Elected mayor in 1920, Laberge was at 27 years old the youngest mayor ever elected in Sudbury at that point. He was also the first mayor to have been born in Sudbury, and the first francophone to hold the mayoralty since Francis Lemieux in 1903. His election marked at least a temporary end to linguistic tensions between the city's anglophone and francophone communities initiated by the Conscription Crisis of 1917, and ironically occurred just one year after the first municipal election in the city's history in which francophone candidates had failed to win a single seat on council.