pike River, Notre-Dame de Stanbridge and Stanbridge East. “We need someone to validate the intervention plans on all the farms … so if firefighters have to intervene, they know where the fuel tanks are, and that sort of thing,” Rosetti said.

Water quality is another ongoing issue in the lakeside community, which, like its neighbours, dealt with a series of blue algae (cyanobacteria) blooms over the summer.  The water treatment plant in Philipsburg is within Saint-Armand’s jurisdiction but is owned by the town of Bedford and supplies water to Bedford Township and part of Stanbridge Station. Bedford and Saint-Armand are jointly contributing to move the plant’s main water intake pipe deeper into Missisquoi Bay. “We are funding 45 per cent of that project, and we don’t want to put that burden on only 170 people [Saint-Armand residents who rely on water from the plant].” Budget documents estimate the town’s contribution in 2024 at about $134,000.

Beyond that major project, Rosetti said the town “cut back a lot” on infrastructure projects this year in an attempt to keep taxes down. The revitalization of the town’s dock is on hold “for the moment” while the municipality conducts further studies and applies for grants for long-awaited repairs. “We’re sticking with roads and essentials because of the new property value increase. We do have money for road work; we just need to plan for it. We’re thinking, ‘Let’s just keep the system rolling.’”

Rosetti encouraged anyone with concerns about the budget, the tax rate or upcoming infrastructure projects to attend council meetings and other public meetings organized by the town. “We give out a lot of information there; answering everyone’s questions one by one on social media takes a lot more time.”

Rosetti, a former town councillor, was elected mayor in a February 2023 byelection after the previous mayor, Brent Chamberlin, stepped down. After an “overwhelming” year, the mayor said she’s still undecided about running for a full term this fall. “I like working with the team [of councillors] we have now, and it will depend if they decide to run again. I’m still debating.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

When the BCN caught up with Brigham Mayor Steven Neil for a belated 2024 year-end interview on Jan. 6, Neil took the opportunity to announce the lifting of a boil-water advisory in the Guay sector. The town replaced the aging, convoluted pipe system under the 22-home residential development in September with help from a provincial program.

“As of today, at least in theory, everyone is on the new system,” Neil said. “There is no boil-water advisory in effect for the first time since 2007. I’m very glad to get that off our plate.”

Alongside the water network situation, Neil said the town’s biggest challenge over the past year was maintaining its extensive road network. “Having such a big municipality in terms of kilometres of road, finding people who could do the job at a cost we could afford was a challenge. Because we were redoing the water network in the Guay sector, our staff spent a lot of time dealing with contractors when they would have been doing other things. That stretched our resources a little thin, and we weren’t able to do some other things we wanted to do.”

“Over the past few years, we have been doing the minimum in terms of road work because of a lack of availability of staff and entrepreneurs,” he said. “We’ve been behind the curve ever since COVID, because we lost employees and it was hard to [recruit] an inspector. We now have the staff available to do what we are behind on.”

In the coming year, the municipality plans to move forward with the maintenance of wooded areas along local roads, digging ditches, chopping brush and paving work. To finance the road work, the residential tax rate will be raised by one cent per $100 of assessed value and the agricultural rate by three cents. “We needed the extra revenue to do more work than we usually do,” he said. Road work and other transportation-related expenses make up 45 per cent of the planned expenditures on the 2025 budget.

Other major expenses include increased snow removal costs and training for the town’s newly hired building inspector. The town also plans to carry out extensive lighting and road studies, with a view to replacing street lights with LED lights and creating a detailed bylaw listing the town’s roads and speed limits, “so if there is a modification or if the police need to know something, they have one document to check.”

Neil was first elected mayor of Brigham in 1999 and served until 2013. He decided not to run in 2013, but returned to office in 2017 and has led the town of about 2,450 people ever since. In 2023, he said he didn’t plan to run again. “I told people over a year ago that I was leaving – this is a preparatory budget for a new council to come in.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

West Bolton will take a “transitional” budget into 2025, Mayor Denis Vaillancourt told the BCN in a 2024 year-end interview.

“Our biggest challenge over the past year was recruitment – we had a road work co-ordinator who went on sick leave, we had the resignation of our urban planner and our director general, but with the recruitment of Monique Pépin as interim DG and secretary-treasurer, and with help from the Fédération québécoise des municipalités, we were able to put together a [2025] budget that responded to our needs,” he said.

Vaillancourt said the average West Bolton homeowner would see their tax bill rise by about three per cent, despite a decrease in the base tax rate from 36 cents per $100 of assessed value to 37.17 cents per $100. MRC service fees and waste management fees will also rise slightly, from $34 to $36.87 and from $195.00 to $205.00 respectively. “The general tax, public safety and utility costs are things we have no control over. For example, snow removal went up by 21 per cent – there are services we need that we don’t have control over,” the mayor said. 

The infrastructure plan for the coming year is centered around road repairs and renovations to the town hall. “The big projects will move forward only if we get grants,” Vaillancourt said. “We have road work [planned] on some roads that need serious repairs that we have to get done at some point.” Major projects include repairs to a number of culverts, extensive work on Chemin Stagecoach and Chemin Spicer and added signage to reflect reduced speed limits. The town also plans to conduct a septic tank inventory with a view to organizing a municipal septic tank inventory and laying the groundwork for a standardized septic waste collection system.

The current town hall is in a converted school, and it’s “very, very small” for the municipality’s present-day needs, said the mayor. Vaillancourt said no decision had yet been made on whether to build a new town hall or expand the current one. “We had a public consultation in April [2024] and we said that one of the first things we should do is make an offer on some adjacent land,” he said. “Because that land is zoned agricultural, we have to go through the Quebec agricultural protection commission. That request was sent to the MRC and we were hoping to have a response before the holidays, but our file was stuck in the mail – that should work itself out. The next step would be to apply for a grant for renovations, and we would have to have a public consultation period. Nothing is decided yet.”

Vaillancourt also said he hadn’t yet decided whether to seek a second term as mayor in this fall’s elections.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The fate of the Villa Châteauneuf in Sutton will come before a judge in Cowansville on Jan. 28.

The former convent and religious retreat centre, run for decades by the Catholic Church-affiliated Foyers de la Charité, has sat empty since September 2023, after the church shut down the Foyers de la Charité network. The nonprofit which currently oversees the Villa, Villa Châteauneuf Inc., hopes to rent it out to La Passerelle, a Montérégie-based nonprofit which operates a centre for women dealing with substance abuse. Sutton Mayor Robert Benoit has previously announced the town’s intention to use its right of preemption to take the facility over and use it as a community centre. The diocese of Saint-Hyacinthe has also signalled its intention to get involved in the case, alleging that the nonprofit does not have a legitimate right to control the building.

Lawyer Benoit Chabot of Chabot Delorme represents Villa Châteauneuf. He plans to ask the court to grant a temporary occupancy permit so that La Passerelle can use the 25-acre property while other legal questions surrounding its fate and the diocese’s involvement are resolved. “There are many things that can delay the trial; it can take two years or more [before a final verdict is reached].” He says that if the building stays unoccupied during that time, it’s likely to become uninsurable. “We want the building to be occupied to minimize the prejudice [to the building].” Chabot said he hopes the permit will be granted in the days following the hearing, to allow La Passerelle to move its operations to the villa as soon as possible.

“All the criteria [for the granting of an occupancy permit] are met — the request has been filled out, the payment has been made, the fire safety and security verifications have been made,” he added. “The town’s lawyer said there was no other reason to refuse the permit other than the opposition of the diocese.”

In November, the diocese formally requested to be party to the case, despite an earlier indication from the papal delegate of the Foyers de la Charité that the Catholic Church would not intervene. The diocese also sent a mise en demeure to the town of Sutton, asking it not to grant the occupancy permit. Chabot did not go into detail about the diocese’s concerns about the nonprofit’s legitimacy. “We obviously believe [those concerns] are unfounded,” he said. The BCN was unable to reach a representative of the Diocese of St-Hyacinthe before press time despite repeated attempts.

Villa Châteauneuf vice president Victor Marchand said he hoped the judge would grant the temporary permit quickly, although “it’s his prerogative to take the time he needs.”

“If La Passerelle can’t move in and occupy the building, there are a lot of things at stake – insurability, maintenance, heating. If we don’t get revenue at some point in a relatively short period of time, we won’t be able to maintain it … this will determine for months and possibly years to come what we’ll be able to do with the place,” he said.

The town of Sutton and its lawyer declined to comment on the case. La Passerelle executive director Amélie Lemieux was unavailable for comment.

Photo courtesy of Francois Couture

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

A Brigham vineyard has become the first vineyard in Quebec and the second in Canada to receive a certification from the U.S.-based Regenerative Organic Alliance. The certification goes beyond organic certification to assess not only a winery or farm’s crop-growing and pest control methods, but its wider environmental and social impact.

Winemaker Simon Naud took over the Vignoble de la Bauge from his parents, Alcide and Ghislaine Naud, in 1996. At the time, organic methods were not yet used there. “I was working to understand the wine and the terroir and gain our name recognition; I just wanted to produce the best wine we could at the best price. It wasn’t until later [in 2016] that I went organic,” Naud said.

As part of the organic certification process, Naud did away with chemical fertilizers on his land. Amid growing public awareness of the climate emergency, he realized he didn’t want to stop there. “Going organic is a big step, but just because we weren’t using chemicals, it doesn’t mean we were acting in the best interests of the planet,” he said. “We were using the tractor more, using gas more. We wanted to take things further and minimize our impact on the planet.”

He explained that switching to regenerative agriculture involved three major “axes” – fertilizing his vines with natural compost, encouraging biodiversity and putting more emphasis on community contributions. An independent auditor takes periodic soil samples, which are tested for “soil vitality.” The vineyard has acquired a herd of sheep to make a dent in excess vegetation and provide natural fertilizer, and installed nest boxes and begun growing berry bushes to attract birds, which eat insects. Naud also welcomes apprentice winemakers and soil scientists who want to work on research and development projects.

“We planted a biodiversity research patch – two rows of grapes and one row of berries … it creates disease barriers and you have other fruits you can ferment and produce other things with, where you can flavour the wine; that’s something I want to do,” he said. “I’ve found that people are keen to work with me and rethink agriculture together – botanists, wine lovers and urban farming experts. I enjoy talking to people, hearing what they have to say, seeing the birds in the spring and the life that pops up everywhere.”

“The oldest vineyards in Quebec are only about 40 years old,” he pointed out. “When you think about it, we have it all to rebuild and rethink, especially when we talk about adaptation to climate change. Every vineyard in this country is a lab.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Town councillors in Frelighsburg passed the municipality’s 2025 budget on Dec. 16. The 14 per cent tax increase (from 37 to 41.58 cents per $100 of assessed value for all types of property) will allow the municipality to shoulder a heavier workload, pay rising service fees, pay off loans and avoid dipping into the surplus, Mayor Lucie Dagenais explained. A presentation posted on the town website indicates that total operating expenses have gone up by nine per cent. Water, sewage and waste management fees will be determined later this winter.

“Our accountants recommend that we have six months of money in reserve in case of an emergency, and right now we’re at four months – we’re at a point where it would not be responsible to keep using the surplus,” she said, arguing that residents still pay less than those in neighbouring towns. 

Dagenais said the amount of work involved in keeping the town running has increased “tenfold” in recent years.

“For a few years now, we’ve been having human resources issues, jobs that went unfilled, issues responding to citizens’ requests and maintaining stability. [This past year] was a good year – we got an assistant treasurer, an assistant director general, a new inspector, a better organized fire department. As a small municipality, we can’t hire full-time staff, and it was difficult to find competent staff who were willing to work part time. We made some intermunicipal agreements to share staff and we have a structure now where we can be really operational,” she told the BCN. “We have more and more responsibilities – we’re asked to be more proactive in promoting civic engagement, new responsibilities in terms of fire risk coverage and protecting the environment. It’s understandable, but it requires resources; it’s something else that taxpayers pay for.”

Dagenais also noted an increase in Sûreté du Québec (SQ) service fees of nearly 11 per cent. Along with her counterparts from across the MRC, she is asking Public Safety Minister François Bonnardel to order an external analysis before confirming the increase. “We have an enormous fee rise from the SQ. “We have fewer officers and it costs more … and we’ve had a big increase in population – and we have no say in the matter; we just have to put up with it,” she said. She noted that MRC fees, insurance and auditing costs and fees for the Cowansville municipal court and the Société de protection animale des Cantons had also shot up.

On the infrastructure front, Dagenais said she hoped to launch calls for tenders for a major upgrade to the town’s water treatment plant as early as this summer. “Until that’s done, there are a lot of other things we can’t start. We can’t have new [residential] development. Once we get rid of the marshes, we can build the new fire station and municipal garage. There will be a lot of groundbreaking in the next little while.”

The first-term mayor said she would seek a second term in the upcoming election. “You learn from experience – I feel like I’ve learned a lot in the last few years and I want to use that knowledge.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

City officials in Cowansville presented the municipality’s 2025 budget at a council meeting on Dec. 16. The budget, totalling just under $37 million, will be “focused on responding to citizens’ needs and requests over the past few years,” said Mayor Sylvie Beauregard, who recently confirmed her own plans to run for a third term. She called the budget balanced, responsible and future-oriented.

According to the city’s three-year infrastructure plan, released in tandem with the budget and presented by director general Claude Lalonde, major planned investments in 2025 include upgrades to the town’s water pumping and filtration systems and ongoing work to separate the water and sewage networks (a total of nearly $4.9 million of which $4 million is expected to be paid by provincial grants), land acquisition for future use ($2.76 million), ongoing watermilfoil prevention, upgrades to lighting and walking trails in city parks, new pickleball courts, a permanent gazebo at the nature centre, the construction of an outdoor education space in Parc des Colibris as outlined in the participatory budget and the acquisition of a new garbage truck. The city is also setting aside $285,000 to fund Lake Davignon preservation efforts, and establishing a new fund for upgrades to water service ($560,000).

Longer-term projects include preparing for the city’s 150th-anniversary celebrations in 2026 and renovating the indoor aquatic centre, the only one of its kind in the municipality. Beauregard said renovating the centre, which opened in 1968, is “a very expensive operation” and a needs analysis needed to be carried out to see what form renovations might take.

In order to finance these projects, help the city pay down its debt and pay the city’s contributions to the Sûreté du Québec and MRC Brome-Missisquoi, a slight tax increase is planned for most types of property. Single-family homes and agricultural buildings will be taxed at 62.5 cents per $100 of assessed value, up from 62 cents last year. Other types of property which will be taxed at a higher rate are commercial buildings with a value under $800,000 (up from $1.740 to $1.762 per $100), commercial buildings over $800,000 (up from $1.940 to $1.964), industrial buildings under $800,000 (up from $1.760 to $1.782), industrial buildings over $800,000 ($1.960 to $1.984) and serviced vacant land ($1.24 to $1.25). The tax rate for multi-unit residential buildings with six or more units will stay unchanged at 72 cents per $100.

Flat rates for most city services will rise. Property owners paying a flat rate for water service will now pay $210 for the service itself and $180 for water treatment, up from $197 and $152 respectively. The increase, according to budget documents, “will be used to create a reserve for water services. Starting in 2024, any excess pricing over the annual cost of water services will be set aside. The accumulated amounts will be used for unforeseen events, to pay for future investment activities related to water services and thus reduce debt.”

Combined garbage removal fees will total $146 ($92 for trash and $54 for compost). The town’s compost program will be expanded to cover apartment buildings of six or more units. Recycling centre fees will rise from $32 to $37, and for those who use septic tanks, the emptying fee will go up from $65 to $99 due to a price raise by a third-party contractor. The pool levy will remain the same ($35 for above-ground pools and $70 for in-ground). For commercial properties using water counters, water and water treatment rates will creep up to a combined 95 cents per cubic metre from 90 cents. According to the budget presentation, the average single-family home will owe $65.50 more in taxes and utilities than last year, a 2.25 per cent increase.

Detailed information on the budget and three-year infrastructure plan is available on the city website.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Dunham mayor Pierre Janecek and director general Francis Bergeron presented the municipality’s budget and infrastructure plan during a Dec. 16 council meeting. The budget includes a 4.9 per cent property tax hike per $100 of assessed value for residential, agricultural and forested properties and a hike of nearly 10 per cent for industrial and non-residential buildings, and 21 per cent increase in the levy to cover road work on Chemin Noiseux and Chemin Selby. The town presented a balanced budget of $8.45 million.

The average single-family home will see a tax increase of 3.93 per cent in the village sector, 4.04 per cent in the Lac-Selby sector and 4.38 per cent for homes not connected to the town’s water and sewage network. Most service fees will also go up, with a $10 increase in the septic tank emptying fee and increases in the sewage network maintenance levy (an increase of $12.85 or 3.28 per cent in Lac-Selby and 32 cents or 0.12 per cent in the village).

“On our end, costs for everything are rising, so we’re stuck sometimes [with having to impose a tax increase],” Janecek said. He cited increases in the fees the town paid to the MRC Brome-Missisquoi, the Sûreté du Québec, the Cowansville municipal court, the SPA Brome-Missisquoi and insurance providers as among the reasons for rising expenses.  Revenues, Bergeron noted “are practically not going up at all,” with only seven new housing units added to the tax roll in the past year.

According to the presentation prepared by town officials, for every dollar of property tax revenue, $0.18 funds road work, $0.13 funds the municipal administration, $0.09 funds snow removal, $0.09 funds debt repayment, $0.08 funds the police, $0.08 funds the fire department and public safety, $0.07 waste management, $0.06 water and sewage, $0.06 urban planning, $0.05 the clerk’s office and $0.03 other allocations.

The three-year infrastructure plan was also presented. Major projects in 2025 include the construction and fitting-out of a new fire station (7.949 million) for which the call for tenders process began last week, new washrooms at Parc de l’Envol cybersecurity upgrades and a new cloud-based online system for handling citizens’ requests ($34,000), connecting the town hall and library to the water network ($25,000, intended to make it easier to use the two buildings as emergency management hubs), upgrades to walking trails ($125,000) and new sanitary facilities at Parc de l’Envol ($250,000). The town also plans to invest $1 million in road work, of which $900,000 will be covered by provincial grants.  

The BCN contacted Janecek and the Ville de Dunham to schedule a follow-up interview but did not receive a response before the holidays.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Farnham mayor Patrick Melchior presented the municipality’s 2025 budget and infrastructure plan during a brief council meeting on Dec. 9.

“We are proud to present the main points of the 2025 budget of the City of Farnham, the result of rigorous work aimed at reconciling economic development and protection of the purchasing power of citizens,” the mayor said. “We have a balanced budget, as required by law … The 2025 budget represents an increase of 7.17 per cent, or $1.45 million, compared to 2024. These funds will support our services, repay the debt linked to projects completed in 2024 and invest in our infrastructure, thanks to an ambitious three-year [infrastructure] plan.”

He said the new property tax assessment roll which came into effect this year, with an average increase of nearly 50 per cent in the values ​​of taxable properties, has “raised legitimate concerns.” Single-family home residential property values have gone up by 52.2 per cent, multi-unit residential property values by 53 per cent, agricultural property by 46.7 per cent, and serviced vacant property by nearly 60 per cent. Commercial and industrial property values have risen by 29.9 and 52 per cent respectively.

Consequently, the city has reduced tax rates and kept fees for most utilities stable. The residential tax rate has decreased from 70 cents to 47.8 cents per $100 of taxable value, and the multi-unit residential tax rate from 72 cents to 48.8 cents. Non-residential buildings are now taxed at $1.329 (previously $1.660) and industrial buildings at $1.947 (previously $1.331). The only tax rate increase applies to serviced vacant lots, now taxed at 95.6 cents (up from 88.7 cents). Additional fees of 3.43 cents per $100 and 8.59 cents per $100 will respectively go toward paying the town’s MRC and Sûreté du Québec funding obligations. Waste removal and water fees for residences will rise from $45 to $60 and $180 to $200 respectively; other utility fees will be stable. Citizens will no longer have to pay the $45 recycling fee due to a change in the way the service is funded; a new $30 fee for the removal of bulk trash will be put in place. Taxpayers will submit their payments in six instalments.

For an average home, whose value has increased from $243,300 to $369,816, he said the residential tax rate has been reduced from $0.70 to $0.478 per $100, in order to cushion the impact of the increase on residents’ finances, Melchior said.

Farnham was recently cited in a report by the Fondation Rivières as the municipality in the region most vulnerable to sewage overflows, and improving the capacity of the water treatment system is high on the town’s to-do list. “Over the next three years, we have major investments to make in infrastructure to ensure that our town stays healthy,” he said. “We don’t enjoy spending, but…it ensures we will have essentials like water … It’s heartbreaking when you see how astronomical the costs are now, but they are absolutely necessary.” He noted that scaling up the capacity of the town’s water filtration and treatment plant would have cost an estimated $900,000 in 1998, and the current cost of the project is estimated at $14 million. “That’s what happens when you put off needed investments.”

Planned investments in the coming year include studies that will go toward the planning of upgrades to the Éva-Dulude Dam, plans and estimates toward renovations to the fire station and town hall, adding  UV disinfection capability to the water treatment plant and extensive roadwork aimed at allowing upgrades to the water network. The Domaine du Sentier bike path is also slated to be completed this year, and the city intends to replace a fire truck, a garbage truck and a Zamboni. The 2025 portion of the infrastructure plan totals about $15.75 million.

Melchior has previously said he plans to seek a third term in this fall’s election. He was not available to respond to follow-up questions from the BCN. At the council meeting, he invited interested residents and property owners to consult detailed budget documents on the town website or in person at the town hall, and send questions by email to administration@ville.farnham.qc.ca

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Sutton Mayor Robert Benoit and director general Pascal Smith presented the municipality’s 2025 budget and infrastructure plan at a Dec. 18 council meeting. They described the budget as “reasonable and forward-thinking” and “something that we can be proud of.”

With tax increases ranging from -0.11% to 1.39%, depending on the sector, the Town is undoubtedly proposing one of the most moderate increases among Brome-Missisquoi municipalities,” said Robert Benoît. “We congratulate ourselves on having achieved this feat while maintaining the level and quality of our services to citizens, and pursuing structuring projects for the town’s development.” Priorities laid out in the budget presentation include improving services to citizens, investing in engineering projects that reinforce climate resilience, working toward connecting the Mountain sector to the town water network and incentivizing affordable housing.

In 2025, residential taxpayers in the Village sector will see their bills rise by an average of 1.19 per cent (serviced properties) and 1.39 per cent (properties not served by municipal water and sewer services). Taxes in the Mountain sector will be reduced by 0.11 per cent. These figures are based on the average assessed value of a residence in Sutton, which is $472,939 in 2025. Taxes are expected to decrease for properties valued at $200,000 or less in the Village sector and $500,000 or less in the Mountain sector, according to a spreadsheet provided by the city.

There will be a 2.5 per cent increase in the basic tax rate for all types of property. Additional taxes aimed at servicing debt and funding public works will rise by 1.11 per cent and 7.5 per cent respectively. Waste removal, sewage and septic tank fees will decrease, but water fees will increase by slightly less than 7 per cent (6.77 per cent or $13).

On the infrastructure front, the town plans to conduct detailed studies concerning the cost and the work involved in piping water from the Village to the Mountain sector, upgrade the current water network and work toward converting the former Calvary Church (which was an art gallery until last year) to a daycare centre and community hall.

The city once again dipped into its surplus to balance the budget, taking $300,000 from its reserves, despite having previously planned not to touch the surplus this year. “It’s not normal to use the surplus to pay our expenses; it’s not normal to use credit to pay for groceries, but [otherwise] we were not able to achieve the objective of a balanced budget,” Smith said.

Benoit said the town needed to dip into its surplus to pay fees owed to the MRC Brome-Missisquoi and the Sûreté du Québec (SQ). He said the fees for both had risen by 9.6 per cent this year. “I don’t think any municipalities can survive with [SQ fee increases] of nine or ten per cent. The other [concern] is the MRC, where over the last three years we’ve had a roughly 10 per cent increase each year on average, which doesn’t make sense because they don’t really provide services for consumers.” He said the current SQ fee structure particularly penalized wealthier parts of the MRC like Sutton and Brome Lake, which had less crime and less regular police presence but a larger tax base. Councillors voted to send protest resolutions to the MRC and the director general of the SQ denouncing the fee increases.

Other issues weighing heavily on the town’s finances were an influx of new residents and needed upgrades to the road and drainage systems. “We have major [public] works to do, and we’ll have to finance those projects. That will be a big challenge also for the next coming years,” said the mayor.

However, he said the municipality was not in a position where services would have to be cut this year. “Public works is our priority – we have 245 kilometres of roads here and we have to maintain them, especially with climate change and the melting and refreezing. We don’t want to cut back on direct services to the population. If we don’t [invest], we’ll hit a wall at a certain point and we’ll have to spend money on crisis management, and that’s going to cost a lot more.”

Benoit and his Action Sutton slate of councillors were first elected in 2021. He told the BCN he is considering running again. “My focus was to deliver the budget first, and then think about [the election] next year. It’s a big decision, because the challenges are huge … but I’m pretty proud of what we’ve accomplished.”

Detailed French-language summaries of the budget and infrastructure plan can be accessed on the city website. English versions are expected to be available after the holidays.