John Gardiner is a former politician in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He was a member of the Montreal city council from 1974 to 1978 and again from 1982 to 1994 as a member of the Montreal Citizens' Movement (MCM) and was a prominent figure in Jean Doré's municipal administration.
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Early life and career
An anglophone Montrealer, Gardiner studied history at McGill University. He was a high-school teacher from 1967 to 1973 and a school commissioner from 1973 to 1977. He also co-ordinated Montreal's Milton Park project, in which capacity he organized six hundred units of non-profit housing.
Opposition councillor
Gardiner was a founding member of the Montreal Citizens' Movement and became one of its first elected councillors in the 1974 municipal election, defeating incumbent councillor Hyman Brock in the second Saint-Louis ward. He lost his seat to Civic Party candidate Joffre Laporte in 1978 but was returned over Laporte in a rematch four years later.
Mayor Jean Drapeau's Civic Party dominated municipal politics in this period, and Gardiner served as a member of the opposition. He was considered a radical left-wing activist in the 1970s and took part in several efforts to preserve historic buildings from urban development. By the 1980s, he had moved to the political centre.
Gardiner was the MCM's house leader and housing critic in the mid-1980s. In 1985, he called for the city to hold public consultations before approving any large-scale downtown development projects. The following year, he criticized the Drapeau administration's decision to cancel a housing renovations program.
Shortly before the 1986 municipal election, Gardiner said that francophone Montrealers were becoming increasingly engaged in municipal politics, in light of the growing role of the French language in the city's professional sector. He added that this change benefited the MCM's chances of winning the election.
Doré administration
1986–90
The MCM won a landslide majority in the 1986 municipal election and its mayoral candidate, Jean Doré, was elected to succeed Drapeau. After being sworn in as mayor, Doré appointed Gardiner to the Montreal executive committee (i.e., the municipal cabinet) with responsibility for housing and city planning. Gardiner also served as the leader of the Doré government in council. He supported several development projects while also attempting to promote low-income housing.
Early in the Doré administration, Gardiner offered support to a new low-income housing project in the Rosemont area, pledged that Montreal would cover most costs in renovating dangerous rooming houses, and announced that the city would make rent control a condition of landlords receiving renovation grants. In 1989, he announced that Montreal would introduce a tax incentive to make home ownership easier and prevent a drift to the suburbs.
Gardiner supported several high-rise projects in the Doré administration's first term and was sometimes accused of ignoring tenant rights. One of the most controversial projects he supported was an unsuccessful condominium development on Overdale Avenue that caused the displacement of seventy tenants. Gardiner required the developers to provide alternate housing for all of the affected parties as a condition of the project's approval; this notwithstanding, some MCM councillors opposed the project on the grounds that it was unfair to the tenants and created a bad precedent for future development on the Saint Lawrence River. Despite the internal opposition, the Doré administration approved the project in September 1987. The tenants were ultimately evicted and relocated, although the developers never followed through with building the condominiums. Gardiner later helped approve two 45-storey office buildings in 1988, despite further opposition from within the MCM.
In March 1988, Gardiner announced the first draft of a long-awaited master plan for Montreal's downtown. Its key planks included making Montreal streets friendlier to pedestrians, requiring that no new buildings significantly block the view of Mount Royal, and giving incentives to developers who create "social useful" amenities such as day care centres. Gardiner followed this in January 1990 with a ten-year downtown plan that included the creation of ten thousand new housing units and significant new office space and a restoration of the area's main commercial thoroughfare. Gardiner led council in approving the plan later in the year; critics charged that it favoured developers by permitting the construction of more high-rise offices.
Since 1994
The MCM was defeated in the 1994 municipal election and later fell victim to internal divisions. Gardiner quit the party in 1997, saying that it was no longer a credible force in municipal politics. In early 1998, he encouraged Conrad Sauve to consider running for mayor of Montreal on a centrist ticket. He also recommended that the Montreal's municipal government be restructured, converting the city into eight to ten municipalities, consolidating the suburbs into eight communities, and giving all municipalities on Montreal Island shared oversight of the city's downtown.
In 2000, Montreal lawyer Jean-Pierre Cantin recorded an affidavit that accused Gardiner of taking bribes for the rezoning of commercial property in Montreal's north end. Gardiner denied the charge, saying, "I haven't a clue what [Cantin] is talking about. I'm not worried because I am not guilty, but I'm concerned because I get phone calls and people are talking. We were an honest government, and we maintained it that way."