The number of expropriations of private land exploded in Montreal four years ago when city hall quietly delegated its seldom used power to take properties for use as streets and alleys to civil servants, documents obtained by the Montreal Gazette reveal.
For decades, city departments responsible for real estate transactions and infrastructure had to obtain approval from Montreal’s top decision-making body, the city executive committee, to use a section of the city charter that’s written expressly to enable the expropriation of private properties for streets, places and lanes.
But in May 2016, the executive committee under former mayor Denis Coderre delegated its authority to use Section 192 of Schedule C of the charter to the civil servants — specifically civil servants at the level of department director, according to the documents obtained through Quebec’s access to information law. The power gives the bureaucrats full control to decide behind closed doors what properties to expropriate without needing the executive committee to pass a public resolution on it.
And after the power was transferred to city employees, the number of times Section 192 was used to acquire property for the city rose more than sixfold, the documents show. The city clerk’s office gave the newspaper the files for every expropriation under Section 192 since 2010 in response to the newspaper’s request for information for the past decade.
The files show that between 2010 and May 2016, the executive committee approved 67 expropriations under Section 192 of the charter — an average of 10 expropriations per year.
After the power to use Section 192 was delegated to the civil service, there were more than 200 such expropriations between mid-2016 and August 2019, the files reveal. Between 2016 and 2019, city employees expropriated, on average, 68 properties per year, which means the city was expropriating the same number of properties each year that it had taken during all of the previous six-and-a-half years.
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