With the prospect of an early federal election more certain by the week, Jean-Yves Duclos, Minister of Public Services in the outgoing Trudeau cabinet, was warning that a Conservative government under Pierre Poilièvre would almost certainly make deep cuts to programs introduced by the Liberals in the past nine years – including national dental care and access to affordable housing.
“Pierre Poilievre wants to take away dental coverage for millions of Canadians and leave you and your family without the health care you need and deserve,” Duclos said in an interview with The Laval News.
Mayor Stéphane Boyer confirmed in February he’d be seeking a second term in the November 2 municipal elections, in spite of the fact he was facing a health issue which was impacting the quality of his life.
Boyer, who became Laval’s youngest elected mayor in 2021 at the age of 33, told journalists he was diagnosed more than a decade ago with ankylosing spondylitis, a type of arthritis that affects the spinal cord.
The Rubino family from Laval’s Duvernay district were among the thousands of moms, dads and children who converged on the Centre de la Nature on the weekend of January 24-25-26 for the city’s Laval en Blanc winter carnival.
For elected as well as unelected members of the Action Laval opposition at Laval city hall, longtime Chomedey city councillor Aglaia Revelakis’s announcement during the February council meeting that she was abandoning the Action Laval caucus was as unexpected as it was astonishing.
Revelakis was one of the first Action Laval city councillors to be elected in 2013 after former mayor Gilles Vaillancourt’s monopoly on Laval city council seats had finally been broken.
Since then, she won clear majorities in three elections, while retaining a large and reliable base of support for Action Laval from within her territory.
“As of today, I will no longer sit as municipal councillor with Action Laval,” Revelakis said, adding that she was giving up her membership in the party at the same time.
Although fallout from U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposed 25 per cent tariffs on imported Canadian goods had yet to make a full impact in Laval, as far as one local business owner was concerned, Trump’s threat was a challenge to be taken.
“Bring on the tariffs,” Jason Bérubé, CEO of Chemtec Epoxy Coatings, a Laval-based manufacturer and distributor of industrial floor coatings, told The Laval News.
He said the company’s earlier decision to shift some of its focus to the U.S. would probably help Chemtec absorb whatever impact came from the tariffs – even if they were as high as 25 per cent.
