Forced Fusion – Creating One Community Where Once There Were Two

Metis Beach was one of a handful of municipalities forced to amalgamate by the government of Québec in 2002, given no choice but to join the next-door municipality of Les Boules. There were few objections from the latter. Decades of snickering at the town’s suggestive name (Les Boules is the French word for “the balls”) and the high cost of the village’s sewage treatment system made amalgamation seem attractive. The residents of Metis Beach were less enthusiastic. Their municipality was debt-free and the town council sought to preserve the bilingual status it had secured decades earlier. 

To outsiders, resistance seemed futile, even racist. In Métis Beach, novelist Claudine Bourbonnais has her fictional character Romain Carrier describe the reaction to the extinction of the village’s name: 

The shock was too great to the system…Oh, there were of course a few protests from Metis Beach, a few base comments, some of the old hatreds unburied. There was a crisis when one of them, Harry Fluke at their head, who refused, in vain when the firetruck they had paid for from their own pockets was to be used for the entire community. “’You should have heard what they said about the Francophones,” John said. You would think it was fifty years ago! 

The 2002 amalgamation created a single town where there were two and brought the communities together for the first time since the early days of the Metis seigneury.