Courtesy of Town of Bedford
Claude Dubois

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Bedford Mayor Claude Dubois has confirmed he plans to seek another term. “The projects we started aren’t quite finished, and my wife is OK with [my decision], and I feel like it,” he told the BCN.

Dubois was first elected mayor of the town of 2,600 people in 2003; he was defeated in the 2013 election, but ran again in 2021 and easily regained his seat. Since assuming office, he has made opening a new fire station and moving the town hall two of his top priorities.

He said the fire station was essentially finished, and it would be formally inaugurated later this fall. “The fire safety standards are getting more and more strict – eventually, they might make us have firefighters on call full time. Before I came in in 2021, the city was planning an enlargement of the old fire station; I thought that was like putting a band-aid on a gaping wound. We got a grant to cover 80 per cent of the cost of a new fire station, and now we have a nice fire station in a new building that respects our architectural traditions, meets safety standards, will improve response time by five or six minutes and is set up in a way where fire trucks don’t have to back up into traffic. Everything has been thought of.”

The municipality also plans to inaugurate the new town hall this October, in a building purchased from Desjardins. The credit union will now rent offices in the back half of the building and the municipality will use the rest. Dubois said Desjardins approached the municipality last year and “said they wanted to manage money, not buildings.” The town purchased the former caisse pop for $800,000. Dubois said the new town hall, which has a parking lot, a charge point for electric vehicles, and wheelchair access, unlike its predecessor, would be much more accessible and provide the town’s growing staff with more office space. According to the town’s three-year infrastructure plan released at the end of last year, buying and renovating the building will cost the town about $1.37 million in total. The mayor plans to sell the current town hall, and said it could potentially be turned into a multi-use building with one or two businesses and a few apartments. He said demolishing the building is “out of the question” and any buyer would have to preserve its 19th-century exterior facade.

If Dubois is re-elected, he said the next item on his to-do list would be getting a new municipal garage built. “Our current garage is not up to modern standards – there are trucks sitting outside, which is not always good for the trucks… with the new garage, the trucks and tractors are going to be inside and we are going to have additional space to store things like gravel and sand.” He said the plans for the garage have already been drawn up and the municipality plans to apply for a grant to fund the project later this year. He said he would like for the garage to be built next year, although he couldn’t guarantee it would.

He said “a few residential developments” were also in the cards in Bedford, including on land ceded to the municipality by the Graymont quarry.

Tourism – particularly bike and outdoor tourism – is also something he hopes to encourage. The Parc Héritage – a nature park featuring a jungle gym, splash pad and sliding hill for kids and hiking trails for all ages, built atop artificial hills made from waste stone which the quarry couldn’t otherwise store – opened in 2023. “It’s becoming a major tourist attraction. We have more and more cyclists [coming to explore the hiking trails], we have a bike repair station in the parking lot, a splash pad and washrooms…they made hiking trails that go high up, and you can get a great view of the hills. It’s worth the trip.”