Quebec’s small towns are debating reducing council sizes amid recruitment challenges

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Some small Quebec municipalities are considering reducing the size of their municipal councils due to challenges in recruiting candidates to run for office.

Quebec recently adopted a rule allowing communities with fewer than 2,000 residents to reduce the number of municipal councilors from six to four after next year’s elections.

The president of the Fédération québécoise des Municipalités says the rule change was a “repeated” request from some cities, which are struggling with persistent vacancies on city councils and even mayors.

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Jacques Demers says small towns are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit candidates due to low salaries, job challenges and a general lack of time and enthusiasm for community involvement.

“When we look at volunteers spending their free time, volunteers dealing with culture, volunteers participating in festivals, exhibitions, it is increasingly difficult to attract people in all this,” he said in a telephone interview.

Corina Lupu, mayor of the small community of Lac-des-Seize-Îles in the Laurentians north of Montreal, says her council will discuss the issue at its next meeting before making a decision.

“In small municipalities, you don’t have 20,000 residents to choose from,” she said in a telephone interview. “Sometimes the population is 1,000 or 500.”

While this isn’t a problem in her community, she believes it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get people to run for office because of the hostile climate elected officials face.

“Some politicians are rather harassed,” she said. “It’s really not a pleasant environment.”

Vacancies are a persistent problem at the municipal level in Quebec. During the last municipal elections in 2021, approximately 120 mayoral and councilor positions went unfilled and nearly 5,000 candidates were elected unopposed.

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Both Lupu and Demers claim that low salaries of councilors in small towns are also a problem.

“In our small communities, city government involvement is almost like volunteering because many people earn $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 a year for their involvement,” Demers said.

While Lupu says salaries are higher in her community given the scope of work, it doesn’t amount to much per hour, and notes that over time, the province has increasingly passed on responsibilities to municipalities.

“We are a small commune, but we still have to complete the same formalities as a large commune,” she said. “It’s the same bureaucracy, but for fewer people.”

Chantal Richer, chief executive of the 168-person town of Val St-Gilles in the Abitibi region, said her community would consider reducing the size of the council.

“It would be easier to find candidates and we could split the money saved between all four of them, which would increase their salaries even more,” Richer said, adding that the matter would be discussed at the next council meeting.

The mayors of Barkmere and Lac-Tremblant-Nord, both in the Laurentians, said they believed keeping the six-member council was better for democracy despite the small number of residents.

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“By reducing the number of councilors to four, we could achieve a quorum at council meetings of three,” Barkmere Mayor Luc Trepanier wrote in an email. “We do not believe that only three people should decide about the entire commune.”

Lupu says moving from six to four councilors would save cities like hers some money on salaries, which may be a consideration in places with small tax bases.

But he also worries that four-person boards could allow strong personalities to dominate and make decisions more difficult. Even though fewer than 200 people live in her community year-round, her lakeside community has never had a council vacancy, and she can’t imagine the council without any of its current members.

“I think I gained a lot from having six councilors, six opinions and six perspectives,” she said.

Municipalities that want to reduce the number of councils after the 2025 elections have until the end of December this year to adopt a resolution on this matter. Demers says about 700 municipalities are eligible for the change, but he believes most will stick with the current mayoral format of six members or more.

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