Michael Mark Applebaum (born February 10, 1963) is a former Canadian politician who served as interim mayor of Montreal between his appointment by the city council on November 16, 2012, and his resignation on June 18, 2013. On June 17, 2013, he was arrested and indicted on 14 charges including fraud, conspiracy, breach of trust, and corruption in municipal affairs. He resigned the following day. On January 26, 2017, Applebaum was found guilty of eight of these charges, and subsequently sentenced to a year in prison and two years probation for extorting $60,000 worth of bribes from real estate developers as borough mayor in Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce between 2006 and 2012. On June 6, 2017, Applebaum was granted parole two months after serving one-sixth of his sentence when he admitted to his crimes.
Applebaum was first elected city councillor for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce on November 6, 1994, as a member of the now defunct Parti des Montréalais. In 2001, he became a founding member of the Union Montréal party and rose to prominence as part of Mayor Gérald Tremblay's administration, serving as borough mayor of Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce from January 1, 2002, to November 21, 2012, and becoming chair of the city's powerful executive committee in 2011. By 2006, he operated a "stratagem of corruption" in the borough and was investigated by UPAC, Quebec's anti-corruption police force. He was appointed interim mayor by the city council after leaving the party as increased scrutiny of corruption within the administration prompted Tremblay's resignation.
Biography
Applebaum was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Montreal on February 10, 1963, the third child of Ray and Moishe Applebaum. He was raised in Saint-Laurent and went to Winston Churchill High School, where he was a quiet student. He spent Grade 7 in a French immersion program at the English-language school but never mastered the language.
Applebaum always wanted to become a very wealthy businessman and never expected to go into politics. At the age of 13, he began working at his eponymous family shoe store founded by his grandfather in 1913. He studied commerce at Dawson College CEGEP, dropping out because he lost patience with a business teacher who regularly arrived late for class. He opened his first clothing boutique at 18 while at Dawson. He later opened a number of other businesses and took over the family shoe store.
Applebaum married in 1984. He and his wife Merle have three children.
He was involved in the Jewish community and was supportive of Israel. He always professed traditional Jewish values of family, working hard, and volunteering.
City Councilor for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (1994–2002)
In 1994, Applebaum became known locally as "the rink activist" for campaigning to save a popular local outdoor hockey rink from closure at MacDonald Park in his Snowdon neighbourhood. He negotiated a compromise solution that had the city maintain the installation while local volunteers maintained the ice.
Later that year, he was elected city councillor by a margin of 31 votes in the former Notre-Dame-de-Grâce district of Montreal as a member of Jérôme Choquette's Parti des Montréalais. In 1998, he was re-elected by a large margin as a member of Nouveau Montréal, an opposition slate headed by former Montreal police chief Jacques Duchesneau. As a councillor, he relinquished his businesses and became a real estate agent at the Royal LePage realty firm to supplemented his low public salary. He maintained a brisk, focused business, selling 48 properties in his first year alone.
Applebaum campaigned ceaselessly on cutting government waste. He once tracked down a blue-collar worker who spent a day hiding in a luncheonette while collecting $21 an hour. He emphasized the fiscal responsibility and integrity that came with his business experience: "I've been in business, and it doesn't matter if you steal a dollar or you steal $100,000. You're not allowed to take a penny."
Borough Mayor for Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (2002–2012)
In 2001, Applebaum joined other city councillors in forming the Union Montreal party under mayoral candidate Gérald Tremblay, a businessman and former Quebec Liberal cabinet minister. Applebaum and Tremblay went on to win the 2001 election on a platform of halting the forced merger of Montreal with suburban municipalities and decentralizing power to newly created Montreal boroughs during the 2002–06 municipal reorganization of Montreal. In 2002, Mayor Tremblay would appoint Applebaum to the newly created position of borough mayor for Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. He also chaired of the borough's zoning committee (in French, Comité consultatif d'urbanisme) or CCU. They were reelected handily in 2005 and 2009, each with almost 50% of the vote.
By 2002, Applebaum's overall remuneration for committee work and expenses had grown to $102,868. Fellow councillors Jeremy Searle and Francine Senécal publicly criticized Applebaum in 2005 and 2008 for a potential conflict of interest over his continued work as a real estate agent and property manager while also sitting on the borough's secretive CCU (zoning committee). Applebaum once threatened to sue a citizen who pointed out that he should give up his real estate job if he wanted to sit on the CCU. He only gave up his realtor job and CCU position upon being appointed as a full member of the Montreal Executive Committee in 2009. Applebaum also repeatedly rejected proposals from councillor Warren Allmand to open CCU meetings to the public and to provide documentation on CCU zoning recommendations to the public before being adopted by the borough council. Allmand, formerly both the member of Parliament for NDG and Solicitor General of Canada, decried the lack of transparency in borough rezoning procedures. Councillors would often not know what they were voting on because they did not have time to review the CCU's complex zoning recommendations.
Applebaum found himself at odds with community groups over a number of public works projects in Benny Park in the underserved Loyola district of the borough. Local residents believed that the construction of a sports complex, a community health centre, and a cultural centre was eating into too much park green space.
In 2007, the borough council moved already approved plans for a sports center on the residential development of Benny Farm across the street to Benny Park because of lack of space. Residents supported the construction of a sports complex but objected to the new location and the rezoning of the entire park for institutional construction, arguing it would make the greenspace a target for further development. In 2009, construction on the sports center began and plans for an ultra-modern library in the same park announced, further angering residents concerned about Green Space. The sports centre would open in 2011.
The closure of the Fraser-Hickson Library in 2007 also proved contentious. The foundation that owned and ran the spacious stone library requested $4 million in public money to help renovate the site. Despite a petition with 13,000 signatures and a tradition of volunteers to keep the library running, Applebaum refused the idea arguing that it would be more cost-effective to include a library in the cultural centre. In the 2009 election, opposition Vision Montreal candidate David Hanna accused Applebaum of neglecting to save the old library.Although signs announcing the construction of the new facility went up before the 2009 municipal election, construction did not begin until 2013. Applebaum explained delays by the city's careful review of technical documents to ensure that bids for the project do not come in higher than expected. The new building opened to positive reviews in 2016, four years behind schedule.
Residents expressed similar environmental concerns in 2011 about zoning for a parking lot at a planned community health centre (CLSC) to be built by the province across the road from the park would eat up greenspace and cause traffic problems. Construction on the community health centre began in 2012.
Applebaum also alienated community groups looking to revitalize the Empress Theatre, a heritage site owned by the borough and sitting unused since a 1992 fire. In 2010, provincial funding to revitalize the theatre as a home for Geordie Productions, Black Theatre Workshop, and the McGill Music Conservatory fell through. Ownership reverted to the borough and the Applebaum administration set up a competitive bid process in 2012 that pitted community groups against each other. The winning bid went to Cinema NDG on condition that it find funding for its film house project. As of November 2017, after several deadline extensions, funding has yet to be secured by the project.
Supporters of Applebaum saw him as a hard-working borough mayor who always did his best to get things done, pointing to the construction of the Benny sports centre, a community health centre, and plans for a cultural centre in a badly under-served sector of the Loyola district. Local community groups saw him as thin-skinned and viciously partisan, running over all who he saw as political opponents. Applebaum rejected any criticism as always coming from the same "five or six or seven people" that ran against him in elections. In 2013, fellow Union Montreal councillor Warren Allmand said that he encouraged Applebaum to react more constructively to citizen suggestions, and was critical of Applebaum's perceiving differences of opinion as attempts to dislodge him from power.
Corruption Applebaum was investigated by Quebec's anti-corruption police squad (UPAC) for being involved in a "stratagem of corruption" involving 10 real estate transactions and municipal contracts signed during his 2002-2012 tenure as borough mayor in Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce.
As borough mayor, Applebaum conspired with his aides, fellow councillors, and municipal officials to extort illegal campaign contributions, bribes and kickbacks from real estate promoters and construction firms in exchange for zoning changes and municipal contracts in his borough.
He was arrested at his home on June 17, 2013, on 14 charges related to two of these investigations; he was found guilty on January 8, 2017, on 8 charges, including fraud against the government, breach of trust, conspiracy, and corruption in municipal affairs.
Applebaum's crimes were part of a nexus of corruption involving bid-rigging for municipal contracts by large construction firms (some with links to the Mafia) in Montreal-area cities in exchange for bribes and kickbacks. Major players included Tony Accurso, owner of Simard-Beaudry Construction in Montreal, who paid for vacations of municipal officials on his giant yacht. He was also part of a straw-man financing scheme for municipal and provincial political parties, reimbursing company employees for political donations to circumvent Quebec campaign financing law banning companies from contributing to political parties. Large construction companies like Dessau, SNC-Lavalin, CIMA, Genivar and SM also were involved in these schemes.