Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay returned to work Monday after abruptly scrapping planned public events and leaving town last week, two days after he was accused of turning a blind eye to illegal campaign spending and other wrongdoing going back to 2004.
The hot question at city hall is how long Tremblay will stay on in his post. Most commentators have already discounted the possibility he will remain mayor through to the end of his mandate in November 2013.
And in the sprawling suburb north of Montreal, the long-serving mayor of Laval broke weeks of silence only to refute reports that he would announce on Tuesday or Wednesday that he is resigning the job he has held since June 1989.
Gilles Vaillancourt, who has temporarily stepped aside from his duties on orders from his doctor, has been targeted in the last month by three police raids at his home, offices and bank in connection with a seemingly vast anti-corruption investigation.
It fell to the second-in-command at Vaillancourt’s municipal fiefdom to correct the record about the mayor’s political future.
“No decision about that has yet been received,” Laval executive committee chair Basile Angelopoulos said in a statement.
“The mayor is continuing his period of rest and reflection. Once his decision has been taken, it will be passed on.”
The resignation of either Tremblay or Vaillancourt would represent the highest-profile political casualty of Quebec’s war on corruption to date. The prospect of the police probes, coupled with the televised inquiry into corruption and collusion in the province’s construction industry, sending both into retirement was unthinkable when the Charbonneau commission began hearing from witnesses less than two months ago.
Vaillancourt, whose PRO Lavallois political party holds every municipal seat in the city, was seen as untouchable until the commission started hearing testimony about how the mayor enriched himself with kickbacks on city infrastructure contracts that were restricted to a small group of construction firms.
Tremblay was cast as the unknowing leader surrounded and duped by allegedly corrupt and greedy bureaucrats, party official and elected politicians.
That was until testimony last week from a former political organizer for Tremblay’s Union Montreal party, who testified that the party cooked its books in a 2004 byelection when it spent $110,000 — more than double the $46,000 campaign limit.
When Martin Dumont confronted Tremblay and another official and learned about the secret spending, he testified that the mayor walked out of the room saying, “I don’t want to know about this.”
Montreal’s mayor has denied the allegations, but few believe him and no one is stepping forward to defend him.
He returned from his long weekend in the Laurentians Monday to find television crews staking out his house. A few hours later, the cameras were there again at the rear entrance to Montreal City Hall as he returned to work.
“Politics is often a grey zone between what is moral and what is legal. Mayor Tremblay has a legal and legitimate mandate. He was elected by the people and has the right to stay on,” Sylvain Gaudreault, Quebec’s Municipal Affairs and Transport Minister, said Sunday on the popular Radio-Canada television show Tout le Monde en Parle.
“But there is also the zone in politics where there is moral legitimacy. I think the burden is heavier in that zone on the shoulders of Mayor Tremblay.”
More: Full coverage of the Quebec corruption inquiry
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