Beloeil Mayor Nadine Viau is calling on Quebec to review deadlines for filing financial reports from municipal parties. She regrets that the sanctions are “excessive” at a time when many elected officials lost their seat rights this week for failing to submit this report on time.
Posted at 10:00 p.m
“While I understand the reasons that led the National Assembly to enact legislation to tighten the rules to be observed in municipal elections, today we have come to this conclusion: the penalties are disproportionate in several respects,” Ms. Viau writes in a letter addressed to was sent to Minister for Local Affairs Andrée Laforest this weekend.
Several elected municipal representatives have been stripped of their right to a seat on the municipal council in recent days because their party’s financial report was not submitted before April 1, i.e. within a maximum period of three months. This applies to the opposition leader of Longueuil, Jacques Lemire1, but also to Xixi Li of the Coalition Brossard party or even to the opposition leader in the city of Beloeil, Renée Trudel.
Across Quebec, however, “companies have six months to file their tax return,” says Mayor Nadine Viau. “Cooperatives used to have four months, but amendments were passed in 2015 to extend that to six months. In both cases, they do not have to be checked,” she emphasizes.
In the meantime, Ms. Viau continues, “the resources available to political parties are being eroded by the administrative delays of the Québec Elections.”
“By that date, all parties in Beloeil that won more than 15% of the vote in the November 2021 general election are still awaiting reimbursement of about 25% of eligible expenses. The two 2022 by-elections for Beloeil are awaiting evaluation of election expenses and no reimbursement has been made by Elections Quebec to date,” she laments.
” That makes no sense “
Ultimately, how can we justify that Elections Quebec takes more than two and a half years to issue a refund “but that a party leader is ousted from office for not filing a report within three months”? asks the mayor. “It doesn’t make sense,” she insists.
In particular, his government is demanding that Quebec extend the deadline for filing financial reports across the province from three to six months.
“You have to understand that the political parties in a city like Beloeil with 25,000 inhabitants don’t have the same resources as the parties in a city like Montreal with 1.7 million inhabitants. However, the law does not differentiate in terms of obligations and sanctions for non-compliance,” the mayor continued.
She finds that too often Elections Quebec imposes statutory sanctions “without the guidance or support of volunteer organizations committed to serving their community.” “Is it possible to encourage citizen participation? Is it really democracy to suspend citizens honestly elected by the community for not obeying a rigid law? »
The official-elect calls on Secretary Andrée Laforest to “find a way with all communities in Quebec to manage these situations with humanism and realism.” “It’s a question of public trust in our institutions,” she concludes.