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Giving back key to Kandyba

More than 20 years as Mayor of Pincourt

Chris Masson
The Gazette
Thursday, August 21, 2008

When Michel Kandyba moved to Pincourt in 1970, the city was under bankruptcy protection, there were widespread charges of corruption and building had stopped on all new houses.
“We were a laughing stock,” Kandyba put it bluntly.
After years of hearing her husband bemoan the state of municipal politics in the town, Kandyba’s wife had enough.
“She told me: ‘I’m tired of hearing you complain! Run for council yourself! Make some changes!’ ” Kandyba said. “If not for her, I would not be as active in everything that I do. You must have a partner who believes in you.”
And so, in 1973, Kandyba ran and was elected to city council for the first time. There he served until 1982 when he made an admittedly lacklustre campaign for mayor. “Even without campaigning,” he said, “I still only lost by thirty votes.”
In the next elections four years later, his friends and former constituents pressured him to run for mayor again, and he agreed. With a proper campaign, he won by a very comfortable margin.
Now, more than twenty years later, Kandyba is proud of the city he and his colleagues “had to rebuild from scratch, more or less.”
Rebuilding, he says, has included trimming $2 million from the city’s operating budget in 2000 without significantly reducing services, improving the water treatment system, and making the tough decision to take some major land speculators to court over non-payment of taxes. Invoking that rarely-used law resulted in a five-year legal battle all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Pincourt’s favour.
“Politics is different from what I do,” Kandyba said. “We (at the municipal level) are administrators. The only time I ever feel I’m playing a political role is when I’m dealing with federally or provincially elected officials.”
Kandyba sits on, or is president or chairperson of a long list of regional committees that deal with issues as diverse as agricultural dezoning, urban planning, policing, education, tourism, and women’s issues. He is straightforward in explaining his motivation:
“I never felt I belonged anywhere until I moved to Quebec. Quebec has given me so much. I’m now giving back everything I have gotten,” he said, adding, “everybody complains. It is easier. How many people get involved? If you feel you are able to advance things, get things done, why wouldn’t you?”
Kandyba was born in the Ukraine. His father was a military man and the political situation in postwar Russia made it necessary for his family to flee the Ukraine.
After living in a number of different countries, they finally settled in Pointe St. Charles in 1950.

With the mayor

Most prized possession: His cottage near Mont Tremblant.
First job: In the design office of a Montreal engineering firm.
Hidden talents: Is a former champion boxer.
Favourite pastime: Travel, especially anything that takes him off the well-worn tourist paths.
Most impressive trip: Travelling into China via Hong Kong in 1965, before the Vietnam War.