Counted
as No.

One island, one city,
1 January 2002.

In December 2000 the National Assembly passed Bill 170, which merged every municipality on the Island of Montreal into a single city. On 1 January 2002 twenty-eight of them became one: the old City of Montreal and twenty-seven suburbs, from Westmount and Hampstead in the middle of the island to Senneville at its western tip and Montréal-Est at its eastern end. The same reform merged municipalities around Quebec City, Longueuil and Gatineau. Each former town became a borough or part of one, with a borough council and no standing of its own.

At the general election of 14 April 2003, Jean Charest’s Liberals won on a promise to let the citizens of merged towns decide whether to stay. On 17 June 2003 the new Minister of Municipal Affairs, Jean-Marc Fournier, introduced Bill 9 to do it. The bill set two steps. First, a register: if ten percent of a former town’s electors signed it, a referendum would be held there. Second, the vote, and section 25 of the bill as introduced set out what would count as a win: “a greater number of affirmative votes than negative votes.” The bill’s own explanatory notes called it what it was: “la majorité simple”, a simple majority.

The committee room,
23 September 2003.

Between 9 September and 23 October 2003 the Assembly’s Commission de l’aménagement du territoire held thirteen sittings of public hearings on Bill 9. The mayors of the new cities had asked it to require a minimum turnout before any result could count. At the fifth sitting, on 23 September, the bill on the table still asked for a simple majority, and the people who wanted their towns back came to argue against any higher bar.

William Steinberg spoke for the Hampstead Municipal and Recreational Association. He called the ten percent register “clearly unfair” and asked for two and a half or five percent. He called a turnout minimum “outrageous”: “Requiring a minimum voter participation rate gives a veto to those in favor of the megacities.” Then he told the committee who would get through if the bar went up anyway:

“We are certain that Hampstead, Montréal West, Baie-d’Urfé, Westmount, Pointe-Claire and several other former municipalities will meet even a high requirement because we are very well organized and the anger against the forced mergers remains extremely high. However, some of our neighboring towns are less organized, even though the sentiment for demerger is just as high.”

The same afternoon Irving Adessky, mayor of Hampstead from 1974 to 2001, appeared with three former officials of Côte-Saint-Luc and Montréal-Ouest. One of them was Mitchell Brownstein, a Côte-Saint-Luc councillor from 1990 to 2001. Adessky put their position in one sentence: if ten percent of electors signed a register and then fifty percent plus one voted in favour, “then demerger should occur. It is unreasonable, as it is undemocratic, to raise that level of participation.” And in French: imposing a supermajority would be “totalement inacceptable et discriminatoire”.

The minister answered with the idea that would shape the final law: “Je ne pense pas que la meilleure solution pour contrecarrer une fusion illégitime, c’est une défusion qui serait elle-même illégitime.” The best answer to an illegitimate merger, he said, was not a demerger that would itself be illegitimate.

Thirty-five percent,
added at the end of November.

In the last week of November 2003 the minister tabled his amendments. The simple majority was gone. The new section 43, as enacted, reads:

“La réponse donnée par les personnes habiles à voter à la question référendaire est réputée affirmative lorsque les résultats du scrutin révèlent que le nombre des votes affirmatifs est supérieur à celui des votes négatifs et égal ou supérieur à 35 % de celui des personnes habiles à voter inscrites sur la liste référendaire du secteur concerné.”

Yes had to win more votes than No, and those Yes votes also had to equal at least thirty-five percent of every elector on the list. The second test does not look at the ballots. It looks at the list. Every elector who did not vote Yes, whether they voted No or stayed home, counted against the town leaving. At fifty percent turnout, Yes needed seventy percent of the ballots. At forty percent turnout, it needed eighty-seven and a half.

Fournier defended the rule on 1 December 2003, opening the debate on the bill’s principle: “Nous ne voulons pas répondre aux fusions illégitimes par des défusions illégitimes.” He gave an example: a vote in which only twenty percent of people turn out and it ends fifteen to five, so that eighty percent of the population never speaks. A demerger was “une structure permanente”, and it would affect those who chose to stay. The level was there to make sure a departure was “appuyée par une mobilisation de la population.”

The Parti Québécois opposition objected that the bar was too low. On 2 December Daniel Turp said the “amendements de dernière minute” made demergers certain in small towns “comme Baie-d’Urfé”, where a small number of people could break up a large city. In the Gazette that month Anthony Housefather, then a city councillor for Côte-Saint-Luc, Hampstead and Montréal-Ouest and one of the demerger campaign’s organizers, wrote that the threshold “should be of very little concern to people advocating demerger”, because referendums in Quebec drew higher turnouts than general elections.

On 15 December the government moved closure. The next day the whole Assembly sat as a committee and went through the bill clause by clause in a single sitting. Bill 9 passed on 17 December, sixty-five votes to thirty-seven, and received assent on 18 December 2003 as chapter 14 of the statutes of that year.

Twenty-two votes,
20 June 2004.

Twenty-two of the twenty-eight former municipalities on the island filled their registers in May 2004 and voted on Sunday, 20 June. Every one of the twenty-two returned a Yes majority. No referendum on the island was won by No.

Fifteen cleared both tests and were reconstituted: Baie-d’Urfé, Beaconsfield, Côte-Saint-Luc, Dollard-des-Ormeaux, Dorval, L’Île-Dorval, Hampstead, Kirkland, Montréal-Est, Montréal-Ouest, Mont-Royal, Pointe-Claire, Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Senneville and Westmount. The five towns Steinberg had named to the committee all made it, every one with more than forty-seven percent of its list voting Yes.

Seven won their majority and stayed merged: Anjou, LaSalle, L’Île-Bizard, Pierrefonds, Roxboro, Sainte-Geneviève and Saint-Laurent. Together they cast 50,154 Yes votes to 25,411 No, two to one for leaving. Saint-Laurent voted seventy-five percent Yes and cast 15,939 Yes votes, more than any of the fifteen towns that left; it fell 3,582 votes short of its line. Roxboro missed by seventy-four votes. L’Île-Bizard missed by 133. The seven held 195,976 registered electors between them, more than the fifteen restored towns combined.

Across Quebec that day, eighty-nine former municipalities voted. Thirty-one were reconstituted. Thirty-one voted No. Twenty-seven voted Yes and stayed merged. In Quebec City, Sainte-Foy voted 16,233 to 14,869 for leaving and is still a part of it.

Every row is a majority. The pale bar is the share of ballots that said Yes; it passes the halfway mark in all twenty-two. The dark bar is the same Yes vote measured against the whole voters’ list, which is what section 43 counted. Tap a town to read its count.

Income, managers
and the line, 2001–2004.

The census of May 2001 was the last one taken before the merger, so it counts every former town on its own. Set beside the vote three years later, it shows who the thirty-five percent line let through.

The fifteen towns that cleared the line had a median household income of $70,573 in 2000. The seven that stayed under had $48,377. In the fifteen, 20.7 percent of workers held management jobs; in the seven, 12.0. Home ownership was 68.8 percent against 55.4, the average owned home was worth $266,817 against $149,741, and 47.3 percent of adults between twenty and sixty-four held a university credential against 26.1.

Across the twenty-one towns with census figures, the share of the whole list that voted Yes rises with management share and with income, at correlations of about 0.7, and falls as the share of income from government transfers rises. The eleven towns with the highest share of managers all got their town halls back. These are figures for towns, not for how any one person voted, and income, schooling and the size of the electorate move together, so they cannot be pulled apart. Together they describe a rule that counted every elector who stayed home as a No, in a city where turnout follows income.

Owners and managers. Hampstead, Mont-Royal, Côte-Saint-Luc and Westmount had the same share of managers as the eight West Island towns that got out, 23.2 percent against 21.1, and the same median household income, $71,047 against $72,185. They differed in property and in where income came from. The average owned home in the four was worth $415,102; on the West Island, $215,470. Income from sources other than wages and government, which in the census means investments and private pensions, was 23.9 percent of all income in the four and 13.8 on the West Island. Allowing for age, that difference sits in Hampstead and Westmount. Mont-Royal looks like the West Island, and Côte-Saint-Luc, with a median age of 50.5 and a median household income of $41,028, sixteenth of the twenty-one, is a town of pensioners.

Where organization beat income. Côte-Saint-Luc cleared the line with 40.4 percent of its list. Montréal-Est, the lowest-income town of the twenty-one, with 4.4 percent of its workers in management, cleared it with 45.2. L’Île-Bizard, ninth by income, missed by 133 votes. Income set the odds; turnout on the day settled the cases.

Who asked for a higher bar. The committee record of autumn 2003 names them.

Fifteen councils,
and the council above them, 2004–2006.

What the fifteen would get back was decided after the vote. On 17 December 2004 Bill 75 received assent. It created an agglomeration council for the island and kept at that level most of what a city spends money on: property assessment, public transit, the arterial road network, water and sewage treatment, waste disposal, police, fire, the 9-1-1 centre, the municipal court, social housing and economic development. A decree of 8 December 2005 weighted each municipality’s votes on that council by population, which leaves the City of Montreal with about seven votes in every eight.

In March 2005 the leaders of the Côte-Saint-Luc campaign, organized as the Committee for Reconstituted Cities, lobbied Lawrence Bergman, the Liberal minister and member for D’Arcy-McGee, over the rest. They asked for early municipal elections, for no local asset to be made island-wide without the town’s consent, for a voice on the Montreal Metropolitan Community, and for local planning with no “third level of regulation at the agglomeration level.” Brownstein, by then co-chair of the Côte-Saint-Luc Demerger Committee: “We need councils in place as quickly as possible so legitimate elected officials are making the important decisions that will bind our cities for years to come.”

On 1 January 2006 the fifteen were reconstituted. They kept their own councils, their own by-laws and local services, their standing as legal persons, and their own status under the Charter of the French Language. The seven that stayed under the line remained boroughs of Montreal, with borough councils whose decisions on those questions go to Montreal’s city council.

What a council does
that a borough cannot, 2022–2026.

Language status. In December 2022 the Office québécois de la langue française notified municipalities whose English-mother-tongue population had fallen below half that they would lose their bilingual status unless their councils resolved to keep it, the procedure Bill 96 had created that year. Côte-Saint-Luc, at 46.0 percent, resolved unanimously on 21 December. Kirkland voted on 16 January 2023 and Dorval on 23 January. The borough council of Pierrefonds-Roxboro voted the same January night as Kirkland, but its decision still had to be confirmed by Montreal’s city council. Pierrefonds and Roxboro had voted seventy and sixty-seven percent Yes in 2004. On 16 May 2023 the Office said all forty-eight bodies notified had kept their status.

Lawsuits. On 6 June 2023 twenty-three municipalities filed in Quebec Superior Court against five parts of Bill 96; ten of them are restored island towns, among them Côte-Saint-Luc, Dorval, Pointe-Claire and Westmount. On 20 September 2023 Hampstead and the Town of Mount Royal filed their own challenge, which also attacks the formula Quebec used to amend the Constitution. Beaconsfield is suing Montreal over agglomeration payments for twenty million dollars. On 25 February 2025 all fifteen contested a twenty-million-dollar agglomeration loan by-law that they said had been adopted “by the only majority of votes held by the City of Montréal.” None of these cases has been decided on the merits.

Foreign policy. In October 2023 Hampstead’s council called on Ottawa to demand the release of the hostages taken by Hamas. On 5 February 2024 it voted its “discontent” with Canada’s vote for a United Nations ceasefire and lowered its flags to half-mast until the hostages were freed; that April it passed a resolution of no confidence in the federal government over Israel and antisemitism. On 11 August 2025 the council of Côte-Saint-Luc, with Mitchell Brownstein as mayor, adopted Resolution 250802, moved by Councillor Lior Azerad, seconded by every member and carried unanimously:

“THAT the Côte Saint-Luc City Council (‘Council’) opposes the Government of Canada’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state in September 2025, as it deviates from the established principle of achieving statehood through direct, bilateral negotiations between Israel and a demilitarized Palestinian authority which recognizes Israel’s right to exist.”

The clerk was directed to send it to the Prime Minister, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the member of Parliament for Mount Royal. The same council has since resolved on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, in February 2026, and on a Canada Council grant to a magazine that published material praising the attacks of 7 October 2023, in October 2026.

The big city uses its council the same way. On 24 August 2026 Montreal’s city council adopted an amended motion of solidarity with Palestinians, fifty-four votes to six. Three days later the agglomeration council, on a motion from Côte-Saint-Luc’s mayor seconded by Westmount’s, unanimously declared that the agglomeration “is neither responsible for nor capable of resolving international conflicts” and that the rise in antisemitism was unacceptable. What the 2004 vote decided was how many councils on the island speak in their own name. Sixteen do. The seven that voted Yes and stayed under the line speak through Montreal’s.

The log,
from the merger to the resolutions.

Sixteen entries, each fixed by a document. The hinge rows are where the line was drawn and where it fell.

Back on deck:
what the log supports.

The rule. Bill 9 was introduced with a simple majority. The thirty-five percent test was added by the government in the last three weeks before it passed, under closure, and it counted every elector who stayed home the same as a No.

The warning. Nine months before the vote, the committee was told by name which towns would clear a high bar and that less organized neighbours, just as angry, might not. The people who said it were arguing against any bar at all. The towns they named all cleared it.

The count. All twenty-two island votes were Yes majorities. Fifteen towns, 74,738 Yes votes, left. Seven towns, 50,154 Yes votes at two to one, stayed. The line sorted towns that had all voted the same way.

The class. The towns that cleared it had a median household income near $70,600 and one worker in five in management; the towns left under it had $48,400 and one in eight. The higher bar was asked for by the merged cities’ side and set by the government, against the objection of every demerger group, and it worked as a filter on income all the same.

The platform. What came back was a council with its own legal standing under an agglomeration that holds most of the money. The restored councils have used it to keep their language status without anyone’s confirmation, to sue Quebec and Montreal, and to put positions on Israel and the Middle East before the federal government, as Montreal’s own council does from the other side. The thirty-five percent amendment was the government’s, tabled by the minister. The campaigners whose towns cleared it had argued against any threshold above a majority.