‘People are ready for change’: Joly
Candidate says it’s time for youth to take helm
At 34 years of age, Mélanie Joly is by far the youngest and least-known among the main contenders in the race to become Montreal’s next mayor. While her youth and relative anonymity have many questioning whether she is wasting time and considerable resources on a lost cause (she says the campaign will cost more than $100,000 raised through campaign donations and Internet crowdsourcing; she won’t say how much she has raised to date), Joly says widespread rumours of systemic rot at city hall mean the time is ripe for a youthful, Oxford-trained lawyer and marketing expert to take the helm.
“I believe Montreal has faced its worst political cataclysm in the last 15 years and people are ready for change and are seeking coherence,” she said Wednesday.
“You can’t always be taking same solutions and getting the same results. We will present a team of new people and new ideas that will completely change the way Montreal is being governed.”
Her opponent Denis Coderre, who has incorporated several former Union Montreal party members into his team, “makes me think of Gérald Tremblay, who always said he was clean, but surrounded himself with the wrong people,” she said.
Marcel Côté and his Coalition pour Montréal alliance with Vision Montreal strikes her as a “pretentious” attempt to gain voters along east-west geographical lines, and Richard Bergeron’s Projet Montréal is hampered by grand urban schemes and no way to pay for them, she says.
After an embarrassing setback last week, when her only declared candidate declared he was leaving, Joly says her party is ramping up. It will announce 15 candidates Thursday, the first of what she says will be a full slate of 103 councillors by election time in November.
Her team is slowly releasing what will be a 10-point platform of its main ideas, debated by a volunteer committee of experts and vetted by municipal professionals to assure they are feasible, she said.
“Most politicians throw ideas around but have no ideas of how to actually do things — for me, accountability is very important.”
Joly sat down with The Gazette to discuss what she feels are the main priorities for Montreal, and what she plans to do about them if elected. Public transit: “We want to create a 130-kilometre bus rapid transit system — like a surface métro line — that will connect east and west Montreal, so the residents of Pierrefonds, LaSalle, Lachine and Rivière-desPrairies can get to the city centre, or to the industrial hubs of the city.”
Joly said her bus system will help ease congestion and smog, cost eight times less than installing a tramway and 40 times less than a metro line, and serve as a natural extension to the 70 kilometres of métro lines in place. Retaining families: Investing in public transit will create new neighbourhoods and help fulfill her party’s goal of retaining 30,000 families on the island of Montreal in her first mandate. Other plans include working with the provincial and federal governments to decontaminate land, including next to the Turcot Interchange, to open space for family-friendly housing units, investing in the Blue Bonnets development plan and giving incentives to promoters to build threeand four-bedroom homes instead of 600-square-foot condos. Infrastructure: “The big problem is we budget money we don’t even spend because there’s a lack of expertise and co-ordination within the city. We want to create an agency called Infra Montreal with a general director and a board of directors made up of professionals … whose mandate will be to make sure the three-year capital works program is executed.
“Also, work will not just go to the lowest bidder — awarding of contracts will be based on performance criteria and guarantees must be given by contractors, as is done in Germany, France and the U.S.” Finance: On the question of creating a system of tolls to raise extra funds for the city, Joly said it’s unfair to taxi drivers until a good public transit alternative is offered. As part of its 10-point plan, her party will soon present “other revenue sources” that will make the city less dependant on property taxes. Corruption: Banning companies found guilty of corruption from bidding on government contracts unfairly punishes the thousands of Montrealers working there, and hobbles construction work, she said. Joly proposes “signing a peace treaty in 2013” wherein a mediator will negotiate how much a firm has to pay back to the city. The funds could go toward aiding the homeless — “kind of like Robin Hood,” she said.
And the provincial anti-corruption squad UPAC must continue its investigations, she said.