Pledges to de-emphasize big-ticket projects, unlike some of his predecessors at Laval City Hall
Unlike several mayoralty candidates who were seeking re-election in Quebec’s third-largest city over the past few decades, incumbent Laval mayor Stéphane Boyer will not be dangling the prospect of flashy new projects – like Place Bell or the Aquatic Complex, as his predecessors did – when he’s out campaigning before election day on November 2.
A focus by past City of Laval administrations on projects like those, which also tended to be located in or near downtown Laval rather than in the more residential outlying areas, provided fodder over the years to city council opposition councillors, such as those from Action Laval.
Dismisses opposition claims
Rightly or wrongly, they accused Boyer’s predecessor, Mayor Marc Demers who also led the Mouvement lavallois, of ignoring the more common needs of Laval’s tax-paying residents (including upgrades to park infrastructure and new local arenas) in neighborhoods all over Île Jésus where the vast majority of Laval’s bedroom community population is situated.
With a little more than a month and a half left until the people of Laval decide who will lead the city for the next four years, Mayor Boyer, 37, said late last week in a wide-ranging pre-election interview with The Laval News that he disagreed fundamentally with the opposition’s claims,
He maintained that his party, the Mouvement lavallois, has succeeded in striking a proper balance between big and small projects in line with the needs of Laval’s residents.
“The opposition always wants to do wedge politics, while telling people that they are forgotten in their neighbourhoods,” said Boyer.
Focused on big and small, says Boyer
“The reality is that, yes, there are a few big projects, because we are Quebec’s third-largest city. But there are a lot of small projects in the neighbourhoods. It’s just that we don’t talk as much about it.”
As examples of smaller and more local projects in recent years, Boyer cited the renewal and opening of a long-neglected beach area alongside the Rivière des Mille Îles in Laval-Ouest, as well as the inauguration of a new library branch and culture centre in Saint-François.
In numbers, according to the mayor, no more than 18 per cent on average of the City of Laval’s budgeted annual expenses gets allotted for major projects, including the upcoming central library and cultural complex in the Montmorency sector, while the rest goes towards the city’s everyday needs as well as smaller projects in neighbourhoods.
So, what is Stéphane Boyer’s pledge to voters should they choose to re-elect him? “What I am proposing to the citizens for the next few years is to concentrate on the essentials,” he said.
Making Laval more resilient
Noting that a good deal of Laval’s essential infrastructure, including major roadways, dates from the 1960s and 1970s when the population grew by 100,000 over a relative few years, he said a re-elected Mouvement lavallois administration would concentrate on basics like road maintenance, while keeping a focus on issues directly impacting homeowners such as flooding, ice storms and wind damage linked to climate change.
“So, my main focus for the next few years would be maintenance of infrastructure, to make the city more resilient and to better protect our citizens,” he said, while claiming that 94 per cent of the pledges the Mouvement lavallois made prior to the 2021 election are now accomplished or are underway.
Few details on Carré Laval project
The mayor does, in fact, have one project he announced a year ago that could be considered major, although it is longer-term. Carré Laval envisions the development in the space of 20 years of a large tract of land near Autoroute 15 in eastern Chomedey (formerly serving as a snow dump) into a mixed residential/commercial/light industrial sector.
Ironically, the opposition at city hall has criticized Boyer for not saying enough about this dossier. Boyer has justified his administration’s reluctance to say more, insisting it would be inappropriate to discuss in detail a project that’s only now getting off the ground.
Earlier this year, Mayor Boyer garnered a fair bit of media attention after he revealed that he suffered from a type of arthritis affecting the spinal cord, limiting some of his activities, although he said that he still intended to run for re-election.
Back problem not limiting him
As he explained in last week’s interview, the discomfort he experiences makes it more difficult for him to stand for lengths of time at the frequent receptions politicians are expected to attend. “After half an hour I need to sit down,” he said.
Boyer, who first entered Laval city politics in 2013 during the post-Gilles Vaillancourt surge that brought the Mouvement lavallois into office, served at first as the city councillor for Laval’s Duvernay-Pont-Viau district and as a senior member of the executive-committee. At the time of his election as mayor four years ago when he was 33, he was the youngest mayor in the City of Laval’s history.
While acknowledging that he owns and lives in a house in Laval-des-Rapides, Boyer was reluctant to reveal more about his personal circumstances. “I don’t talk about my personal life,” he said, while adding, “I want my family to be able to have their own private life.” What is better known about Boyer is his love of outdoor activities, including hiking, kayaking, rock climbing and sailing.
He has less time for leisure
While he is also known to have travelled in his younger years to some distant parts of the world like South Africa and New Zealand, his role as mayor over the past four years has constrained his ability to continue travelling as extensively, he admitted.
“I don’t do it as much as I would like to now that I am mayor because I work six or seven days a week now and don’t have that much free time,” said Boyer.
Famously, one of the pledges Mayor Boyer made when running for the mayoralty in 2021 was that he would roll his salary (which was the second-highest among Quebec towns and cities at the time) back by $30,000 if elected.
Today, minus that amount, he earns around $200,000 a year. Although he has no intention of renewing the pledge, the mayor pointed out that his current salary is less than the salaries paid to the city manager and the assistant city manager.
On track to low property taxes
One of the inescapable truths about municipal election years is that the annual budgets that precede voting day almost always go easy on property taxpayers. As such, the budget by the Boyer administration in December last year held the tax increase to 1.9 per cent. The increase the year before was 4.8 per cent.
Noting that Laval’s economic development projections for the current year as well as for 2026 indicate continuing growth in the number of housing units built here, Boyer said the city is on track to break all previous records before the end of this year, allowing the city to maintain a correspondingly low tax rate because of the additional revenue.
