After living for many years in a small community in the Laurentians, he moved here on Jan. 1, 2002 — the very day the City of Westmount was forcibly merged into the megacity to become a City of Montreal borough.

“I was very well aware of what Mike Harris had done,” he told The Examiner, referring to the former Ontario premier’s forced municipal mergers.

“I knew it was a failure there, and I knew it would be a failure here. Living in a small community up north, you get to know that you can fight battles easily on a small scale. I figured that Westmount was losing that privilege.”

A somewhat abrasive and free-speaking de Maisonneuve Boulevard resident, Grossman wasn’t a complete newcomer. During the early 1970s, he had been president of the Westmount Conservative Association, campaign chairman for Tory candidate Michael Meighen, and a “real political hack,” he said.

After the merger, he got involved with Défusion Westmount, the grassroots group mandated to promote demerger after the Liberal government reversed the PQ’s work and allowed demerger referendums. Grossman worked as a volunteer for the demerger cause on referendum day, following which he started to become more interested in the WMA.

Prior to Grossman's winning the WMA presidency by acclamation when opponent Charles Bierbrier bowed out of the race last week, the WMA had been without an official president for an extended period, with leadership roles filled by vice-president Rosalind Davis, Patricia Dumais as corresponding secretary, past-president Henry Olders as membership secretary and Helen Rainville as treasurer.

“We hadn’t had a president, and also I wasn’t happy with the direction of the WMA,” Grossman said, adding that he was particularly incensed with how the nomination proceedings were handled at the annual general meeting, and that friends warned him he had better not say anything that might rock the boat if he wanted to be elected.

He maintains that on the afternoon of the May 25 AGM, Olders, as chair of the nomination committee, issued a notice listing the nominees for the board and executive, with Bierbrier nominated to become president. “I was nominated prior, and it wasn’t really rejected,” Grossman said.

This led to a fiery public exchange between Grossman and Olders during the meeting, and it was agreed that the election would be held June 15. Bierbrier, whose name had been put forward as an ideal candidate to inject some youth into the WMA board, eventually withdrew from the race.

While several current WMA board members have confirmed rumours that the WMA is split into factions, Grossman insists that he has not been the cause of it.

"As I said in a letter to the board, don’t shoot the messenger," he said. "There could be a little factionalism. There are some on the board who, regardless of the issues, will be against me because they are anti-arena. Westmount Save the Park people. There’s a few of them. Not many. They’re entitled to their opinions. But I hope they don’t make it into a personal thing. If they do, they’ll have a fight.”

As for the style he’ll be adopting as president, Grossman said, “I want to reserve the right to be critical of every single thing council does … My idea is friendly persuasion … I definitely want an approach that is non-confrontational. But certainly we’re not going to be lackeys.”

Former WMA president Stanley Baker sees Grossman's presidency as a good thing, and he condemns the dissent as counterproductive. "It's appropriate that bickering among members ceases and the board gets back to its job of trying to improve conditions in Westmount," he said.

This was echoed by new board member Marilynn Vanderstaay. "We must put aside our personal opinions and stand in unison behind our new president, whether or not he would have been our personal choice, so that we can go forward as an association and do what we are called to do," she wrote to fellow board members this week. "If we want to be the WMA, with any credence and respect in the community at all, we are going to have to both look and act like the responsible professionals we are and just stop throwing sand in the sandbox."

Photo: Martin C. Barry