Pontiac – Jonathan Crowe

Jane Toller has been elected warden of the Pontiac MRC, the first warden in the Pontiac’s history to be elected directly rather than selected from the MRC’s council of 18 mayors. Toller, who as Jane Pitfield served on Toronto’s city council and ran a somewhat quixotic campaign for Toronto mayor in 2006, took 46.7 percent of the vote, finishing well ahead of incumbent warden Raymond Durocher. The outgoing mayor of Fort-Coulonge took 18 percent of the vote.

Linda Davis finished third, ahead of former Pontiac MNA Charlotte L’Écuyer; onetime Calumet Island mayor Pierre Fréchette was only 40 votes behind L’Écuyer.

At the municipal level, new mayors in the Pontiac MRC include Gaston Allard in Fort-Coulonge, Maurice Beauregard in Campbell’s Bay and Serge Newberry in Île-du-Grand-Calumet. Two incumbent mayors were defeated decisively: Danielle Belec in Mansfield-et-Pontefract to Gilles Dionne, and controversial Thorne mayor Terry Murdock to Karen Daly Kelly. Several mayors were elected by very narrow margins, including Lynne Cameron of Portage-du-Fort (6 votes) and Sandra Murray of Shawville (16 votes). Only 6 of 18 mayors were elected by acclamation.

Voter turnout was extremely high for a municipal election. A total of 7,552 people voted in the warden election, which is just insane for a county whose entire population—not just those eligible to vote—was 14,251 in last year’s census.

Full results after the jump. Winners’ names are in boldface; incumbents are marked with an (i).

The Latecomers

By Jonathan Crowe

On November 2, 2017

In Politics

First, some background, so you understand what’s going on a bit better:

In Quebec, what would be called a county elsewhere is called a municipalité régionale de comté or MRC; an MRC encompasses all the towns, villages, townships and other municipalities within its boundaries (with the exception of large cities and reserves). Shawville, the municipality where I live, is part of the Pontiac MRC, which comprises a total of 18 municipalities as well as a vast unorganized territory to the north.

The head of an MRC is called a préfet (or prefect); around here that title is translated as warden. Pontiac MRC’s warden has heretofore been selected from the 18 mayors that make up the MRC’s council. But that changes this year: in Sunday’s municipal elections, the Pontiac MRC’s warden will be directly elected for the first time.

Five candidates are running. Two of them are familiar faces: Raymond Durocher is the incumbent warden and the outgoing mayor of Fort-Coulonge, a post he’s held since 1999. Charlotte L’Écuyer is the region’s former Liberal MNA: she represented the provincial district of Pontiac between 2003 and 2014. But the other three are relatively recent arrivals to the Pontiac: each has been here full-time for only three to six years.

Bus Service in the Pontiac

By Jonathan Crowe

On June 27, 2017

In Transportation

The Pontiac’s commuter bus service—a single line running the 148 from Isle-aux-Allumettes to downtown Ottawa—was for many years run by Transport Thom. But finding out about the service took some doing: there was never a web page listing fares and schedules. (I had to go to the service station that serves as Shawville’s bus stop.) Now that the service has been taken over by Transcollines, we have that web page.

We like having friends visit, but many of them are urbanites without cars. The current schedule doesn’t necessarily solve that problem: the morning bus passes through Shawville at 6:00 and the afternoon bus leaves Ottawa’s bus terminal at 3:30 (unchanged since the Thom days). A single one-way ticket is $17. (Weekly and monthly passes are much cheaper per trip: it’s a commuter bus, after all.) There’s a reason we usually just drive in and pick people up. But Transcollines will be revamping the service next year; it’ll be interesting to see what changes.

J’y suis, j’y reste

By Jonathan Crowe

On May 1, 2017

In Personal

“You’re from the city, aren’t you?”

That was the then-mayor of Shawville, watching me walk gingerly through the mud during the groundbreaking ceremony for what would soon become the village’s day care centre. It was the fall of 2003 and I was covering the event as a reporter for the local newspaper. For various reasons I lasted all of five months in that job, but it gave me a crash course in the town, the surrounding countryside and the MRC du Pontiac in general.

Yes, I was from the city—I grew up in suburban Winnipeg—but Shawville, a town of some 1,600 people, most of whom anglophone, about 75 km northwest of Ottawa, seemed somehow familiar. I spent a lot of my childhood staying with my paternal grandparents in Hartney, Manitoba, a village two thousand kilometres away and about one-third the size. But there were some similarities: both communities served as service centres for the surrounding farms. And both had demographics that tilted elderly. To me, it felt like moving to Shawville was like moving in with elderly relatives with whom you had to mind your manners and steer the conversation away from politics as much as possible, but apart from that you loved each other to bits.

Pontiac and Ottawa Valley Writers Circle

By Jonathan Crowe

On January 10, 2017

In Writing

The Pontiac and Ottawa Valley Writers Circle, a new group for fiction writers in my neck of the woods, is having its inaugural meeting next month in Portage-du-Fort. It seems a bit excessively structured for a group that’s just getting started, but is probably something I ought to check out — assuming they’re open to speculative fiction writers, that is. Coverage in The Daily Observer.

How the Pontiac MRC Voted in 2015

By Jonathan Crowe

On January 2, 2017

In Politics

More than 14 months after the election is hardly the definition of timely, and it’ll be a few years before the next one, but I suddenly remembered that I meant to look at the poll-by-poll results for my electoral district, Pontiac, and see how much the vote in my particular sector — the Pontiac MRC (municipalité régionale de comté, roughly equivalent to a county) — differed from the electoral district as a whole.

Jonathan Crowe

Book reviewer, cat photographer, fanzine editor, map blogger, snake whisperer.

Tag: Pontiac

Pontiac MRC Municipal Elections: Toller Wins, Belec and Murdock Defeated

The Latecomers

Bus Service in the Pontiac

J’y suis, j’y reste

Pontiac and Ottawa Valley Writers Circle

How the Pontiac MRC Voted in 2015

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