Marcel Cote

NewsPolitics

Montreal politics in the 2010s saw quite a bit of change, followed by more change. The city had five mayors in ten years.

The decade kicked off with the final two years of Gérald Tremblay’s twelve year reign as Mayor. By November 2012, though, the Quebec corruption scandal had engulfed many of his closest associates, meaning he had to resign before his term was up.

While Tremblay may have avoided any personal repercussions for the crooked business-as-usual approach Montreal and Quebec were famous for, his successor Michael Applebaum wasn’t so lucky. Applebaum was arrested at City Hall just over seven months into his term as Interim Mayor and was subsequently (March 2017) sentenced to a year in prison March for bribery and extortion that happened when he was Borough Mayor of Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce.

Enter Laurent Blanchard, temporary replacement mayor for the temporary replacement mayor. He had one job: not get arrested for six months until the election and he pulled it off! Great job M. Blanchard.

2013: Time for Change?

Mélanie Joly (photo Valeria Bismar)

The stage was set for 2013. In one corner, former Liberal Cabinet Minister Denis Coderre leading the cleverly named Équipe Denis Coderre, a group largely comprised of former team Tremblay members (the ones who weren’t arrested). In the other, Projet Montréal, still led by its founder Richard Bergeron.

That was the case until political upstart Mélanie Joly entered the fray with her newly formed Vrai changement pour Montréal party. Joly’s energy and political skill helped her overcome accusations that she was only using this run as a springboard to federal politics and that it was all about her, not her team.

She finished second to Coderre in the mayoral race, only six points down, but her party was fourth in the seat count, way behind Coderre’s team and Projet Montréal and also with less representation than Marcel Côté’s Coalition Montréal. Joly quit municipal politics shortly thereafter and ran federally for the Liberals two years later. She is currently our Minister of Tourism, Official Languages and La Francophonie.

As for Projet, they held the Plateau and Rosemont boroughs and made significant gains elsewhere, most notably taking all but the Borough Mayor’s seat in the Sud Ouest (until Benoit Dorais eventually decided to join his councillors).

Denis “Cut the Mic” Coderre

For the next four years, though, Denis Coderre was running the table. And he had no problem reminding everyone of that fact whenever he felt he needed to or just wanted to:

  • Car sharing service downtown? Use the power the Mayor has as the defacto Bourough Mayor of Ville Marie to block it and admit it’s because of personal support from the taxi industry.
  • Montreal’s turning 375? Time to spend a ton of money on random stuff like granite tree stumps and a national anthem for a borough where support for the administration is strong.
  • A dog (that wasn’t a pit bull) attacks someone? Ban all pit bulls.
  • Someone brings up valid points about the pit bull ban? “Cut the mic!“
  • Flooding in the West Island? Pull rescue workers off the job for a photo op.
  • Opposing federal party installs a community mailbox? Personally take a jackhammer to it. (Okay, that one was kinda cool)
  • Formula E organizers want the race to go through city streets even though there’s a perfectly good racetrack to use? Do their bidding, disrupt people’s lives and try to make the event look like a success with free tickets.

That last one, honestly, probably cost him re-election more than anything else. Yes, the Coderre era, brief as it was, ended.

Valérie Plante and a New Direction

On November 5, 2017, Valérie Plante, who was never supposed to have defeated former PQ Cabinet Minister Louise Harel for a council seat, was the underdog in the Projet Montréal leadership race and an extreme longshot to take down Coderre at the beginning of the campaign, became Montreal’s first elected female mayor. Her party also took control of not only City Council but also several bouroughs including CDN/NDG, the city’s largest.

Right out of the gate, Plante and her team undid two of Coderre’s most unpopular decisions: the pit bull ban and the prospect of a second Formula E race running through Montreal’s streets. They also recently overturned in council the Tremblay-era changes to bylaw P-6 which had previously been overturned by the courts in 2016 and 2018.

Plante and her team also voted early on to ban calèche horses, a law that goes into effect tomorrow. So they’re starting the new decade with a promise even Coderre tried to deliver on but failed.

One of Plante’s most controversial moves was the pilot project to bar private cars from using the mountain as a shortcut. They ultimately decided not to make it permanent after respondents to the public consultation process they had set up overwhelmingly rejected it (personally I thought it was a good idea that didn’t go far enough).

That decision to listen to the public most likely played into longtime Plateau Borough Mayor and Projet Montréal heavyweight Luc Ferrandez resigning. Earlier this year, he stepped down saying he thought his party wasn’t willing to go far enough for the environment.

For years, Ferrandez had been successful in the Plateau but harmful to his party in other parts of the city. Now, Plante and Projet’s opponents don’t have the Ferrandez albatros to contend with and his replacement Luc Rabouin handily retained power for the party in the borough.

This doesn’t mean Plante and company didn’t make mistakes in their first two years. They haven’t properly dealt with ongoing problems like systemic racism in the Montreal Police Force (SPVM) and in our institutions, the for-profit authoritarian leanings of our transit system and its ticket enforcer cops or adequately challenged the CAQ Provincial Government’s bigoted Bill 21, something Montrealers, by and large oppose, despite support in the rest of Quebec.

There are also some self-made mistakes like cancelling plans to rename a street in the Sud Ouest after the late Daisy Sweeney or the idea of naming the Griffintown REM train stop after former PQ Premier Bernard Landry. The latter an idea that didn’t need to be floated to begin with and should have been withdrawn after public outcry from the historic Irish community.

Plante was, however, successful, in securing funding for some of her signature campaign promise, the Montreal Metro Pink Line. In particular, the western portion that will travel above ground.

If the Pink Line starts to see the light of day and Plante fixes or starts to fix the problems I just mentioned, she’ll be on her way to another term. She has two years.

So, will the next decade be as bumpy on the Montreal political scene as this past one was? I honestly don’t know, I don’t have 2020 vision.

Featured Image by Jason C. McLean

NewsPolitics

Denis Coderre is the Mayor of Montreal. Let’s all let that sink in, the man who hangs with Club Charbonneau regulars, thinks it’s cool to lock up mask-wearing protestors and once helped make a coup happen in Haiti is now our mayor.

To put it mildly, it’s not the outcome I wanted, not in the slightest. That said, all is not bad, in fact some things could end up being quite good.

We lived through Gerald Tremblay and Michael Applebaum, so we can live through Coderre. They’re really not all that different.

What is different, and this is huge, is that Coderre does not have a majority on the city council. He only has 27 of the 33 seats required for one. Projet Montreal, with 20 seats, is now a very strong opposition, much stronger than they were after the last election.

They are also stronger at the borough level, retaining their control of the Plateau and Rosemont-La Petite Patrie and picking up all the city and borough council seats in Sud Ouest except for that of borough mayor. Projet’s Jason Prince very narrowly lost to incumbent and candidate for Marcel Côté’s Coalition Montréal Benoit Dorais.

projet montreal sud ouest bergeron
Projet Montreal candidates, now city and borough councillors in Sud Ouest (l-r) Craig Sauvé, Sophie Thiébaut, Anne-Marie Sigouin and Alain Vaillancourt with outgoing Projet leader Richard Bergeron in the centre

Meanwhile in Côte-des-Neiges/Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, Projet’s seat count went from one to two, which also is huge. As NDG councilor Peter McQueen found out last time, one councilor can propose motions, but it takes a seconder for them to be heard and debated and in a council controlled by an opposing party that doesn’t listen to outside voices, that can mean nothing gets through. Now, Magda Popeanu, who beat uber incumbent Helen Fotopulos in the Côte-des-Neiges district and McQueen can support each other.

Projet leader Richard Bergeron won his seat in Saint Jacques in the Ville Marie borough. It was a bold move for him selecting a colistière (or running mate, whose seat the party leader takes if they aren’t elected mayor but their designated co-candidate is elected to council) outside of the safety of the Plateau.

This move paid off, ensuring that he can sit on the council as leader of the opposition. Yesterday, though, Bergeron decided that three elections are enough and he would only keep his seat, and the leadership of Projet, for the next 18-24 months then resign from politics for good.

This inevitably will mean a leadership race, the first in the party’s history. Whomever that leader will be will have to figure out who on the council the — Projet councillors can count on for support, if Bergeron hasn’t already set those particular wheels in motion by the time they take over.

Marcel Côté, whose colistière finished third to Popeanu and Fotopulos, doesn’t have a seat on council himself, but six of his teammates do. Some of them are ex-Union as are many of Coderre’s councillors, so them siding with Projet on key issues is doubtful at best, though you never know.

Mélanie Joly got four city councillors elected: Steve Shanahan in Peter McGill downtown, Lorraine Pagé in the Sault-au-Récollet district of Ahuntsic-Cartierville, Justine McIntyre in Pierrefonds-Roxboro’s Bois-de-Liesse district and Normand Marinacci was elected borough mayor if L’Île-Bizard–Sainte-Geneviève, where her party also picked up all four borough council seats. Borough councilors don’t sit on city council, despite potentially bringing some Vrai Changement to Île-Bizard.

Even though Joly finished second for mayor, just a few points ahead of Bergeron and not that far from Coderre, she failed to get a seat on council herself. She ran her colistière in NDG against McQueen, a popular incumbent.

If, instead, she had placed her running mate in Peter McGill, where she has personal political experience (in Shaughnessy Village), she’d have a seat on council today. It’s that kind of decision that led me to believe those (including FTB’s Taylor Noakes) who were and are saying that she had no intention of staying in the municipal arena if she wasn’t elected mayor and would try instead federally with the Liberals (she has worked with Trudeau before).

Melanie Joly
Mélanie Joly (photo by Valeria Bismar)

Now, though, it looks like she wants to stick around, after all. She has pledged to run for the first seat on council that opens up and extended an olive branch to Bergeron a day before he said he was quitting.

Olive branches and parties working together are how good things can actually come out of the current city administration. True, as mayor and through mechanisms like the executive committee, Coderre wields considerable power. It’s also true that Côté councilors will probably vote with their former Union Montreal or establishment colleagues, but they are not obliged to.

The Joly councilors, Joly herself and all the independents and borough-specific candidates are wildcards. If Projet could bring enough of those wildcards into their well-stacked deck and create enough groundswell in the districts represented by Côté candidates, then they may be able to bring about positive change whether Coderre wants it or not.

I’m not saying this will be enough to, say, get rid of P6, but it might. It can’t hurt to try with that or with other issues important to Montrealers like transport or the awarding of city contracts.

I’m hopeful. Mainly because this will require a grassroots approach to politics, rather than a top-down one. And that is the type of political approach where Projet Montreal excels.

NewsPolitics

The results are in. No, not the results that will name the next mayor and city council members Montreal will have for the next four years, those come later tonight.

It’s tradition for the editorial boards of media organisations to endorse a candidate or candidates in elections. This campaign, The Gazette and La Presse endorsed Denis Coderre while Le Devoir, The Link and Le Journal de Montreal came out in favour of Richard Bergeron and Projet Montreal.

Last municipal election, we played the editorial endorsement game. This time, though, we took a broader democratic approach and  let our readers pick for us with a poll in the sidebar of every page of our site.

web poll
Our poll results as of 3pm on November 3

With 163 votes cast a the time this is being written, our readers have endorsed Projet Montreal in the 2013 Montreal Municipal election. The party led by Richard Bergeron got 54% of the vote, followed by Melanie Joly in second place with 18%.

None of the above was third with 9% of the vote, followed by Not Sure Yet and Marcel Côté’s Coalition Montreal, tied with 6% each. There’s An Election? came in fifth with 4%, narrowly edging out Équipe Denis Coderre pour Montréal, which got only five votes.

It’s interesting to note that in the last two “respected” polls, which came out over three weeks ago and admittedly had a much larger reach than our own, Coderre had a solid lead. It seems that FTB readers are looking for something different in their municipal government.

I’m one of those readers and I voted in our poll (only once, in order to test it, I tried to vote a second time, but it didn’t work, so the numbers are accurate). I, like the majority of those who answered our poll, voted for Projet Montreal and, full disclosure, started volunteering for them in NDG two weeks ago, shortly after making my decision.

Rather than try and figure out why our readers voted the way they did, I’ll tell you how I came to my decision.  Since I voted the same way as the majority of poll respondents, I think it can serve as analysis. These opinions are mine and not necessarily those of everyone involved with FTB or the editorial team. In fact, there are a wide range of opinions in our group.

Our last municipal administration was a disaster and a global embarrassment and not just because our mayor resigned and his replacement was arrested (I honestly needed to use Google to find out the name of our replacement replacement mayor just the other day, I stopped paying attention after Applebaum). I think back to the sudden and unceremonious eviction of Occupons Montreal and then the crackdown on the Maple Spring a year later, including draconian changes to bylaw P6.

I don’t want anyone who was part of that administration back in office. So a good chunk of the candidates running with Corerre and Côté are a no-go for me. Coderre’s personal involvement in the coup in Haiti and his voting with Harper to imprison masked protestors (plus his recent Hasidgate scandal) rule him out as mayor, as does Côté’s politics-as-usual robocall scandal. It seems like our readers agree, as Coderre and Côté finished behind choices that amount to spoiling your ballot.

That leaves Bergeron and Joly. Melanie Joly would be my second choice and she is also the second most popular choice among our readers.

I interviewed her. She is a smart, passionate person who I believe truly does care about her city. I think her nightlife charter is a great idea and one that Projet Montreal would be wise to adopt if they come to power.

While she does support the right to wear a mask at a protest, she agrees with the part of P6 that requires protestors provide a route. Projet, on the other hand, has already tried removing the additions to the bylaw passed during the Maple Spring and originally had tried to scrap P6 entirely. For me, that is a huge plus.

candidates montreal

Joly is not corrupt, though she hasn’t had the chance to be and neither have her team. Projet and Bergeron on the other hand were around during the Tremblay administration and came through the experience skweaky clean with no Projet member as much as mentioned at the Charbonneau commission.

Joly has some big ideas, too, but I like Bergeron’s more. Rapid bus lines wouldn’t work in all the places she is suggesting, whereas a blue line metro extension west and a tramway would, they’re both costed and Bergeron explained to Taylor Noakes how he would push Quebec to make his plans happen.

To be honest, I wouldn’t mind Joly as mayor. If Bergeron wasn’t an option, I’d take her over Coderre any day.

The problem is she’s not running independently for mayor. Instead she’s fronting a party that seems to have been put together overnight. Some of her candidates seem solid, like Sud Ouest borough mayor candidate Cindy Filiatrault. Others less so.

While I don’t have a problem with candidates who used to work in the sex industry, in fact I think transgendered ex-erotic massage therapists running for office is a very good thing, I do have a problem when a candidate is arrested for domestic abuse. Backchecking and a nomination process can avoid problems like that.

Projet, on the other hand, has a solid team, all of them vetted and nominated by members of the party. That’s not to say they’re seasoned politicians, some of them are, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.

Projet candidates have roots in their communities which they have big plans for. This is a party of big thinkers who have the means and the will to turn their ideas into reality. People like borough mayor candidates Mike Simkin, Jason Prince and Mary-Ann Davis as well as a slew of other borough mayor, city council and borough council candidates, many of whom we have profiled right here, are why I chose to support PM.

This is not to say that all is perfect. Bergeron has come under fire for comments he made about the anti-police brutality march (which he clarified on FTB) and artists have criticised the Projet team that has run the Plateau for the past four years for excessive fines and restrictions on noise.

While some progressive activists are arguing for spoiled ballots, I think, given the city-wide picture and what’s at stake, it’s best to vote for the party that aspires to make things better in the general sense and has the means and the drive to do it with integrity and transparency and then after they are elected, take advantage of that transparency to hold their feet to the fire.

It seems like those who answered our poll, for the most part, agree with me. Now we can vote (until 8pm) in the only poll that really matters, the election itself.

You can find out where you can vote on the Elections Montreal site

NewsPolitics

You’ve seen the signs up all over town. You’ve read the candidate profiles on FTB and followed the coverage elsewhere. You’ve seen the polls and hopefully voted in the poll we have in our sidebar (if you haven’t there’s still time).

Now, CBC and McGill University have hosted an English language debate with all the major party leaders. If you don’t know how you’re going to vote or you’re backing a candidate and want to see them shine, it’s worth watching. It runs about an hour.

What did you think of the debate? Who won? Did it change your opinion?