Jorge Maria
Fort-Colounge Nov. 3, 2021
Former councillor of 25 years, Gilles M. Beaulieu, is taking another run at municipal leadership.
Beaulieu, born in 1953, has called Fort Colounge home except for a brief three-month internship on Parliament Hill.
Beaulieu spent decades working first with his father and then on his own in the hardware and lumber business up until 2006. In that time, he also drove a school bus for 25 years. Later he worked as a property manager and now fills his time as a cook in the École secondaire Sieur-de-Coulonge’s kitchen.
Over the years, he volunteered for the fire department and was one of the founding members of Fort Colounge’s Knights of Columbus in the 1980s, he said.
He is married with two children and five grandchildren.
He has always been interested in politics. He became the first school president in 1972 at Polyvalente in Fort Colounge, a post he held for two years. Then at the age of 28, he became a councillor.
Somehow he also found the time to work on the Fort Colounge council for 25 years, until his loss to his current mayoral opponent Christine Francoeur in 2017.
If elected mayor, he intends to bring the council together to rebuild the homes lost in the 2017 and 2019 floods.
“We lost 23 houses [because] of the 2017 and 2019 floods. Three have been rebuilt,” he said. The land for the remaining 20 homes needs to be cleared and made suitable for construction, which he will do if elected mayor, he said.
Cleaning up the town
Beaulieu feels that more needs to be done to beautify the town, particularly the front of people’s homes. Over the years, the frontage of dwellings has been neglected. In addition, to attract people to the community, the community needs to appeal to possible newcomers.
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Fining homeowners is the most obvious solution, but he would like to encourage people to make the right decisions rather than forcing them to. “But I’d rather work with the people of the town, give it a year, two years and see if we come up with a better solution,” he said. Communicating with residents is vital. He acknowledges that it could be just a matter of age or means for some in the community. The municipality should be helping those people.
“Everyone needs to do their part.”
Encouraging Development
Beaulieu said the council needs to do more to attract development in the community. There are large parcels of land that sit empty. He sees it as a two-pronged approach. One, to keep the existing ageing population in the community, long-term care or senior housing needs to be developed and two, homes need to be built for young families. Smaller, more easily maintained homes for seniors, larger homes for growing young families. “I want new families to plant roots in Fort Colounge,” but you have to build homes for them to move to, he said. The population is shrinking because seniors have nowhere to move to, so they leave for the city or Pembroke.
The Downtown Core
The downtown core is also a major issue; he sees businesses like The Cafe Downtown as important for the area and would like to attract more small business owners and shops to the site. One proposal is hosting a weekly farmers market to attract people to the downtown core regularly. From there, he hopes, others might be interested in setting up a permanent shop.
With the Félix-Gabriel-Marchand bridge set to open next year, he believes it will be a boon to the community and attract tourists like motorcycle riders. He added that there are things in the community to attract tourists; Fort Colounge just needs the shops for people to go to.
THE EQUITY reached out to mayoral candidate Christine Francoeur for an interview on several occasions and did not receive a response.
