Trent Takes a Sledgehammer to the Mega-Merger

The following is excerpted from Trent Takes a Sledgehammer to the Mega-Merger by Bill Tierney.

 

After the release of The Merger Delusion: How Swallowing Its Suburbs Made an Even Bigger Mess of Montreal (McGill-Queen’s University Press) by Westmount Mayor Peter Trent, I now realize what he was doing while we were living through the chaos of the first few years of then-mayor Gérald Tremblay’s boroughs and mega-city.

(...)

Trent was a figure in the demerger campaign but not as dominant as he had been before the merger. Now it is clear what he was doing: He was laboriously going through the mountains of documents he had archived to write the history of the mergers. His ability to understand, absorb and speak authoritatively about so many different aspects of Montreal municipal life was always astonishing, and still is.

This text will be recognized as a definitive account of the merger history. No one will tell the story any better than this. No one else will be able to grasp how all the bits of the puzzle fit together. No one will be able to write so thoroughly about what led to the forced disappearance of our towns in 2001. No one will have such a clear and comprehensive recipe for reorganizing the Montreal region, which, with the resignation of Gilles Vaillancourt of Laval, is now leaderless.

And then in 2009, I suppose in Westmount’s version of fair play, Mayor Karin Marks herself “retired” after eight years of representing Westmount. Trent returned to the municipal scene as mayor of Westmount. And as a rediscovered leader, he has been a voice of calm and consensus during the storms swirling around Tremblay, which finally brought him down in disgrace.

Although Tremblay dealt rather dismissively with Trent in a famous televised interview, Trent has not been, publicly anyway, gloating over the mayor’s fall from grace.

If you had any doubts about Trent’s intellectual capacity, now he is the author of a definitive text on the mergers. The book’s subtitle, How Swallowing Its Suburbs Made an Even Bigger Mess of Montreal, encapsulates the book’s theme. Montreal was and is a mess and the mergers have made it worse. Everyone has caught the Montreal disease.

Read the full article

 

Meet Peter Trent

 West Island book launch for Peter Trent’s The Merger Delusion
 Thursday, November 29th, at 7 p.m.
Stewart Hall in Pointe-Claire

To learn more about The Merger Delusion or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.