Discontent in Beaconsfield

The municipal election campaign in Beaconsfield has taken a nasty turn over the last two weeks, with all three camps reporting promotional signs have gone missing, unfriendly e-mails have been exchanged, and unfair accusations have been thrown around.

Adam Robertson did not think it was a big deal when he displayed his political preference for incumbent mayor Bob Benedetti by sticking a poster of the latter in the showcase of his used books store, Robertson Bookstore, along with posters of two council candidates supporting him last Monday.

"I support Benedetti and his team," he said.

On Tuesday, while the store was left in the hands of a part-time employee unfamiliar with Robertson's political leanings, he said, one of Benedetti's mayoral rivals, David Pollock, walked in and asked if it would be possible to put up his own poster in the showcase. That employee agreed.

"I came in the next morning and took it down right away," said Robertson.

He sent an explanatory e-mail to Pollock, he said, whose response threw him off.

"He said: I do not agree with your sense of democracy," Robertson revealed.

Last week, Robertson was also approached by Greg Stienstra, a council candidate for District 5 backing Pollock's bid for mayor, who wanted to put his own signs up. When he was refused, Stienstra allegedly told Robertson it is illegal for a private business to put up signs backing one candidate and not another.

"I pay my bills and I can do whatever I want (in my store)," Robertson said.

Reached for comment, Pollock did not deny the e-mail exchange, but said it had all been very pleasant.

"I was very polite," he said, once he found out his sign was not up at the store. As for his words on Robertson's sense of democracy, "I don't think the comment I made was nasty," he said.

Pollock also said he thought he had seen some posters of third mayoral candidate Hela Labene and her candidates in there, which is why he had originally thought anyone was allowed to put their posters at the store.

"I donÕt think we ever had Hela Labene posters," Robertson said.

Meanwhile, Pollock maintained campaigning in Beaconsfield had generally been clean.

"I don't think there's been any negative campaigning going on in Beaconsfield, really," he said. He singled out the theft of around 50 electoral posters of Rhonda Massad, a council candidate in District 6 backing him for mayor, as an exception.

Massad was surprised at how the campaign had run. "I thought we were all a little more mature than this," she said, noting how her posters had all been stolen the same weekend. "It wasn't kids who did this," she said. She had stuck her signs up rather high on poles. "You need a ladder and a pair of wire cutters to take them down."

Massad's two rivals for the District 6 seat, Pierre Demers and Robert Lebel, have both experienced their share of sign vandalism.

"It's ongoing this morning," Demers, who is backing Benedetti, said Monday. He added he had about 11 signs either vandalized or stolen so far.

As for Lebel, who is on Labene's slate, he noticed about 16 or 17 of his signs out of 35 had been vandalized or gone missing. "It makes a sad statement of this city," he said of the ruined signs among all three camps.

In nearby District 1, council candidate Barbara Baudinet, who is supporting Benedetti for mayor, said most of the signs she had planted on Woodland Avenue were vandalized or simply disappeared last week.

On her campaign website, Labene recently posted two documents, a copy of old meeting minutes from the Beaconsfield Citizens' Association, and a budget brief from the same group in 2007. Three council candidates backing Pollock for mayor, Stienstra, Gilles Perron and Karin Essen, wereÑuntil deciding to seek public officeÑmembers of the BCA. In the September 2006 meeting minutes, Essen and Stienstra are noted to have supported the construction of an industrial biotech building on Elm Avenue over the installation of Sunrise, a senior citizens' home eventually built there.

In the budget brief, the BCA advocates, among other things, that the city's several outdoor skating rinks be eventually eliminated, to make way for one single indoor-outdoor skating arena. "We could have one good, dependable rink behind the Recreation Centre instead of badly maintained rinks with closed chalets," the brief reads.

Labene uses these documents to claim Pollock's slate would raze Angell Woods for development, as well as attempt to shut down the city's many skating rinks.

"She keeps lying on her website," Massad charged.

Essen said both documents are publicly available on the BCA's website. The former BCA president, now running in District 2, said association meetings are "open forums" where anyone is allowed to express their opinions.

"I categorically refute that anyone on the BCA has ever said they would like to completely raze the northwest corner (where lies a large part of Angell Woods)," she said.

As for cutting down on skating rinks, she said the BCA's suggestions at the time were based on comments by the city. "In early 2006, Mayor Benedetti had said the rinks were going to be on the chopping block," she said, since Beaconsfield could not afford to maintain them all in good shape.

Meanwhile, Labene told The Chronicle she has received about a dozen e-mails, several of them anonymous, urging her to drop out of the race since, as a relatively unknown, third candidate, she would be lessening Pollock's chances against the incumbent.

"Some of them even told me not to run because I am a woman," she said. "But I'm not going to give up, I'm going to keep running."

However, when asked to produce those e-mails, she could only supply two messages that were signed and civil in tone, each asking her to drop out of the race to give better chances to Pollock.

"I don't think that Mrs. Labene, with her separatist leanings and her former links to the Parti QuŽbecois, even has a chance," said Warren Mayhew, a politically involved resident who signed one of the two e-mails in question. "I politely asked her to drop out," he said.

"As a citizen, I want a change of mayor," said Robert Luxenberg, who wrote the other letter asking Labene to step down. "If she's serious about representing the citizens of Beaconsfield, she should not be sitting down and doing nothing," he said of Labene's tendency to remain quiet during the audience's question period at council meetings.

Luxenberg added he was impressed with Pollock's performance as a councillor for the last four years. "He has consistently stood up for citizens and he has been punished for it," he said.

Both Mayhew and Luxenberg said they wrote their e-mails purely out of personal conviction and not on anyone's suggestion.