City to accept draft petition in man's crusade to limit Publisacs distribution

In October 2017, Rosemont—Petite-Patrie resident Charles Montpetit got a Publisac in his mailbox, despite a sticker indicating he wanted no flyers.

He complained to Transcontinental, the company that prints and distributes the bags of advertising flyers to 3.5-million Quebec households each week — including 900,000 in Montreal. It promised to stop.

And it did — for a week. But then the deliveries started again.

After getting four more unwanted Publisacs, Montpetit, 61, a children’s author and illustrator, decided to take action.

Now the company might be wishing it had heeded his complaints.

On Wednesday, Montreal decided to allow Montpetit to submit a draft version of a citywide petition demanding public consultations on halting distribution of Publisacs except to people who specifically request them.

His one-man battle against the bags of supermarket specials has consumed most of his waking hours for the past 16 months

It was a signal victory for the writer, whose one-man battle against the bags of supermarket specials has consumed most of his waking hours for the past 16 months.

He has taken 5,400 photos of the offending bags and filed 34 complaints with the city. He has peppered elected officials with questions and founded a website and Facebook page.

In January, the city clerk’s office rejected a draft petition Montpetit had filed Nov. 30 demanding that the city crack down on the circulars, saying the issue came under the jurisdiction of Montreal’s 19 boroughs.

But this week, the city made two major changes to the “right of initiative” that allows citizens to force the holding of public consultations on issues with a significant impact on the community.

First, it launched an online version, allowing citizens to collect signatures electronically, instead of having to do so the old-fashioned way on paper.

And then on Wednesday, Laurence Lavigne Lalonde, the executive committee member responsible for democracy, announced she was overturning the city clerk’s decision and would allow Montpetit to submit his draft petition to the city centre instead of to each of the 19 boroughs.

“As we consider that this is a request that has an impact on the whole territory, we chose to avoid duplicating the human resources needed to work on analyzing the file in each of the boroughs and to repatriate this request to the central city, which we are allowed to do under the bylaw,” she said to reporters at city hall after announcing the measure during the weekly executive-committee meeting.

The issue will also come up at consultations on waste management planned for later this year by Montreal’s standing committee on the environment.

Montpetit wasted no time in re-submitting the draft petition online.

“We’re thrilled that the system for submitting petitions online is now operational,” he said in an interview.

“We’re the first ones to take advantage of it.”

The city clerk will determine within two weeks whether the draft petition meets the requirements. If so, he would have three months to raise 15,000 signatures in order to force consultations.

Montpetit had gone through the arduous process of applying manually in 11 boroughs. He had also collected the necessary 25 paper signatures in 18 out of 19 boroughs. However, he said he held off on applying in all of the boroughs, in hopes the online system would soon be ready and that the initial decision would be overturned.

The draft petition seeks to flip the onus from residents — who presently may refuse flyers by putting a sticker on their door — to the distributor, who would only be allowed to leave flyers at households that have put up a sticker indicating they want to receive them.

Montpetit put his illustration skills to work designing such a sticker.

It also asks that the flyers be distributed in a paper envelope rather than a plastic bag so the whole thing can be recycled

It also asks that the flyers be distributed in a paper envelope rather than a plastic bag so the whole thing can be recycled. Most people discard the flyers in the plastic bag, which can result in neither being recycled, Montpetit said.

The proposed petition also calls on the city to apply a bylaw imposing fines of up to $2,000 for illegal distribution, which he said has been blatantly ignored until now.

Montpetit said he has the backing of 13 major environmental organizations.

“It will be very easy for us to collect 15,000 signatures online,” he predicted.

“It won’t take us three months. It will take us five days,” he said.

Katherine Chartrand, senior director of corporate communications for Transcontinental, said in an email that 87 per cent of people who receive the grocery flyers say they use them.

“We are of the opinion that the silent majority who use the Publisac would like to maintain its distribution, but we respect the initiatives undertaken by certain citizens with regard to the Publisac,” she said.

mscott@postmedia.com

from Montreal Gazette https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/citizens-can-sign-petitions-online
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