Ruby Pratka

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

City officials in Bromont say the “chaucidou” pilot project along Chemin de Lotbinière is achieving its objectives, a year after it was put in place.

A “chaucidou” (the name is an abbreviation for the French term chaussée à circulation douce, or gentle-traffic highway, also known as a bidirectional central lane) is a stretch of road where car traffic is reduced to a single lane where vehicles travel in both directions, with bike and pedestrian lanes on either side. Cars pull to the side when necessary to let those travelling in the opposite direction pass. To allow cars to pull over and stop safely, the speed limit is reduced – in the case of the Bromont “chaucidou,” from 70 to 50 km/hr. The main objective is to slow the speed of car traffic. The Bromont “chaucidou,” which was approved last June by the Quebec transport ministry, is the first of its kind in Quebec. It covers the stretch of Chemin de Lotbinière between Rue Sheffington and Chemin Laporte.

On July 25, the city shared an assessment of the project’s first year. Officials said the average speed measured decreased by 14 per cent in the “chaucidou” zone, compared to an 8 per cent decrease in an area without this facility. “The reduction in illegal passing, from 11 per cent to 1 per cent, reflects a significant improvement in road behaviour, despite a reduced passing distance. No accidents or incidents have been reported, and feedback from pedestrians and cyclists is positive,” they said in a statement. “These indicators suggest that the Chaucidou system is indeed improving the safety and flow of our road network. This initiative has also attracted the interest of several other municipalities and organizations, such as Gatineau, Rimouski, Stoneham, Quebec City, as well as Mont-Orford National Park.

“Seeing the project inspire other municipalities is a source of great pride for Bromont,”  said Mayor Tatiana Contreras. “This first year of testing confirms that our commitment to safety and innovation is paying off, both for all road users and for the quality of life in our community.”

The city “remains committed to the ongoing collection and analysis of data to ensure that positive behaviours are sustained,” the statement said. “This rigorous monitoring is aligned with our desire to inspire action through innovative and effective solutions.”

The city’s communications department did not respond to a follow-up interview request from the BCN.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

A Brome-Missisquoi group which supports caregivers has received a $50,000 grant from the MRC Brome-Missisquoi (MRCBM) to extend its “social geriatrics” program around the region.

The grant to the Regroupement Soutien aux aidants de Brome-Missisquoi (RSABM) came from the MRC’s Pacte fund, a $100,000 fund dedicated to addressing food security, homelessness, transportation issues, access to community services, mental health and inclusive access to services for English speakers and immigrants.

“This [grant] marks the return of the Pacte after a hiatus of more than a year, but in a new form with new objectives focused on the fight against poverty, social inclusion and the factors of vulnerability of citizens,” said MRCBM communications advisor Isabelle Paquette. “The MRC is delighted to support such a mobilizing and impactful project for local communities. Brome-Missisquoi is part of a movement to transform care and services for seniors, focused on kindness, proximity, and prevention.”

According to an announcement from the MRC, social geriatrics is “an innovative approach that aims to promote healthy aging among older adults by considering not only their physical and medical condition, but also their social, environmental, and psychological realities. It is based on a community-based and preventive approach focused on comprehensive support for older adults in their living environment.”

Frédérique Dorais is a patient navigator at the RSABM. She said the goal of the social geriatrics program, established in January, is to help vulnerable seniors stay at home for as long as possible. She and her colleagues do this by training caregivers to recognize the signs of accelerated aging. “People can recognize the signs and call the navigator and explain what the person is experiencing” so the senior can receive support adapted to their needs and wants, to help them stay in their homes. “For example, if someone loves to cook but is having trouble cutting vegetables, we can send someone over to help them cook. We can help people prepare for their doctors’ appointments, refer them for home care, help them fill out insurance applications, sign them up for the [family doctor access portal] if they don’t have a family doctor. We build connections with them [and their caregivers] so their status staying at home is not precarious.”

Dorais said the Pacte funding would allow the program to keep assisting seniors and caregivers around the region for the next three years. “There are social geriatrics programs in 25 MRCs, and most are funded by the government, but we missed that opportunity, so we had to find other sources, and that is what the Pacte came to do.”

She said one significant goal of the program is to reduce the burden on the health care system. “There are a lot of community organizations that can offer support outside of the health system. There are some issues you don’t need the health system to fix.”

RSABM services are offered in English and French across the MRC. If you are a senior in need or a caregiver, or if you know someone who could benefit from these services, call 450-263-4236 and press 3.   

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Rainbow flags and banners will be held high in downtown Cowansville on Aug. 16 as a citizens’ group hosts the city’s first-ever LGBTQ+ Pride march.

The Marche des Fiertés Brome-MissisQueer Pride March will begin at 1:30 p.m. at the corner of South St./Rue du Sud and Rue Léopold and proceed to Parc Centre-Ville for a Pride fair, dubbed the Queer Village, where local LGBTQ+ community organizations will set up information kiosks. Live music, colouring activities, “conversation spaces” and cake will be offered; participants are encouraged to pack a picnic. Trained volunteers will monitor the march and the festival to make sure everyone feels safe.

The event arose out of discussions on social media between five members of the queer community from around the region, said Syn Moreau, a founding member of the Brome-MissisQueer collective. Moreau lives in Bedford and their fellow organizers live in Frelighsburg, Sutton, Saint-Armand and Stanbridge East; Cowansville was chosen for the event because of its central location.

“I grew up here, and I’m part of the generation – people in their 30s and 40s now – who were told that no matter what letter [in the LGBTQ+ acronym] you represent, to live out your identity, you have to go to Montreal,” they said. “A lot of people moved to Montreal or some other big city, and we all decided to move back after a while – we wanted to be closer to nature, closer to our families, some of us are farmers… for various reasons, it made sense for us to come back. For a while, we were all living in our little bubbles with family, friends and allies. I don’t know how exactly it happened, but last year, someone [on social media] mentioned that there were few events created for the queer community, to show that we are a big community, we’re here and we want to live in the countryside and feel free to express our identity. And so we decided to do the march.”

Moreau said the goal of the march was “to show that it’s safe and joyful to be part of the LGBTQ+ community in a rural area, that we can thrive here.”

“We’re not naive – we know there are homophobic and transphobic people in the community, just like there are homophobic and transphobic people everywhere – but most people in the region are very strong allies and they support our existence,” Moreau added. “We do our thing, they respect it and life goes on.” Moreau said they expect that a visible, public LGBTQ+ event will bring more queer and allied people out of the woodwork and help the community grow.

Béatrice Touchette is the community life co-ordinator at Divers-Gens, a Granby-based nonprofit which supports LGBTQ+ and questioning youth and young adults; amid a recent rise in homophobic and transphobic sentiment in the province, they are working on expanding counselling and other services to a larger age group. The organization plans to have a kiosk at the Pride fair. They said they believe bringing a Pride march and fair to Cowansville is a great idea.

“We go to the Montreal Pride parade every year, and that’s really important for us, but we always felt there was something missing,” Touchette said. “Transportation is a challenge, and people might not relate as much to big, urban marches. [Holding a march in Cowansville] is a great way to show that we exist, and help local queer people connect with other queer people.”   

“I hope it will come back year after year and show that yes, there are queer people everywhere, not just in big cities, and that allies can be everywhere too,” Touchette concluded.

The Brome-MissisQueer Pride march and Queer Village Pride fair are free and open to all. To learn more, search for “1ère Marche des Fiertés Brome-MissisQueer 1st Pride March” on Facebook.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

A festive human chain will stretch along the Quebec-Vermont border in Frelighsburg on Aug. 16, the International Day of Friendship, as part of a series of rallies along the U.S.-Canada and U.S.-Mexico borders, organized to celebrate international friendship and denounce tightening border restrictions under U.S. President Donald Trump.

Environmentalist, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) sociology professor and cofounder of the feminist group Mères au Front Laure Waridel is organizing the Frelighsburg rally on her property; Waridel and filmmakers Brigitte Poupart and Anaïs Barbeau-Lavallette will direct the event, with performances by singers Catherine Major and Cloé Lacasse, speeches, a cross-border singalong and a butterfly release. People gathered on another private property on the Vermont side will hold a simultaneous rally.

“Our approach is very gentle, but we wanted to go with what [our American counterparts] wanted,” said Waridel, who hosted a first human chain protest on her property this past March to mark International Women’s Day. “A lot of people find it disturbing to hold a forceful protest; people’s freedom to oppose the Trump administration is already in question,” she said. “We’ve seen arrests, human rights violations and the rise of antidemocratic practices and there’s a lot of fear.”

Waridel works with U.S.-based climate experts as part of her eco-sociology research at UQAM. She said researchers on the U.S. side are “scared” and researchers from other countries are being told to avoid the United States. “It’s very troubling – it gives you goosebumps.”

“Now is the time to create solidarity with our American friends and fight these violations together,” she said. “Even if there’s a trade war, there’s no war between people.”

Waridel said that after the March 8 protest, she was approached by Friends Across Borders, a U.S.-based nonprofit organizing a series of protests along both U.S. borders to mark International Friendship Day. At least 25 protests are planned along both borders, Friends Across Borders cofounder John Fanestil said.

Fanestil sees the protests as “demonstrations of cross-border solidarity and friendship, and pushback against tariff and trade policies, militarization and increased and unnecessary security measures that harm cross-border communities.”

Fanestil runs a nonprofit called Friends of International Friendship Park, advocating for the protection of a cross-border park between southern California and the Mexican state of Baja California. The U.S. side of the park was closed by the U.S. Department of Customs and Border Protection in 2020 to facilitate the construction of a border wall. Fanestil wants to try to change the dominant narrative about the nature of borders.“Borders are places of encounter, where people share art and culture and food and language. Most of what happens along borders is positive, peaceful and productive. There are truths about the border that are never shown in our current political discourse … our interest is to demonstrate the true nature of the border as we have experienced it, which is very different from the border which people in Washington,D.C. see.”

Waridel said she hoped the Frelighsburg rally would “give hope in a dark period.”

“During troubled times, some people have the reflex to kind of curl in on themselves… but we’re not alone,” she said. “We’re stronger together, and it’s time to come together and defend our values.”

For detailed information, search for “Ensemble au-delà des frontières – Together We Stand” on Facebook. Waridel advises people interested in attending to wear red, pack a picnic and bring a few friends.

Montreal museum sheds light on Quebec vet’s eventful career

Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

editor@qctonline.com

Open a drawer at a small Montreal military museum and you may discover a little-known piece of Quebec City anglophone history.

The Royal Montreal Regiment (RMR) Museum is inside the regiment’s headquarters on Sainte-Catherine St. West in Westmount. The museum’s compact, bilingual permanent exhibition tells the story of the first bilingual regiment in Canadian military history, composed of both English- and French-speaking divisions at its founding on the eve of the First World War. Rows of perfectly preserved uniforms, medals, medical kits, weapons and other artifacts, many of which were given to the museum by veterans and their families, trace the unit’s history from the First World War to 20th-century peacekeeping missions and involvement in Afghanistan.

Throughout the exhibit, drawers and captions highlight the stories of specific soldiers. One of these soldiers is Maj. William Jeffrey Holliday, who was born in Quebec City in 1877 and grew up on Avenue des Érables – or Maple Avenue, as it was then known – in the Montcalm district. In 1898, he joined the Quebec Bulldogs hockey team, becoming a local hero in 1901 as the captain of the second-string team, explained RMR Museum assistant curator Amynte Egun.

He and a few of his teammates interrupted their hockey careers to serve in the British Army in the Boer War in South Africa. Repatriated with an injury, Holliday, who held a day job as a ship’s purser, recovered sufficiently well to get back to playing hockey. In 1904, Holliday’s last year on the team, the Bulldogs won the Canadian Amateur Hockey League title, the equivalent of the Stanley Cup at the time. He returned to active duty with the RMR in the First World War, dying at the age of 40 in a French military hospital of injuries suffered at Vimy Ridge.

All of this, Egun and curator Ron Zemancik explained, came to light thanks to a box of artifacts bequeathed to the museum by a nephew of Holliday’s in Kingston, Ont. The box contained several of Holliday’s letters home, along with clippings from the Quebec Chronicle, a predecessor of the QCT, chronicling Holliday’s achievements on the ice and on the battlefield. Holliday’s last letter home, dictated to a nurse, a memorial scroll bearing the signature of King George V, and a wristwatch salvaged from the battlefield complete the exhibit.

Zemancik, a lifelong Montrealer and military history buff in his 70s, and Egun, a recent graduate of the Université de Montréal museology master’s program who grew up in Nova Scotia and studied in Europe, may look like an unlikely duo at first glance, but they’re united by a shared passion for military history and for keeping the memories of Holliday and his comrades alive. The artifacts on display at the museum barely scratch the surface of what has been given to the RMR museum over the years. Egun estimates that they have “five years of boxes” of donated archives waiting to be fully catalogued, with dozens of stories like Holliday’s inside. “I want to do a few of these [exhibit drawers] with a few different people from different backgrounds,” she said. “It’s always interesting to realize that they were just like us – they just didn’t have the same technology.”

“The way I see it is, no one is left to remember them except for us,” Zemancik said. “So let’s do it.”

The Royal Montreal Regiment Museum is open on Tuesdays from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m, other days by appointment, and whenever the sign is out. Access to the exhibit is free. Much of the exhibit’s collection has been digitized online at rmrmuseum.com/our-collection. To learn more, email info@rmrmuseum.com or call 514- 496-2003 ext. 2328.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Sean Gauthier-Neilson was one of hundreds of thousands of Montreal renters who suddenly became much more familiar with the four walls of their apartments – and he wasn’t thrilled with what he saw.

Gauthier-Neilson is originally from Rimouski, and was missing the wide open spaces and riverside landscapes he grew up with in the Lower St. Lawrence, but didn’t want to move too far away from his professional contacts in Montreal. He and his partner dreamed of becoming homeowners and moving out of the city. They ultimately bought a house in Brigham, which he describes as a “magnificent little village,” and moved in four years ago.

When Gauthier-Neilson, who runs a business in the audiovisual sector, moved in, there was a single shop in the centre of town – “a dépanneur that was run by two people who did an extraordinary job.” When the owners announced they were planning to close the store, Gauthier-Neilson and his friend Benjamin Bleuez – also a pandemic-era transplant – got a group of neighbours together with the goal of purchasing the store and turning it into a co-op where local businesses could sell their products. Although they were ultimately unable to buy the store, the experience led them to realize “that there were people around who were interested in getting things moving a bit more, in revitalizing the village.” The Fondation de révitalisation de Brigham was born. “We thought, is there anywhere else in the village that we could use to house a co-op?” said Gauthier-Neilson, now the foundation’s president.

The group, now a registered nonprofit, turned its attention to Église Sainte-Marie-Médiatrice de Brigham, the village’s francophone Catholic church, built in a former hotel, which will celebrate its 100th anniversary this year. Although the church still holds regular services, discussions have been underway for the past several years with a view to finding it a new long-term vocation. “It’s a big project. There’s a triangle – there’s us, the municipality, and the parish – and it’s a lot of work, especially for a group of volunteers who can’t give 100 per cent of their time to it. We want to make sure we’re doing things right.”

Eventually acquiring the church would be costly – “It’s still a real estate transaction; we have to talk about money and conditions,” Gauthier-Neilson said. The group envisions turning the church into a community space, with concerts, movie nights, children’s activities and room rentals, in addition to moving the thrift store there and perhaps adding a café and community kitchen. “We do have a lot of cyclists who come through here, and we’re on the Route des Vins, so offering services to people passing through, having a little tourist attraction value, that could be interesting.” A full business plan is still in development.

In the interim, as a sort of proof of concept, the group has been renting the former dépanneur since late last year. They now run a thrift store, café and ice cream shop (Le Voisin Général), with support from about 30 volunteers and an employee hired through a federal youth employment grant. They also hold free arts and crafts activities for kids in the summer.

The group’s long-term goal is to establish a permanent co-op which would create jobs, offer a space for local businesses to sell their products, provide more local entertainment and recreation options, make more products and services available locally and “keep more of Brighamites’ money in Brigham.”

“If we can be self-sufficient, if we don’t have to go visit the neighbours for every little thing, then we go see our neighbours for the right reasons, to help out, to talk, to understand each other, for solidarity,” Gauthier-Neilson said. “It’s one part of the solution to world peace, when you look at it that way.”

To learn more about the Co-op de Brigham or to volunteer, email coopbrigham@gmail.com or contact the organization on Facebook (Voisin Général – Un projet de COOP Brigham)

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

A coroner is recommending that the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS “put the necessary measures in place” to improve emergency room intake procedures following the death of a cardiac patient who was sent home from the Brome-Missisquoi-Perkins Hospital emergency room in late December.

Coroners investigate accidental deaths, deaths that occur due to violence or suspected negligence and deaths that occur in public facilities such as prisons and rehabilitation centres; they also investigate deaths where the circumstances are not immediately clear. The patient, a 50-year-old man who lived with his partner in Brigham, died at home on Dec. 30, 2024. Coroner Dr. Yves Lambert investigated the man’s death.

In his report, Lambert describes the patient as suffering from type 2 diabetes, morbid obesity and dyslipidemia, a metabolic disorder characterized by abnormally high levels of fat in the bloodstream. “These are all risk factors for cardiovascular disease,” observes the coroner, adding that the patient had a family history of heart disease and had stopped taking medication prescribed to treat high cholesterol in the months before his death. However, the report goes on to say that the patient himself had no known heart problems.

On Dec. 26, the patient went to the BMP emergency room complaining of a fever and tightness in the chest; after tests, which included a chest x-ray and an EKG, he was diagnosed with pneumonia, prescribed antibiotics and told to return if his situation worsened.

Early in the morning of Dec. 30, the patient went to the emergency room again after he was woken up by acute chest pain. On the basis of an EKG, without seeing the patient, a doctor prescribed an antacid and further tests; two hours later, a doctor saw the patient, wrote that the pain had cleared up and prescribed two new medications. “The doctor released [the patient] from the emergency room without noting what follow-up would be done or what [the patient] should do if the pain worsens,” Lambert wrote.

The patient and his partner then drove home, although the report noted that his “partner was driving because he was still experiencing chest pain.” The pain continued throughout the morning, although the patient preferred to wait and see if the new medication would help rather than go to the ER a third time. He suffered a sudden cardiac arrest shortly before noon and couldn’t be revived. An autopsy found a blood clot in the right coronary artery as well as atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries), the combination of which, in Lambert’s estimation, led to his death.

Lambert noted that coroners did not have the power to attribute responsibility for a death to any one person or institution, nor to analyze the work of a health professional. He recommended that the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS “review the quality of intake and care provided to the deceased person in the ER between Dec. 26 and 30, 2024, and if needed, put in place appropriate measures to improve intake of patients in similar circumstances.”

In an unsigned statement, the CIUSSS said the patient’s case was still being evaluated but that the agency was committed to implementing Lambert’s recommendation. “First of all, we would like to offer our sincere condolences to the [patient’s] loved ones and family. Our teams are committed to ensuring access, quality and continuity of care and services, while effectively responding to the needs of the population,” they said. “It is in this spirit that we have reviewed the coroner’s report and are committed to implementing all of the recommendations. The file was submitted on July 14 for an analysis of the quality of the care and treatment provided. We will not comment further as we are still awaiting the evaluation by the responsible committee.”

The Collège des médecins du Québec, Association des médecins urgentistes du Québec and Fédération des médecins spécialistes du Québec, which have all raised concerns about ER physicians’ workload in recent years, have not commented publicly on the case.

Courtesy

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The Bedford Pole Economic Relaunch Committee (Comité de relance économique du Pôle de Bedford) is betting on tourism to give the area a boost.

In 2022, as the region recovered from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the town of Bedford and five surrounding municipalities –  Bedford Canton, Notre-Dame-de-Stanbridge, Pike River, Saint-Armand and Saint-Ignace-de-Stanbridge  – agreed on a collaborative economic development and recovery plan. The groundwork for the committee was laid before the pandemic, when data showed that the Bedford area was the only region of Brome-Missisquoi with a decreasing population.  When the committee was formally launched, committee president and mayor of Notre-Dame-de-Stanbridge Daniel Tétreault told the BCN the initiative would involve a collaborative rethink of tourism, lifestyle, governance, urban planning, agriculture and industry in the eight municipalities – which have a combined population of about 7,500. The committee structure also makes it easier to coordinate action on shared political priorities – such as maintaining government services, protecting bodies of water and caring for heritage buildings – and let residents know about events in neighbouring municipalities, committee vice president and Saint-Armand mayor Caroline Rosetti explained.

The committee has recently released a tourist guide for the region – a single double-sided page with a map of the eight municipalities and contact information for dozens of motels and campgrounds, restaurants, farms, vineyards and distilleries, specialty shops, museums, parks, service stations, facilities for cyclists and other attractions. There’s also an interactive online version made with Google Maps. In total, more than 75 attractions are featured. The guide has very little text – it’s essentially a phone directory with a map – so it can be accessed by speakers of any language.

Rosetti said the guide is the first Bedford-specific tourist guide created since at least 2017. “We aren’t reinventing the wheel here. I think there is a tourist guide that exists for the whole MRC, but we decided to focus on our region,” she said.  “We didn’t want to encroach on the territory of our small business owners either; the goal is to bring people here from outside the region and not just to promote businesses to those who are already here.”

In light of the rising cost of travel and the political situation in the United States, committee members figured would-be travellers from surrounding regions would be interested in destinations a little closer to home, which was one reason they wanted to publish the first edition of the guide before the end of this season. “This [tourist guide] is a first-time initiative, we can change it, it’s going to keep moving.”

Rosetti said she believes promoting tourism and emphasizing the area’s natural beauty have the potential to boost long–term development. “I think people come as tourists, a little lighthearted, a little in vacation mode… and that’s how we can perhaps succeed in promoting our region and attracting people who will come to settle here long-term or as a primary residence.” She said the area’s bike paths, vineyards, breweries and picturesque landscapes were becoming more popular with tourists and day trippers.

Bedford Pole project manager Samantha Medellin Morin grew up in a bicultural Mexican-Québécois family in Mexico City, but spent summers with relatives in Bedford and now lives there full-time. “I’ve long understood that tourism is important to us. The guide wasn’t my idea, but [until I was hired], no one really had time to do it.” She said she’s enjoyed the experience of doing research for the guide and helping introduce outsiders to the region she’s grown to love and to its attractions. For her, the perfect “staycation” in the region would involve packing a picnic, getting ice cream and spending the  “It’s so nice and calm and quiet here…and you have everything you need.”

Access the interactive online guide to Bedford Pole attractions (and download a printable PDF) at sites.google.com/view/guidetouristiquepoledebedford/pagina-principal.

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.”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The MRCs of Brome-Missisquoi and Haute-Yamaska will launch a long-awaited intermunicipal bus service pilot project on Aug. 25, just in time for the new school year.

The service, offered in partnership with Transdev and the Régions et Ruralité fund of the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs, will run on a loop – with one bus running clockwise and the other counterclockwise – from 6 a.m. to about 7 p.m. Monday through Friday, with departures, approximately every 30 minutes during peak hours. Complete information about the route and stop locations was not available at press time, but a partial list of stops provided by the MRC of Brome-Missisquoi (MRCBM) includes the Cégep de Granby, the Granby industrial park, Massey-Vanier High School, the Cowansville Hospital, the Bromont CLSC and yet-to-be-determined stops in East Farnham and Saint-Alphonse de Granby. MRCBM transit co-ordinator Khalil El Fatmi said there would also be a stop at Autoparc 74, allowing riders to catch onward buses to Sherbrooke and Montreal.

The final list of 14 stops will be determined after a road testing phase, according to the MRCBM. Once the testing is complete, an interactive map will be posted on the websites of both MRCs and accessible via a mobile app. The bilingual online tool will allow users to locate stops, view detailed schedules and track their bus in real time. Since the bus runs on a regular schedule, reservations will not need to be made in advance. 

A single ticket will cost $5 and can be bought on board the bus. Single tickets and booklets of ten tickets ($40) will be on sale at the Brome-Missisquoi and Haute-Yamaska MRC offices, adapted transit offices and the co-op store at the Cégep de Granby. The buses will be equipped with bike racks.

The pilot project will be reevaluated after a year, according to the MRCBM.

MRCBM prefect Patrick Melchior and his counterpart in Haute-Yamaska, Paul Sarrazin, have been vocal supporters of the project. “We are very proud of this historic agreement, which connects the two territories of our MRCs. Finally, the population will be able to count on a sustainable and practical mode of transportation to get to school, to work, or simply to discover the tourist attractions specific to each of our regions,” said Sarrazin in a statement.

El Fatmi said the MRC had no specific expectations or targets in terms of ridership. “This is a brand new service that we have never done before; we need to monitor it, see the response and adjust it in function to how it is used,” he said. “For example, if we see that a stop isn’t being used, we’ll move it.”

“Our target audience is workers, students, people going onward to Sherbrooke or Montreal and pretty much anyone who needs to get from one place to another,” El Fatmi said. “We’d like to invite everyone to give it a try and tell us about your experience.”

Bromont, Farnham on-demand taxi service free this summer

In other transit news, residents of Bromont and Farnham who need to travel within their respective municipalities will have access to free on-demand taxi service to and from a series of set stops this summer. The taxi-on-demand pilot project was launched in February and normally costs $4 per trip. The MRCBM has made the service free until Sept. 15 in hopes more people will give it a try. The service runs from 6:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. Riders must reserve their trip at least 30 minutes in advance by calling 450-263-7010, and arrive at their chosen stop five minutes before their reservation time.

“Our target audience for this service is workers and students, but it’s also for seniors and tourists and anyone who needs to get around within their municipality,” El Fatmi said.

Since the service was established five months ago, El Fatmi said uptake had been good in Bromont. “The response…hasn’t been excellent, but it is there,” he told the BCN. In Farnham, on the other hand, he said the service was “underused.”

“It’s a bit too early to say why,” he added. “We’re hoping that now that it’s free, more people will use it.”

To learn more about the taxi-on-demand program in Farnham and Bromont, call 450-263-7010 during business hours.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Weeks after asking school boards and service centres to slash their budgets by as much as $570 million, Education Minister Bernard Drainville has walked back those cuts. On July 16, in a Facebook post, he announced that the ministry would set aside up to $540 million to fund student services. “The last few months have allowed us to consult school organizations and listen to what’s going on on the ground,” he wrote. “We heard the worries and the needs. Today, we’re taking action for students.”

“Over the last seven years, our education budget has risen by 58 per cent. These are historic investments, but every school service centre is responsible for managing this money rigorously,” he wrote, adding that school service centres had been subjected to an “expense review exercise” over the last few weeks. 

Although Drainville’s announcement made no mention of English-language school boards, officials from the Ministry of Education and the Quebec English School Boards Association (QESBA) both later confirmed that the announcement also applied to school boards.

Boards and service centres will still have to find up to $30 million in savings, and work within spending restrictions imposed by the ministry. “Let’s be clear, this is not an open bar,” Drainville wrote. “Of the $540 million announced today, $425 million will go into a dedicated fund. To have the right [to receive money from this fund], every school service centre must show that it is making efforts to reduce administrative costs, as well as ensuring that the money goes to fund student services only. Accountability will be demanded.”

This is not the first time over the past year the ministry has required school boards and service centres to make sweeping cuts before restoring funding at the eleventh hour. Several boards and service centres, including the Eastern Townships School Board (ETSB) and the Centre des services scolaire Val-des-Cerfs (CSSVDC), were forced to freeze enrolment to French-as-a-second-language courses for adults in fall 2024 after funding – pro-rated according to student numbers from three years prior – turned out to be insufficient to meet vastly increased demand. A wave of protests from teachers’ unions, community groups and adult students that autumn did not appear to move the needle; at the time, 20 CSSVDC teachers and 26 ETSB teachers stood to lose their jobs, and hundreds of students lost access to courses. However, in May, Drainville announced the government would invest $119.3 million in adult francisation for the 2025-26 school year; the ETSB now expects to partially reopen the program if demand is sufficient and enough teachers can be found.

The July 16 announcement has once again left school boards and unions rushing to adapt to a radical funding overhaul.

“Everyone’s on vacation, everyone’s scrambling and making a plan to fill these positions [that were cut last month when cuts were first announced],” said Steven Le Sueur, president of the Quebec Provincial Association of Teachers (QPAT), the union federation representing teachers at English-language public schools across the province. “Some cuts are still going to happen. I’d like to say we’ll know more before the start of the school year, but we don’t have that information.”

“We’re happy [the cuts initially announced] have been retracted, but we’re not jumping up and down about it,” he added. “There are still so many issues with workload and class size, and it’s definitely not helping [from a recruitment standpoint] when it’s in the news that they’re cutting $570 million.” 

ETSB board chair Michael Murray told the BCN via text message on Friday that he had “very few facts” concerning the impact of Drainville’s announcement.

“The recent ‘reinvestment’ is less than the original cuts and comes with conditions,” he said. “We intend to let our hardworking administrators enjoy their summer break before considering which services they can restore and by how much.”

QESBA communications director Kim Hamilton said the school boards’ association would know more later this summer about how the funding would be distributed between boards and service centres.

Drainville’s reversal came a week after a National Assembly petition calling on the government to retract the cuts, sponsored by Parti Québecois MNA Pascal Bérubé and heavily promoted by QESBA and by unions and parents’ groups on both sides of the language barrier, began making headlines. As of this writing, it had received nearly 159,000 signatures. It can be signed on the National Assembly website until Sept. 15. “We’re pleasantly pleased the public outrage worked, but there are still cuts to be made and services will still be affected,” said Le Sueur.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The Town of Brome Lake formally opened the long-awaited Carke Terrace locker room block in a ceremony on July 9.

The 13-acre plot of land around Carke Terrace, where the landmark Terrace Inn stood until the 1970s, was purchased from the Poulin family – heirs of the inn’s former owner – by the Carke Foundation in 2019; the foundation donated the land to the Town of Brome Lake for use as a public park.

Last fall, the municipality installed a small dock for non-motorized boats and picnic area on the site, creating a third public access point to Brome Lake for visitors and residents without lakefront property. The 900-square-foot “sanitary block,” which includes washrooms, locker rooms, outdoor showers, a public rooftop terrasse with a view of the lake and a 20-space parking lot, was initially expected to open last fall. It is the main element of the second phase of the long-planned upgrade. In the near future, as a final touch, the town plans to develop walking trails on the property, Mayor Richard Burcombe told the BCN. The Poulin family contributed $250,000 toward the cost of the project, and the town took out a $1.3-million loan last year to pay for the rest; Burcombe estimated the project’s total cost to the town at $1.1 million.

“This project reflects the town’s ongoing commitment to designing accessible, user-friendly spaces that are in harmony with the local heritage,” Burcombe said. “The public is invited to make this new space their own and create unforgettable memories here.” He said he was “very happy” to be able to inaugurate the new facilities, although some work remained to be done on the parking lot. 

“It’s getting to the point where it’s very hard for people to access the lake,” he said in a later interview. “Our two other access points at Douglass Beach and Tiffany Park were full yesterday. It’s very nice to have another access point.”

Created in the 1970s, the CARKE Foundation is a non-profit organization which raises funds and awareness for specific community infrastructure projects in Brome Lake, West Bolton and Brome Village. “The CARKE Foundation is proud to have supported the creation of Carke Terrace, a beautiful new space that gives the community better access to the lake for quiet, non-motorized activities,” the foundation said in a statement. “This project reflects our mission of enhancing the social and recreational life of Brome Lake, and we’re thrilled to see it come to life for everyone to enjoy.”

“We’re very thankful to the CARKE Foundation; they gave us this and many other projects over the years,” said Burcombe, a third-term mayor who announced last November that he wouldn’t seek a fourth term. “They bought it and transferred it to the town on the same day. It’s getting to the end now for [my administration], but this is a project that has been in our strategic plan, along with making a bigger green space along Mill Pond, and the dam, and the sidewalk the full length of Victoria St. which we are completing … it’s another fait accompli, and I’m happy about it.” 

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Longtime Brigham mayor Steven Neil stepped down earlier this summer, four months before the end of his mandate and more than six months after telling reporters he didn’t plan to seek reelection later this year. Former councillor Philippe Dunn succeeded Neil and will serve at least until the Nov. 2 election. When Neil resigned with less than a year left before the election, councillors had the option of scheduling a byelection or of voting to choose a mayor among themselves; they chose the latter option. Dunn, a lifelong Brighamite and son of a former mayor who has served on council since 2013, was the only councillor to put his name forward.

Neil was first elected mayor in 1999 and served until 2013, when he decided not to run; in 2017, he ran again and was re-elected. In the last election in 2021, he was acclaimed. In addition to his political involvement, Neil runs a farm and works as a corporate jet pilot; he told the BCN he decided to step down as mayor because he no longer had any work-life balance to speak of.

“The people close to me have known for three years that I wasn’t running again,” he said. “I’ve been balancing the town, the farm and my job since 1999. I’m away as a pilot for days or weeks at a time, and when I get back I’m always swamped with meetings. I would show up to meetings in my pilot’s uniform or do Zooms from the cockpit. I was stretched thin and I wasn’t able to give 100 per cent to anything. A lot of my colleagues, who are retired, semi-retired or work locally, may be able to balance things a little more easily, but the transfer of responsibilities from the government to towns is increasing and I just didn’t have time anymore.”

He said he waited to step down until the 2025 budget and audit of the town’s finances were completed. “My biggest pride is our finances – we went from high debt to no debt to having everything in place to maximize grant requests.”

He looked back proudly on the town’s recycling program, which was launched on his watch; getting a functional running water system installed in the Guay sector; working with the Granby Zoo and local private landowners on a riverbank conservation project; refurbishing a bedraggled park into a popular baseball and soccer field; overseeing the creation of a town forest on a former tree plantation; and the “green fridge” food sharing project, for which he still plans to volunteer.

He expressed frustration at the provincial government progressively passing more responsibilities onto municipalities, where they usually – at least in the case of smaller towns like Brigham – fall onto the shoulders of part-time elected officials and small teams of civil servants.

“When the [Coalition Avenir Québec] government first got elected, I was apprehensive, and then I was quite content, but then they changed direction again and lost control of their financial vision. Now, they’ve passed responsibilities on to us because they can’t afford to do certain things, [which creates] more meetings, more committees, more red tape,” he said. As examples, he cited recent requirements for towns to establish demolition committees and carry out building-by-building audits for asbestos and sources of soil contamination. “That’s a lot of money for a small municipality, it’s a big job and we can’t be endlessly hiring staff.”

“It’s wonderful not having to worry about every single thing, not having to worry about flooding or about downed trees every time we get high winds, not having to answer 25 emails, knowing that when I get home I can really be home and spend time with my family,” said the now former mayor, speaking with the BCN in a brief phone interview between two flights.   

Neil has joined a growing list of more than 800 mayors and councillors across the province who have headed for the exit, for various reasons, between the 2021 election and the planned end of their mandates this fall. While he’s conscious of the difficulties that municipal elected officials face, he encourages those considering running for office later this year to take the plunge. “It’s a very big commitment, and it is at times unrewarding, because people tend to not understand the sacrifice. If you are someone who takes things personally, it’s probably not a job for you, but if you’re able to roll with the punches, then go for it, because the towns need it,” he said.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Hydro-Québec officials have decided to continue moving forward with plans to build a new substation in a rural area straddling the boundaries of Brome Lake, Brome village and Sutton, rejecting a proposal championed by Sutton Mayor Robert Benoit which proponents say would have avoided the need for a new structure.

Hydro-Québec representatives held a closed-door meeting with elected officials and representatives of the MRC Brome-Missisquoi and the Union des producteurs agricoles farmers’ union on July 11 in Bromont to explain their decision and chart a way forward.

Maxime Lajoie, the director of integrated design and asset management at Hydro-Québec, represented the public utility at the meeting. “We’ve had a lot of outages in the past few years, and the existing network has reached the end of its useful life,” he told the BCN. “It’s time to rebuild it… while responding to the needs of a growing population. We looked at a number of different scenarios, including the one proposed by the mayor of Sutton.”

Hydro-Québec currently plans to construct a 120kV substation and transmission line in or near Brome and dismantle existing substations in Sutton, Knowlton and Eastman. The alternative proposal developed by Benoit and consulting engineer Daniel Vaillant would enlarge the four substations in Sutton, Knowlton, Cowansville and Stukely; it would replace existing 49kV transmission lines in the area with 69kV lines, which Benoit and Vaillant argue would have less impact on the landscape than the 120kV lines proposed by Hydro-Québec.

In a presentation given at the meeting and later partially shared with the BCN, Hydro-Québec conceded that the pylons in the Sutton proposal would have less impact on the landscape than those currently planned, but said other aspects of the proposal would have a larger environmental impact.

For example, according to the presentation, the Sutton proposal would require the construction of around 440 “new structures,” compared to 50 to 60 for the current plan, and the acquisition of at least 107.5 km3 of land, compared to 62.5 km3 for the current plan. Hydro-Québec also argued that the 69kV network would be operating at 90 per cent capacity as soon as it was built, meaning that one or two additional substations would likely have to be built in the area within 20 years. Lajoie also said the Sutton proposal would involve making agreements with more than 400 private landowners, compared to 50 for the current 120kV plan.”

For those reasons, he said, “we are going with the 120kV scenario, and our goal is to work with the community [to implement it].”

“The big issues are land use and the landscape, and we understand that very well,” Lajoie said. “For the next steps, we want to go see the population to find the best means to reduce the impact of the transmission lines on the visual aspect. We will do consultation and simulation [to] determine the route the lines will follow, and keep working with the community to do that.”

Cowansville Mayor Sylvie Beauregard, who attended the meeting, said it was “interesting” to hear Hydro-Québec’s analysis of the two proposals.

“I was kind of expecting [that Hydro-Québec would choose the 120kV option], because in spring there were already discussions about it, but they said they needed to analyze it further,” she said, praising Hydro-Québec’s “openness.”

Beauregard said her biggest concern was the route the transmission line would follow through Cowansville, particularly in light of a proposed new hotel to be built on formerly city-owned land. “We can’t put [the new hotel] at risk … and we have to respect our residential and corporate citizens.” She said she expected to know more about the proposed transmission line route sometime this fall, at the earliest. “We’ll let Hydro continue their evaluation and see what they propose.”

She said the power station was “a necessary project, but no one wants it in their backyard.”

“We have to work together to find a solution with the least negative impact,” she said. “A lot of people were mobilized behind [the Sutton proposal]. People will be disappointed, worried and angry. How can we get all those people behind a positive project? Maybe something positive will come out of this.”

Benoit told the BCN on Monday that he wanted to wait for additional documentation from Hydro-Québec before commenting.

Lajoie said Hydro-Québec hopes to have an “optimized scenario” for the construction of the new substation by the beginning of next year, and start construction in 2027. 

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Six heritage preservation projects from around the Townships are among 15 from around the province that will receive funding from the Sherbrooke-based Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network (QAHN) as part of the SHARE grant program, a Canadian Heritage-supported initiative to make the history of the province’s diverse anglophone communities more visible.

The Eastern Townships Resource Centre at Bishop’s University will get funding to preserve the archives of Townshippers’ cofounder Marjorie Goodfellow, explained QAHN SHARE grant program co-ordinator Julie Miller. The Société d’histoire de Haute-Yamaska will run an outreach project with members of the local English-speaking community, and anglophones around the country with roots in the area, aimed at making the society’s archives better reflect the region’s anglophone history. Richmond Histoire & Coopération will produce and screen a documentary about a local business. The Stanstead Historical Society will use the support to digitize its collections and improve its visibility. The Sherbrooke-based monthly Townships Sun received funding for a writing project encouraging teens and young adults to write about local history in English, for publication, emphasizing outreach to English language learners in schools with mostly francophone student bodies, including Drummondville Elementary School and the Cégep de Granby. Miller said the Townships Sun project was “a great way to make second-language learners feel like they were not just learning a language, but becoming part of a community.”

In Brome-Missisquoi, the Musée des communications et d’histoire de Sutton will create bilingual, web-based educational materials for local primary and secondary schools, aimed at showing the varied contributions of anglophones to Quebec society, through the life stories of real people featured in local archives, explained museologist Michel Harnois. Among the people Harnois plans to feature will be a pioneering journalist who became the first woman to edit the Stanstead Journal; a small-town hairdresser who became an acclaimed photographer; a family doctor turned wartime conscientious objector; and a teenage orphan who was one of the tens of thousands of impoverished “home children” shipped to Canada by the British government in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “He had gotten off to a bad start in life and the U.K. got rid of him with a one-way ticket to the colonies, where he was placed with a farm family and put to work,” Harnois said. “In the end, he became an artisan carpenter and built houses.”

“By design, we wanted to talk about ordinary people,” Harnois said. “They are easier for teenagers to identify with than, say, premiers. [Telling ordinary people’s stories] creates a sense of closeness – maybe there are kids in these classes who want to become carpenters, or who know someone who is a hairdresser or a journalist. QAHN wants to move away from stereotypes, and we agree with that. The rich merchants who exploited their francophone staff, we know they existed, but we don’t want to glorify it.” Harnois said he hoped the tools would be in classrooms for the 2026-27 school year, after consultation with local school service centres.

“We’re at the beginning of the process and we’re very enthusiastic,” Harnois said, adding that the museum may organize meetings with members of the local English-speaking community to get suggestions about who to feature.

Miller said there will be a third round of SHARE grant funding distributed to heritage projects in February 2026. Organizations must be members of QAHN to apply for funding. To learn more, contact her directly at julie@qahn.org.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Since mid-June, the 50 firefighters of the Service de sécurité incendie de Bromont/Brigham/Saint-Alphonse de Granby have had a place to store equipment, rest and fix their meals between calls, and shower and clean equipment after calls. The long-awaited new fire station in Bromont held an open house last weekend and a formal ribbon cutting on June 25. The station was built at a cost of $12.1 million, with $4.6 million covered by a grant from the provincial government’s PRACIM program for environmentally friendly municipal infrastructure, Mayor Tatiana Contreras told the BCN. The towns of Brigham and Saint-Alphonse, which are also served by the Bromont fire department, paid a combined 26 per cent of the remaining cost, and Bromont financed the rest through a $7.5 million long-term loan. The money was first allocated in the city’s 2022 budget.

“The firefighters have been waiting for this for years,” said fire chief Jocelyn Danis, who was named fire chief two years ago, around the time construction began on the new building. “I wouldn’t even call the old fire station a fire station; it was more of a garage.” The closest thing to a break room in the old building, he said, was a worktable wedged between two fire trucks. The new facility has a break room with a kitchen, a dormitory, a workout room, changing rooms, offices and meeting rooms and a terrasse. It also has an equipment decontamination room, in line with new workplace health and safety norms around cancer prevention. Contreras said the central location of the fire station and the fact that the garage is on the premises will lead to improved response times.

Bromont is one of several municipalities in the region with new fire stations planned or under construction – the towns of Dunham, Frelighsburg and Brome Lake have all announced plans to open new fire stations in 2026, citing the opportunity for significant support from the province and the need to replace aging buildings and modernize decontamination procedures.

Danis said the June 21 open house was a “great event” that helped citizens young and old – and firefighters, who led guided tours – get to know the new building. “We do open doors as often as we can – it’s taxpayer money that paid for the building, so people have the right to come and see it. The kids played in the trucks and the adults visited the offices, and we talked to everyone about fire safety. It’s really important for us to keep that link with the population.”

MNA Isabelle Charest, Contreras, Brigham Mayor Philippe Dunn and Saint-Alphonse de Granby Mayor Marcel Gaudreau attended the formal inauguration on June 25. “This new fire station is the result of an exemplary intermunicipal agreement between the City of Bromont and the municipalities of Brigham and Saint-Alphonse-de-Granby,” Charest said. “I would like to commend the leadership of the City of Bromont, which has carried out this important project. Thanks to this collective effort, firefighters will benefit from a modern, safe and functional work environment, and the community will benefit from services better adapted to its needs.”

“It’s a great intermunicipal project – the safety of citizens is improved, and so is the safety of the [fire department] employees,” Contreras said. “Thanks to the government’s financial support … and the valuable collaboration of our partner towns, we are taking concrete action for the future.” Contreras said no decision had been made about what to do with the site of the former fire station.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Administrators from the Commission municipale du Québec (CMQ) will oversee day-to-day affairs in the village of Stukely-Sud until the fall after four of the municipality’s six councillors resigned in recent weeks. Councillors Véronique Papineau, Joël Chagnon and Julie Royer stepped down in mid-May; at the June 9 council meeting, Coun. René Pepin also tendered his resignation, citing a “work climate that has become toxic and incompatible with my values.” The four councillors added their names to the growing list of town councillors electing not to complete their terms across the province – at the beginning of this year, La Presse reported that more than 10 per cent of municipal councillors elected in 2021 had already stepped down. On June 13, with only two councillors remaining in their posts, the village was placed under temporary administration.

Mayor François Rhéaume acknowledged at the June 9 meeting that “important differences of viewpoint,” had led to division on council. “My role is to ensure that the agenda is respected, that people don’t speak out of turn and that no one is spreading falsehoods,” he said. “I’m dealing with a council that often doesn’t read their documents, and trying to have constructive discussions with people who aren’t always aware of what they were talking about.”

Rhéaume is the municipality’s third mayor since 2021. That year, nine months before the scheduled municipal elections, then-mayor Patrick Leblond, who had previously been suspended by the CMQ in 2019 over conflict of interest allegations, announced that he was moving out of the municipality, making him ineligible to serve. Councillors elected then-councillor Véronique Stock interim mayor. Stock was elected to a full term in 2021 but resigned in 2023; according to her message to colleagues at the time, she also planned to leave the village. Rhéaume succeeded Stock after a byelection in July 2023.

Under the temporary administration, Rhéaume remains mayor and retains certain emergency management powers; however, a mayor can’t pass bylaws or allocate funds without approval from the town council, and a town council needs a quorum of at least five people (a mayor and four councillors) to function. Director general Jean-Marie Beaupré will now manage the town’s day-to-day affairs with oversight from two CMQ commissioners. However, as Beaupré explained, “political decisions” can’t be made without a functioning council.

“If there are day-to-day decisions that are not political, the CMQ [commissioners] will come to me and I’ll recommend what to do; they will adopt a resolution and have it signed,” he said. “It is actually faster [than the usual process] because they will give me a decision in a day or two, instead of having to wait for the next council meeting.”

Beaupré said residents wouldn’t see any difference in the town’s day-to-day operations. “The objective of the CMQ is to maintain services – everything that is already planned in the budget, administration, taxation, road work, will go on as scheduled. We can replace things that break down, and I can replace an employee who resigns, but if I wanted to add a new truck to improve services… or create a new position, for example, that would be more complicated.”

Citing documentation from the CMQ seen by the BCN, Beaupré clarified that there’s a difference between being placed under guardianship (tutelle) by the provincial government and being placed under temporary administration. “There are a lot of rumours that we are under guardianship, and that’s not what’s happening. Guardianship is only done in the case of fraud or financial impropriety. Temporary administration is what happens when you lack councillors.”

No byelection is planned because the next municipal election is scheduled for later this year. The temporary administration will stay in place until the village has at least four elected councillors – either at the end of the candidacy submission period in October, if at least four councillors are acclaimed, or after the election in November, the moment the new mayor and council are sworn in.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Officials from Santé Québec, the crown corporation established late last year to manage the province’s public health system, presented its overarching, provincewide plan to avoid summer service interruptions at a news conference in Montreal on June 17.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the public health system has struggled with a chronic labour shortage and changing guidance around when public health institutions could use personnel from third-party agencies; those difficulties are generally exacerbated during the summer when many health care workers go on vacation, leading to temporary service cuts, known as breaks of service.

“During the summer, well-deserved vacations for various teams in the health and social services network, as well as significant fluctuations in traffic, add pressure in several regions,” Santé Québec officials said in a statement, adding that the agency had begun planning as early as March to reduce summer service cuts to a minimum.

Robin Marie Coleman, deputy vice president of coordination of access to care and care trajectory, and Véronique Wilson, assistant director general of network coordination and operational support, explained that the agency had put in place a dashboard that allowed them to follow staffing fluctuations and potential breaks of service in near-real time and identify sectors and regions at particular risk. They announced that the agency had put in place a provincewide rotating team (known in French as an équipe volante or flying team) of 246 people – nurses, nursing assistants, care assistants and educators, along with one social worker, two social work technicians, one psychoeducator and four “human relations technicians”  to prevent region-wide service breakdowns like the one that occurred last year in the Côte-Nord region. A mechanism for reassigning employees on a voluntary basis to cover for others in the same facility or other facilities was also put in place.

Across the network, they said, local health authorities reported a total of 480 situations where breaks of service were a possibility. “Thanks to these efforts, 384 of these situations have been avoided to date. Of the remaining 96 service disruptions, measures have been implemented for 83. Teams are still working on solutions for 13 situations,” they said in a statement.

A Powerpoint presented by Coleman and Wilson appeared to indicate that the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS service area was at risk of service breaks in the emergency, obstetrics and medical imaging sectors. Beyond that, the news conference was conspicuously light on information specific to different regions of the province, and Coleman said during the question period that she could not comment further on regional specifics, leading to several frustrated outbursts from reporters, one of whom asked, “What are we doing here, then?”

Coleman referred a request for further comment to the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS. “As announced a few weeks ago, the obstetrics department at Hôpital du Granit will be closed for the summer. A delivery plan has been developed with each expectant mother in this department,” CIUSSS spokesperson Nancy Corriveau said in an email. “As was the case last year, the emergency department at Val-des-Sources presents some risk of service disruptions. However, we are optimistic that we will be able to fill the unfilled shifts during the summer, as was the case last year.”

As the BCN previously reported, one operating room at Brome-Missisquoi-Perkins Hospital will be shuttered this summer. Nursing services will be unavailable and lab services reduced at the CLSC in Sutton from June 16 to Aug. 24. Lab services will also be reduced at the Bromont CLSC. Nursing services at the CLSC Lac-Brome, suspended at the beginning of last summer, have still not resumed.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Sutton Mayor Robert Benoit has put forward a proposal that would hypothetically eliminate the need for a new Hydro-Québec substation in Brome. The proposal, which Benoit presented at a public meeting in Sutton earlier this month, would require enlarging the existing substations in Sutton, Cowansville, Knowlton and Stukely. According to the presentation, electricity would run mainly along existing transmission corridors, although the lines linking Cowansville and Sutton would have to be rerouted. The existing 49kV lines would be gradually replaced with 69kV lines – not the 120kV lines currently proposed by Hydro-Québec – and Benoit said those lines would require single poles about 20 metres high, rather than the 40-metre-plus pylons required for the 120kV lines.

“The current 49kV line would be dismantled once the new 69kV line is built and operational;

similarly, the existing portion of the Knowlton and Sutton substations would be dismantled once the new 69kV equipment is operational,” Benoit explained. No new substation would be needed. “This proposal has a lot of advantages and very few drawbacks for us. … it minimizes the impacts not only for Sutton, but for the surrounding municipalities.”

Daniel Vaillant, a Québécois electrical engineer based in Lima, Peru and a former colleague of Benoit’s at Hydro-Québec, worked with Benoit as a volunteer consultant to develop the proposal over the past six months. “Hydro-Québec was saying there was only one possible solution, but [in fact] Hydro-Québec had figured out what was the best solution for them, and they wanted to see how they could implant it,” he said. 

Vaillant told the BCN the corridors and substations used for the existing lines “could easily be scaled up…without creating new scars on the land.” He alleged that the utility was trying to “impose” new 120kV lines around the province, without taking into account local particularities.

Two of Benoit’s counterparts have expressed reservations about the proposal. “We thought they had the solution,” said Dunham mayor Pierre Janecek, who attended the June 6 meeting. “We saw the presentation and we were enthusiastic – if it can work, if we don’t have to have any high-voltage lines [running through Dunham], then that’s great, but we do have some doubts.” Janecek alleged that some of the measurements provided were off and some of the land proposed for the Sutton substation expansion is on a wetland; Benoit later said he didn’t know what Janecek was referring to. Cowansville Mayor Sylvie Beauregard told the BCN she would wait for further information from Hydro-Québec before commenting in detail, but the enlargement of the Cowansville substation laid out in the proposal was “not a simple thing.”

Hydro-Québec regional affairs advisor Ève-Marie Jodoin confirmed that Hydro-Québec representatives had met with officials from the town of Sutton, the MRC Brome-Missisquoi and the Union des producteurs agricoles on June 16 to formally receive the Sutton proposal. Jodoin said Hydro-Québec was analyzing the proposal and would be able to comment in more detail in a few weeks. “It’s very well-thought-out and was obviously done by conscientious people,” she said. “There have been a lot of public comments [on the proposed substation] but this is the only fleshed-out proposal for an alternative that we have received so far.”

Hydro-Québec currently plans to build a new substation to replace the existing Sutton and Knowlton substations and provide electricity to Sutton, Brome Lake and Cowansville. The location has not yet been pinpointed, but is expected to be somewhere on a section of rural land straddling the boundaries of Brome Lake, Brome village and Sutton. Construction is expected to begin in 2027. Jodoin said area residents are still welcome to submit questions, comments and suggestions in English or French via the Hydro-Québec website.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

If you “made the move” from Montreal or another major city to the Eastern Townships during the COVID-19 pandemic, a film crew is potentially interested in hearing your story.

As rural communities across the region continue to grow, a new documentary project entitled Back to the Land, produced by a woman-led crew, is exploring the motivations and stories behind the migration. Produced by Kimchi Productions and developed through the CBC Absolutely Canadian strand, the documentary explores the wave of Montrealers who left the city during and after the COVID-19 crisis to start anew in the countryside.

Producer and co-writer Rebecca Rowley has lived in Dunham for nearly 20 years and seen the town’s transformation firsthand. “I saw a lot of people move our way during the pandemic, and I thought it would be interesting to see whether those moves met their objective,” she told the BCN. “Even though there were horrendous difficulties during that time, for a lot of people there was a benefit…I see so many people who have made the move and who are very happy.”

She noted that the wave of migration to the area has apparently spurred long-term growth, with new primary schools opening in Farnham, Cowansville and Shefford and the student body at Massey-Vanier High School increasing by several hundred. “The countryside is definitely not for retired couples anymore!”  

“We are excited to meet people who have moved and hear their stories,” she said. “Everyone can relate to a moment when they had to stop because life forced them to stop, and to think, ‘Am I aligned with my best life? Am I doing what resonates?’”

Rowley says she has spoken to several recent arrivals who “are loving having this slower life, working remote and enjoying being at home more and spending time with their kids, stepping out of the house and hearing lots of birds.”

However, for some, moving to the Townships has not been the solution they were hoping for, at least not yet. “In the case of a separation, you kind of idealize this family project, and it might not be enough to keep a family together. Not everyone likes to go talk to strangers, and some people feel their social life has gotten smaller… but I only know the people I know, and I’d like to know other people’s stories.” 

Rowley and director Miranda Handford want to explore how where people live shapes their sense of identity and the pace of their lives. They also plan to make the film a “love letter to the Eastern Townships” where the area’s landscapes play a starring role.

Rowley hopes to secure funding for the film from a variety of sources over the next few months and begin filming next year. Rowley is inviting families who are interested in participating to fill out a form on the production company website, kimchiproductions.com. They are looking for a diverse range of stories, from families with children to new retirees and single telecommuters, homebuyers and renters, from a range of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, living in the country and in larger towns like Bromont. Both anglophone and francophone families and those from other backgrounds are welcome to participate, although the current plan is to conduct interviews in English only – to facilitate distribution to English Canada and internationally, but also to encourage anglophone participation and reflect the area’s anglophone history. “We are fine with accents; you just need to be comfortable speaking English in front of a camera and having a film crew invade your home,” she said.

“We are aware that moving to rural areas [during the pandemic] was a global phenomenon, and  [the film] would speak to people around the world about how the pandemic sent a lot of people on a wild goose chase” leading them to rethink many aspects of their lives, she said.

To learn more about the film or to fill out an expression-of-interest survey if you’d like to be interviewed, visit kimchiproductions.com.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The Cantons-de-l’Est Regional Airport Authority (Régie Aéroportuaire Régionale des Cantons de l’Est; RARCE) broke ground last week on a $10-million renovation of the single runway at Roland Désourdy Regional Airport in Bromont.

The airport has been in service for about 50 years and about 12,000 planes take off and land in Bromont every year, according to Simon Villeneuve, general manager of the airport. The airport is not equipped for large commercial flights, but it is used by corporate jets, private jets, “high-end tourist flights,” a flight school and an air ambulance service, Villeneuve told the BCN. 

The renovations involve completely rebuilding the airport’s single runway “down to the foundation,” redoing the apron, adding two taxiways for safer and more efficient takeoff and landing and bringing the airport into compliance with provincial regulations on rainwater runoff. “As it stands now, we have a single taxiway and there’s only one way for planes to take off,” said Villeneuve. “The idea is to improve the safety and fluidity of the operation and clear the runway much faster.” He said he believed the new runway offered “potential for new revenue down the road.”

“The first [step] would be to have more secure operations [thanks to the new taxiways], and then potentially we’ll have potential for growth,” he said. “We have about 25 private owners of aircraft and they have been saying for a long time that they would like for there to be hangars … to give people a place to park their jet. We are trying to facilitate this, and then we’ll extend the Rue du Ciel.”

Half of the cost of the runway revamp will be paid by the Quebec government through the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility regional airport infrastructure assistance program (PAQIAR) The other half will be paid jointly by the cities of Bromont, Cowansville and Granby. Contracts to work on the project have gone to local companies, Villeneuve said, with Granby-based Allaire et Gince the main construction contractor, Bromont-based Eurovia Québec supplying an estimated 20,000 tons of asphalt and Sherbrooke-based Ace Electric handling the electrical systems; in total, according to Villeneuve, the project will employ about 50 local workers. “It’s a regional airport, and we have people from around the region pitching in.”

Villeneuve explained that the first phase of construction began in May and the project is expected to kick into high gear over the summer. The airport will be closed for construction from Aug. 11 to Sept. 19, and full operations are expected to resume in late September or early October, Villeneuve said.

“Regional infrastructure, such as Roland-Désourdy Airport, is an essential economic driver, particularly when connected to our industrial parks, which are home to cutting-edge sectors such as industry, science, and technology. The Innovation Zone designation has reinforced the strategic role of this airport,” said Brome-Missisquoi MNA Isabelle Charest in a statement. “We are modernizing this key infrastructure to improve safety, support its development and enhance the attractiveness of the entire region.”

“I am proud to see this structuring project take shape, the result of rigorous work carried out with dedication by the RARCE team and numerous partners. The airport is much more than an infrastructure: it is a lever for our collective future,” said Cowansville Mayor Sylvie Beauregard, who is also president of the RARCE. 

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Employees and visitors to the town hall in Bedford Township have a little more breathing room. The new town hall, with a meeting room/reception hall, a full kitchen and private offices, was officially opened during a brief ceremony on June 14. Mayor Gilles St-Jean and MNA Isabelle Charest spoke, the ribbon was cut and town councillors gave guided tours of the new building.

The new building, built from the ground up, is adjacent to the former town hall and fire station, which will be converted into a new municipal garage. In the old town hall, “It was difficult to organize activities for citizens since only a very limited number of people could access them. We also didn’t meet universal accessibility standards, not to mention that the term ‘confidentiality’ lost its meaning given the cramped, multi-purpose spaces,” director general and town clerk Manon Blanchet said in a statement announcing the opening of the new building. Citizens who attended council meetings had to leave the building – and brave the weather – whenever council went in camera.

 “The old building was part town hall and part fire station, it was very small and it wasn’t private – the director general always had someone else in her office,” explained St-Jean in a brief English-language interview. “We could only receive 30 people [for meetings]. Now we can receive 70 or 80, and we have a kitchen, so if someone wants to hold a wedding reception or a Christmas party, they can do that.” The director general, assistant director general and administrator – a job filled by two part-time staff members –  all have office space of their own. People who attend council meetings will be able to wait indoors. There is no mayor’s office – “I haven’t needed an office in the last 20 years and I don’t expect to need one in the next eight,” St-Jean said – but there is shared workspace in the meeting room. The new building also has a 36-car parking lot. The conversion of the old town hall into a garage is well underway, also largely funded by a government grant; the fire trucks will be moved to the fire station in the town of Bedford.

“Now, we can welcome citizens with dignity in beautiful offices and rent out our large community hall and terrasse,” Blanchet added.

The municipality bought the land where the new town hall now stands in 2019, and started working toward the project in earnest in 2022 when they got a provincial grant equivalent to 78 per cent of the estimated cost of $2.8 million. “The province paid $2,152,020, so we were left with $656,839 that we had to pay,” Saint-Jean said. “Given that we sold a piece of land two years ago that covered that amount, the building will not show up on people’s tax bills. I didn’t want people to have an extra tax – I wanted the building paid for, and that’s what happened.”

“I’m very pleased that the government of Quebec has contributed to the construction of this essential infrastructure for Bedford Township. This new municipal office will not only allow municipal staff to work in modern, well-adapted premises, but it will also provide residents with a welcoming space for the entire community,” Charest said in a statement.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

When Granby businesswoman and mother of two Penny Lamarre began experiencing debilitating fatigue in May 2018, at age 44, she thought she just needed to catch up on her sleep.

“I was sleeping 20 hours a day…and I thought I was just really tired,” she said. “I had a friend who was a nurse, and she said, ‘You need to go to the clinic.’ I thought I had mono. I went to the clinic in the morning; by 11 a.m., I had my blood test. At 1 p.m., my family doctor called and said they would be transferring me in an ambulance.”

Lamarre was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia, a form of cancer which attacks the blood and bone marrow. She was told that without treatment, she could have as little as one week to live. She was given drugs to “reboot” her immune system, a painful process which left her vulnerable to fungal infections that made it hard for her to open her mouth. “In October, they said, ‘We’ll wait to see if the treatment works.’ In July 2019 I had a setback; I started chemo again and then they launched a search to find a bone marrow donor.” In the meantime, she got her affairs in order and thought about who would raise her children – who were nine and eleven at the time – if she wasn’t around anymore. Then she got the call that gave her a new lease on life – a match had been found in Germany. On Dec. 12, 2019, after the donor’s cells were sent by courier across the Atlantic, the transplant took place in Montreal.

Six years out from a bone marrow transplant and a yearlong recovery process, Lamarre said she has “98 per cent” of her life back, after a long process of rebuilding physically, mentally and financially. “I just turned 50, and now I’m working on building my body back up. I used to ride my bike a lot, play dek hockey and dance; I’m just now getting back into it. I spent four years not working – I got two years of disability pension payments, I sold things and had to start a GoFundMe.” The memory of getting turned away from a food pantry she used to contribute to in better times because she had $50 in her bank account set aside to pay a utility bill still stings. “I found that hard…but I had a lot of help from friends who brought me food and things like toilet paper.” She now has a “nice life” with a life-coaching business and a sideline as a travel agent.

The cells which saved her life were donated by a German college student named Johanna, now a physiotherapist. “The recipient can request [their donor’s contact information] two years after the transplant,” Lamarre said. “We had a Zoom call and it was a magic moment … since then, we’ve met a few times. She came to visit last year and I showed her Montreal and Quebec City. She has a baby now and I sent her some baby stuff. It’s a privilege for me to have this person in my life.”

Lamarre is sharing her story as part of a Héma-Québec campaign to encourage young people to donate bone marrow. Héma-Québec spokesperson Josée Larivée said prospective donors can request a kit from the blood bank and submit a cheek swab sample; they will be contacted if they are a match for a patient. Donors must be between the ages of 18 and 35 to submit a sample, although if you are a match for a patient and you are over 35, you may still get a call. Quebec donors may be matched with recipients in Quebec, in the rest of Canada or in Europe.”

“The bank has 55,000 samples from people who have raised their hands and [sent in] a cheek swab,” Larivée explained. “[Héma-Québec is] a member of a worldwide bank with 42 million samples. We are looking for a genetic profile as identical [to the patient] as we can get, and that’s why we need a large diversity of donors; a North African patient needs a North African donor and a Haitian needs a donor from the Black community. In Quebec, there are genetic commonalities in Bas-Saint-Laurent, in the Gaspé, in the Magdalen Islands and in the Beauce, for example, so if you live in one of those regions, you may be helping your neighbours.”

Bone marrow transplants are used to treat patients with leukemia, lymphoma, aplastic anemia, certain types of immune deficiency and some other cancers, after other treatment methods have failed or have taken a heavy toll on their immune system. Once a match has been found and a donor has agreed to the procedure, there are usually two options – the donor either undergoes a brief surgical procedure to extract bone marrow from their pelvic bone, or takes a drug over a period of several days that multiplies stem cell production before having blood drawn. Sometimes doctors will request one or the other; sometimes the donor will choose the procedure that they’re most comfortable with. The cells are then injected into the recipient’s vein, and the patient’s body can begin the long, difficult work of rebuilding their immune system – Lamarre was hospitalized for three months and dealt with six months of intense fatigue after her own transplant.

“You kill the patient’s immune system and you inject the donor’s cells…so my body is functioning with your blood,” Larrivée said. After Lamarre received her own bone marrow transplant, her blood type changed, a lifelong reminder of the link between her and Johanna.

Larrivée encourages young adults under 35 to sign up for the stem cell registry. “Once you get their attention, young people are community-minded, but you do need to get their attention and their time,” she said. “Give yourself a challenge to convince one person.”

People who are interested in donating and who meet the age requirement can visit

hemaquebec.ca/en/stem-cells-donation/what-to-expect-when-you-give-stem-cells to learn more about the process and request a cheek-swab sample kit.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

The Pettes Memorial Library in Brome Lake is forging ahead with a planned expansion project despite the fact that a provincial grant program from which they were hoping to get funding has been discontinued.

Pettes Memorial Library director Jana Valasek told the BCN she and her colleagues had been working on the expansion – which includes a new annex, renovations to the existing building and improved landscaping – for the past six years. By the end of 2024, an application was submitted to the Ministry of Culture and Communications (MCC) for a grant of around $2 million through the Programme d’aide aux immobilisations (PAI; Infrastructure Assistance Program). “There was no hint there was going to be a problem …until we learned that the government completely shut the program down.”

“Last year we hired a project management team – we completed the [functional and technical evaluation], the next step would be to hire the architects and we had that all set out, but then everything stopped in its tracks,” Valasek said. “We have had to rethink things a little bit, but we are working on seeing how we can move ahead.”

Valasek painted a picture of a library that had largely outgrown its current space. “We desperately need space to hold programming or events,” she said. “We have no meeting room, no place to welcome classes of children or groups or any kind of programming like having a guest speaker come. We have one room with a table that seats ten people which also serves as the [staff] lunchroom. We just need to have a bigger space dedicated to programming.  I would really like to develop the children’s space to make it more specialized and welcoming.”

She said the current plan was to move forward with the renovation in phases, relying on fundraising and smaller grants that are available for specific upgrades, like improving accessibility or modernizing the heating system. “We are going to focus on building the annex and having a new children’s area and a welcome desk where people can walk in from the park more easily … although we will keep the Victorian front door,” she said, adding that no longer being bound by the terms of the MCC grant would make some aspects of the project simpler. “Hopefully we will build next spring,” she said. “This is not stopping us.”

She said it was too early to share a precise estimate of how much the project would cost or how much an eventual fundraising campaign would have to raise, but several large donations had already been received. The Town of Brome Lake (TOBL) has already set aside $1 million to fund the project; at the most recent council meeting, an additional $600,000 was earmarked “for future expenses related to the downtown revitalization project, the redevelopment of Coldbrook Park and the Pettes Memorial Library project,” according to TOBL communications director Ghyslain Forcier.

Program to reopen with new format

Maryse Dubois, a spokesperson for Brome-Missisquoi MNA Isabelle Charest, confirmed that the PAI had been suspended, and that a “new-look” PAI would be rolled out with a call for applications in the fall. “The program’s objectives remain the same, but certain procedures have been improved to provide greater predictability for partners and reduce the number of steps required before approval,” she said.

“Since 2019, my team and I have been closely monitoring the Pettes Memorial Library expansion project. Numerous meetings and discussions have taken place between my office, the project committee and the MCC,” Charest said in a statement, noting that she met with the expansion project committee last month. “In the current context, the government had to make the responsible decision to focus its investments in the new version of the PAI this year on maintaining existing infrastructure rather than on expansion projects …. The library team has already taken important steps in structuring its financial package. I remain fully committed to supporting the realization of this flagship project for the Brome Lake community.”

To learn more about the Pettes Memorial Library expansion project or to pledge your support, contact the library directly at pettes.bpl@gmail.com or 450 243-6128.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Transforming a city park into a “magic forest” for the holidays and giving residents more opportunities to test out recreational activities for free are near the top of Bromont’s priority list after its first participatory budget call for projects went out earlier this year.

“We wanted to create a ‘department of little treats,’” said Councillor Michel Bilodeau (Mont-Brome), the municipality’s point person for the project, drawing on imagery from his previous career as director of the Fête du chocolat de Bromont. He mentioned that his colleague Councillor Claire Mailhot (Lac-Bromont) had first pitched the idea more than two years ago. “This year, we said we were going to do it.”

Participatory budget initiatives, where cities earmark $50-60,000 for citizen-driven projects, have been established in Montreal, Longueuil, Laval, Granby and several smaller towns across the province – including Cowansville and Sutton – over the past few years. “We wanted to take the concept of what already existed and make it more ‘Bromontois,’” Bilodeau said. “We’re not reinventing the wheel here.”

Bilodeau said he was hoping to get ten or so submissions; the 32 projects received exceeded the committee’s expectations. Twelve were chosen by the selection committee. In addition to budgetary considerations (the projects have a combined budget of $60,000) and logistical feasibility, the committee evaluated projects based on creativity, on whether they fit with current town priorities and on how many residents they would benefit – a project for the whole town received more points than a project designed for a single neighbourhood.

Residents could submit projects in three categories – by and for seniors, by and for youth, and “collective,” by and for the general public. In the seniors category, the committee chose two proposals – installation of a wheelchair-accessible swing and several new benches around town. The three projects chosen in the youth division were a soapbox derby car race, a colour run at the elementary school and support for a floor hockey program. In the “collective” category, seven projects will be funded – top-ups to existing funding for the Santa Claus Parade and the Course du Quartier du Lac, opportunities for residents to test out existing recreational activities for free on Saturdays (“Samedi de bouger”), free pickleball sessions in Adamsville, planting along the hiking trail behind the École de la Chantignole, funding for portrait artists in public spaces (inspired by the portrait artists of Place Jacques-Cartier in Montreal or Rue du Trésor in Quebec City), and the “whispering forest of owls and elves” – a magical holiday trail in the Parc des Oiseaux. The projects are expected to be completed by January 2026, Bilodeau said.

“Youth is important, and this is a way of getting them interested in how they can contribute ideas and actions to make the town better,” Bilodeau added. “It makes us all really happy. Hopefully next year, the next council will go in the same direction.

“The city launched a real call for creativity and collective action, and the community responded loud and clear,” Mayor Tatiana Contreras said in a statement. “The projects presented that were not selected will still be forwarded to the various divisions concerned as suggestions, and who knows, they might even be able to be carried out!”

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

A year after the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS announced seasonal closures of the CLSCs in Brome Lake and Sutton and a partial closure of the CHSLD de Bedford, the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS has said similar closures have been avoided for this year, although there will be service reductions in some areas. The CIUSSS would not share a full list of closures and service reductions; according to a partial list obtained by the BCN, nursing services will be unavailable at the CLSC in Sutton from June 16 to Aug. 24, and lab services will be reduced. Lab services will also be reduced at the Bromont CLSC.

“Every year, we plan the summer period to ensure our staff have vacations while continuing to provide care and services to the population,” CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS spokesperson Élizabeth Dubé said in a statement. “No CLSC in Estrie will be completely closed.”

More alarming to local health care professionals, one of the three operating rooms at Brome-Missisquoi-Perkins Hospital will be out of service this summer due to a shortage of respiratory therapists.

Dubé said BMP, “like many other [hospitals] in Quebec, has been facing a chronic shortage of respiratory therapists for several months.” The third operating room “will be closed during the summer to provide the teams with a well-deserved break. Exceptionally this year, the adjustments began on May 5, rather than mid-June, due to the shortage of respiratory therapists.”

“For more than a year, we’ve seen staff running out of steam,” said Dr. Anne-Patricia Prévost, a family doctor in Cowansville who is the president of the Association des médecins omnipraticiens d’Yamaska. “I think it was also closed for part of last summer, and they went to recruit some respiratory therapists from Sherbrooke, but this year, they weren’t able to have them.”

In Quebec hospitals, respiratory therapists help patients who are coming on and off ventilators, conduct tests, administer and adjust medication, monitor patients who are anesthetized and maintain respiratory support equipment. “Doctors and nurses are trained to do a lot of those tasks, but putting those tasks on their plate has an impact too,” Prévost said.

She said about five surgeries per day were normally conducted in the third operating room. “That makes 30 a week. If [the closure] lasts until October, that’s a lot of surgeries, a lot of people who will stay on waiting lists.”

“It’s a real shame – because of vacation and the personnel [shortage], they’re ‘undressing’ the regional centres to bring personnel to Sherbrooke to avoid service cuts there,” said Prévost, who attended an interprofessional meeting where the planned service modifications were presented. Prévost said the closure could potentially lead to bottlenecks at other area hospitals, and have painful consequences for patients and the health care system. “For the patient who needs a knee replacement, for example, we try physiotherapy and other things… but if they have to wait for two years, they’re moving less, they’re gaining weight, they can develop other complications … they’ll make more follow-up appointments and consume more medication … and this is taking time that we would give to new patients.”

Dubé said full operations at BMP are expected to resume in early fall, and that emergencies would be “taken care of without delay.” She noted that 11 respiratory therapists had been hired by the CIUSSS in the past week, with seven assigned to BMP.

No resumption of nursing services at CLSC Lac-Brome

There have been no nursing care services offered at the CLSC Lac-Brome since spring 2024. When the CLSC reopened in October 2024, it reopened for laboratory services only. At the time, CIUSSS spokesperson Nancy Corriveau told the BCN a consultative committee would be put in place to “clearly define the needs of the population and reassess our service offering.” That idea was ultimately scrapped and there are no plans to resume nursing care at the CLSC.

“Following a further assessment, we have decided not to create the announced community consultation committee,” Dubé said. “We have a duty to adapt our care and services according to the needs of the population and the context of our resources. Thus, we no longer have routine nursing care at the CLSC Lac-Brome service point, but we do have a [laboratory sample] collection service. For an appointment requiring routine nursing care, the population is always invited to contact the CLSC de Cowansville at (450) 266-4304, the CLSC de Sutton at (450) 538-3994 or the CLSC de Bromont at (450) 375-1692. These surrounding CLSCs are located approximately 20 minutes away by car.”

The loss of nursing care services in a town like Brome Lake is worrisome for Prévost. “This is a big deal, because we have a very large territory, and having services in the villages is important,” she said. “We have some transit, and we have medical transportation volunteers, but it’s not like a big city.”

Dubé said no major CHSLD closures were anticipated over the summer, but that “a few beds might not immediately be given to the next [resident] when they are freed up” at the CHSLD de Sutton.

Defending access to care in Bedford

After a series of closures and cutbacks in the past year, advocates for health care access in Bedford have formed a nonprofit to fight future cuts.

“The decline in healthcare services in the Bedford area over the past 10 years has prompted a reaction: the loss of three seniors’ residences, the retirement of two physicians who were almost miraculously replaced, the closure of CHSLD beds during summer 2024, the cancellation of the CHSLD expansion project in June 2024, not to mention the glaring lack of intermediate resources, are just a few examples of concern,” said Normand Deragon, spokesperson for the Bedford Pole Citizen Health Committee (BPCHC). “The result of our action [last year] is not so much what we gained, but rather, what we did not lose. For example, we now have two new doctors at our CLSC in replacement of recently retired physicians, and in contrast to last year, no beds will be closed at our CHSLD during the summer vacations. … As you say in English, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.”

“With a population where 25 per cent of residents are aged 65 or over, we are worried about what the future holds for our region. This explains the reason for our mobilization to safeguard healthcare services in the Bedford area,” said BPCHC president Pierrette Messier-Peet.

The new nonprofit plans to “explore the possibility” of bringing a new seniors’ residence to the area, and raise awareness of the services offered by the CLSC de Bedford and other local service providers.

By Ruby Pratka

Local Journalism Initiative

Four years ago this month – on June 15, 2020 – Quebec’s 61 francophone school boards became service centres when Bill 40 came into effect. The bill eliminated elected school boards, replacing them with service centres run by appointed volunteer boards of directors. When the bill was first tabled in 2019, then-education minister Jean-François Roberge argued that eliminating school board elections – which the vast majority of voters did not vote in, particularly in the francophone sector – would save the government $45 million over four years. In 2023, Roberge’s successor, Bernard Drainville, spearheaded Bill 23, which gave the minister the power to hire and fire directors general of service centres and to override their decisions; that bill takes full effect on July 1. 

Neither bill has yet been applied in the English sector. Elected school boards remain in place in the English system due to an ongoing legal challenge led by the Quebec English School Boards Association (QESBA), who argue that ending school board elections for the sector infringes on the community’s Charter right to control its education system. Earlier this spring, a Quebec appeals court panel unanimously backed QESBA; however, on May 30, The Record learned that the Quebec government intended to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada. In the short term, Eastern Townships School Board (ETSB) chairperson Michael Murray has said, this means business as usual for English boards while the case is adjudicated; in the long term, should the court accept to hear the case and rule in the government’s favour, service centres could replace elected boards.

Townships Weekend spoke with a teacher’s union representative and a spokesperson for a school principals’ association to find out what has changed in the French sector since the bill passed.

“It has changed certain things, but not as much as we expected,” said Sophie Veilleux, president of the Syndicat de l’enseignement de la Haute-Yamaska (SEHY), the union which represents teachers in the Centre des services scolaires de Val-des-Cerfs (CSSVDC) service area. “It was supposed to reduce bureaucracy – which I haven’t seen – and reduce politicization – which I haven’t seen either. The central point was to give more autonomy to schools … but that’s not what happened;  the directors and service centres have lost lots of power, and the minister decides practically everything.” 

“We used to have the [elected] council of commissioners, which was replaced by the board of directors, but the board of directors is not what’s making a lot of the decisions. We’re not decentralizing anything.” Veilleux said it’s harder for school service centres to enact decisions adapted to local circumstances. She worried aloud about the government adopting a one-size-fits-all approach to governance, when “what’s happening in Montreal, Granby or Gaspé is not the same thing.”  She said that many teachers were happy with the bill’s stated objective of decentralizing school governance, but are now disappointed. “Reduced bureaucracy, localized decision making, I don’t know who can be against that, but when you start reading the bill, we see that that’s not what’s happening.”

“The CAQ [government] had good intentions, but now we have more centralization,” said Carl Ouellet, president of the Association québécoise du personnel de direction des écoles (AQPDE). He said commissioners would visit schools and talk to students and parents. “The parents were a lot closer to the schools – parents knew there was a commissioner who represented them. They don’t have that anymore.”

He mentioned that one positive aspect of the reform was to give school leadership control over certain financial decisions. “Now [each service centre has] a resource-sharing committee with principals serving on it, who will decide how we will spend [government funding] provided to the schools. Most of the decisions are taken by this committee where we are represented rather than councils of commissioners, where we were not.”

Ouellet said francophone schools were “still adapting” to the Bill 40 and Bill 23 reforms.

“We have good directors general, but we are worried that we’ll lose a bit of power, because the directors general will be put in place by the minister, who will tell them they have to do this or that. That’ll be another adaptation we have to make.”