Francine Bastien 

TBL 5-year plan 

There were at least 150 citizens attending the first session where the results of the vast public consultation on the town’s 2023-2027 strategic plan were made public. 

The consultation process, run by the firm Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton, involved an on-line questionnaire where more than 1100 citizens responded and a special meeting to get the views of younger generations. This first public session dealt with environmental issues and community life. The presentation contained a lot of words such as ‘mission’, ‘values’, ‘resilience’ and the like but it stressed that the environment was a major concern of TBL residents. 

As soon as the questions started, water was the top of list. Will there be enough water considering all the new construction? How is water use measured, is it measured? What about residents using well water, is their supply monitored, protected? 

The meeting was not intended to provide a response like ‘what will the town do?’ – this will come later this spring when the plan is adopted, probably in May – but the line of questioning surely showed that people want the planning to produce concrete results. 

On the ‘social issues’, maintenance of the bilingual status of the town raised some questions. In light of the restrictive language laws adopted by the province, even officially bilingual municipalities such as TBL are limited in the production of documents in English. The town’s population increased in the last five years, will that trend continue in the next five years? This is fundamental in order to establish meaningful priorities for the future said one participant. 

In any event, the planning is still ongoing and if the future action plan of the town is proportional to the planning that went into it, we should be in for an action packed next few years. Incidentally, the largest part of the new plan will in all likelihood be carried out by a new council after next year’s municipal election. 

The public presentation can be consulted at: 

lacbrome.ca/download/news_documents/Eng-Presentation-aux-citoyens-RCGT.pdf