Photographs by Roger Lemoyne
The cabane à sucre is an annual rite for many Quebecers, and on a recent Friday afternoon, 650 golden agers from the city of Laval, a vast suburb north of Montreal, bused into the nearby town of St. Eustache to eat crepes with maple syrup, cretons, and maple syrup-flavoured fèves au lard, and to indulge in a spot of line dancing. Aside from the festive sense common to sugaring-off events, though, this one had a spirit of civic pride. “Our mayor is number one!” said Gino, an ebullient 58-year-old. “Every year he invites us here.” “It doesn’t cost us anything. It’s a gift from Mayor Vaillancourt,” said Gabriel, who along with his wife was on his fourth free cabane à sucre outing.
Indeed it was: the merry event was entirely paid for by PRO Lavallois, the political party that has governed Laval for 22 years—the last 10 unopposed. Paying for seniors to go to a cabane à sucre has been a tradition for over 15 years. Over the course of two days, the party footed the bill for some 2,600 seniors, at an estimated cost of $16 per person, and most were quite appreciative. Attendees interviewed by Maclean’s said cabane à sucre was something they looked forward to every year. Across the room, the object of their affection, Gilles Vaillancourt—the bespectacled 70-year-old architect of PRO Lavallois’s two-decades-long supremacy and a man currently mired in allegations of bribery, favouritism and influence peddling—shook every hand, listened to every anecdote and chuckled graciously at every joke.
The event had all the hallmarks of a campaign stop, down to the huge “Team Vaillancourt” banners decorating the sugar shack and the PRO Lavallois pens handed to every senior as they left. Yet the next election isn’t for two years, and the people in attendance aren’t all PRO members. Arguably, Vaillancourt wouldn’t need to campaign even if there were an election—he beat his last opponent by nearly 40 percentage points in 2009. He just seems to love doing it.
Those canny political instincts have allowed this son of a furniture salesman to rise from humble town councillor to one of the most powerful politicians in Quebec, if not Canada. As mayor of Laval for the last 22 years, Vaillancourt has been instrumental in the city’s transformation from sleepy rural respite to industrial and commercial hub. Today, Laval is roughly the size of Halifax, with a budget of about $669 million and annual private investment of over $1 billion. Its debt load has decreased for 12 consecutive years and it has a higher credit rating than the province of Quebec, according to a release from the mayor’s office. And because PRO Lavallois holds all 21 council seats, Vaillancourt presides over it all. The opposition, such as it is, literally sits on the sidelines, in the public gallery, along with the dozens of PRO Lavallois supporters who often shout it down.
Yet the past several months have been trying for the man known as the “King of Laval.” Last November, Vaillancourt was suspended from the board of directors of Hydro-Québec, the province’s public power utility, after two politicians claimed he tried to bribe them with cash-stuffed envelopes. Former Bloc Québécois MP and one-time provincial justice minister Serge Ménard told Radio-Canada that Vaillancourt had offered him $10,000 when Ménard was running for the Parti Québécois in 1993. And Vincent Auclair, a Laval-area MNA with Jean Charest’s government, says the mayor offered him an envelope in 2002 “to help with a difficult campaign,” as Vaillancourt allegedly put it. Outraged, the mayor threatened to sue both men, though he has yet to do so. Meanwhile, the Sûreté du Québec and the province’s Municipal Affairs Ministry are investigating him.
These aren’t isolated controversies. A La Presse investigation last fall indicated that a quarter of all public works contracts in Laval between 2001 and 2008 were awarded to firms owned by businessman Tony Accurso—including Construction Louisbourg and Simard-Beaudry, both of which pleaded guilty to federal tax evasion for a total of $8 million last December. Accurso’s closeness to various Montreal politicians has been part of the huge controversy in the city’s construction industry in the past two years. In 2009, media reports indicated that the head of Montreal’s executive committee had vacationed on Accurso’s 120-foot yacht in 2007; the city later awarded a $355-million water meter contract to a consortium that included Simard-Beaudry. “It is widely known that Mr. Accurso has direct access to the offices of Mayor Gilles Vaillancourt,” wrote La Presse’s Bruno Bisson and André Noël in the fall of 2009.
Vaillancourt’s name has apparently become so toxic that 15 of 16 Montreal-area mayors of the Union des municipalités du Québec, the council of Quebec municipalities, declared last February they wouldn’t participate in UMQ activities as long as Vaillancourt remained on its executive committee. “His presence on the board sends a message that we’re not serious about setting the tone for the behaviour of municipal politicians,” said Westmount Mayor Peter Trent, the board representative of the 15 mayors. “The board should be purer than Caesar’s wife.”
Sitting in his carpeted office on the second floor of Laval’s city hall, the man around whom all these accusations swirl is the picture of calm. He bears a passing resemblance to jazz crooner Mel Tormé and has barely blinking blue eyes and a low, raspy voice that he uses sparingly. Vaillancourt seems at once an incarnation of folksy politician and intense combatant who has fought (and won) all his life. “I know Tony Accurso very well, because he’s a contractor in the area, but he’s not a friend of mine,” he said. “I never went on his boat,” he added, with the tiniest of smiles.
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