THE STAGE IS SET
Montreal’s municipal election campaign is officially underway, and with only two contenders fielding a full slate of candidates, it promises to be a grudge match. Linda Gyulai examines the battle lines.
Strap yourself in, Montreal, and get ready for a bumpy ride to Nov. 5.
Like roadwork and traffic deviations, the municipal election battle now underway promises to be messy and loud.
Posters went up on Friday as official election campaigns kicked off in municipalities across Quebec — and the one in Montreal is shaping up to be a grudge match between Denis Coderre and Valérie Plante.
Or, to be more specific, between Coderre and Projet Montréal, the party Plante leads.
Politicians are a combative lot, but two-way election races, which crop up infrequently in Montreal electoral history, tend to get bareknuckled and acrimonious.
So call this municipal election Formula E, minus the police overtime. (For an event that was meant to be clean and quiet, the electric car race sure created a lot of commotion.)
The last contest, in 2013, featured four main mayoral contenders and no incumbents. The last mayor elected by Montrealers, Gérald Tremblay, had resigned from office amid corruption scandals plaguing his Union Montreal party, and his successor, Michael Applebaum, was arrested for corruption shortly after his fellow city councillors chose him to act as interim mayor.
This time around, there are only two contenders running a full slate of candidates across the city
Coderre wasn’t an unknown in the 2013 election; he had spent 16 years in federal government as a Liberal MP and cabinet minister. Now, he has a record as mayor to run on.
Many will argue the Nov. 5 vote is really a referendum on Coderre, who has a reputation as a oneman decision-making body who doesn’t consult, to say nothing of his brusque manner when citizens and political opponents disagree with him.
An illustration of Coderre’s temperament is his “cut the mic” order, immortalized on YouTube, when a citizen criticized him at a council meeting for introducing a bylaw banning pit bulls. The mayor ordered a city worker to turn off the critic’s microphone.
Even the mayor’s allies describe him — out of earshot — as a person who leaves no one indifferent.
Coderre’s political party — yes, he has one — didn’t hold a convention to confirm him as leader. The website of Équipe Denis Coderre pour Montréal brandishes no party program, although it boasts a youth wing.
It’s unclear even to some Équipe Denis Coderre members, who speak on condition of anonymity, whether the formation has party statutes lying around somewhere.
Enter Projet Montréal, the official opposition on city council and Coderre’s nemesis during the past four years.
Contrary to Équipe Denis Coderre, Projet Montréal has name recognition, statutes and a program, but a relatively unknown mayoral candidate in Plante, who aims to become Montreal’s first female mayor.
She couldn’t be more different than her rival. While Coderre is a career politician from the suburban borough of Montreal North, Plante is a downtown resident and a relative newcomer to politics. A community organizer, she was first elected as city councillor in 2013.
The matchup between a bossman incumbent and a grassroots political party was last seen in Montreal politics in the 1970s and 1980s. Back then, the battle was between mayor-for-life Jean Drapeau and the Montreal Citizens’ Movement, which challenged Drapeau’s autocratic leadership.
Still, there is at least one significant difference between then and now, and that is the lack of broadbased issues that resonate with voters across the city.
Perennial issues are still alive in city politics, be it housing, heritage, urban planning, poverty, public transit and the relationship city hall has with its citizens — and how much say the latter are given during the 1,460 days that fall between municipal elections.
But the sense of a single municipality with common issues has arguably been lost since the Quebec government legislated the merger of Montreal with its surrounding island suburbs in 2002 and created boroughs that manage zoning and many local municipal services.
The relationship citizens have with their city depends on the borough in which they live.
Such key Projet Montréal planks as bike paths and better public transit won’t resonate in far-flung former suburbs, such as Île-Bizard, the same as in more central boroughs created from the former city of Montreal. In a sense, the coming election will also be a referendum for Projet Montréal, which was created 13 years ago. It took the MCM four elections to win power at city hall in 1986. Projet Montréal, which has been compared to the MCM as a “real” party with principles, is in its fourth election campaign. Unlike previous elections, Projet Montréal is the only citywide alternative to the incumbent this time.
Coderre gets to enjoy the benefits of incumbency, including name and face recognition, builtin media coverage (because he’s the mayor) and access to all of the resources of the city. You might say it’s his election to lose.
But danger also lurks for the incumbent. Coderre is coming off the toughest year of his four-year term, having to fend off controversies surrounding his pit bull ban, the Formula E race, granite tree stumps as a 375th anniversary gift to the city and revelations that he phoned the police chief to sniff out the background of a nosy journalist.
However, so much will depend on voters’ appetite for change this time around.
In 2013, Coderre had voters in his former federal riding of Bourassa, in the northeast end of Montreal, to thank for electing him mayor of Montreal. He was elected with 32 per cent of the vote and became Montreal’s first mayor to fail to muster a majority on city council.
Coderre beat his closest rival for the mayor’s job, Mélanie Joly, by 26,405 votes.
Joly, an unknown who announced in the late summer of 2013 that she would run in the fall election, got 26 per cent of the vote.
Coderre’s margin of victory came from votes in four of Montreal’s 19 boroughs that are in or abut his old federal riding. The four — Ahuntsic-Cartierville, Montreal-North, Rivière-des-Prairies–Pointe-auxTrembles and Saint-Léonard — gave Coderre 27,108 more votes for mayor than Joly.
In fact, Coderre won the mayoral vote in only seven boroughs in 2013. Besides his former federal riding, east-end Anjou chose Coderre over other mayoral candidates. The only boroughs that voted for Coderre for mayor in the western part of the island were StLaurent and LaSalle.
Now a federal Liberal cabinet minister, Joly won the mayoral vote in seven boroughs as well in 2013. She seized the west, south and centre of the island, winning the mayoral vote in Côte-des-Neiges — Notre-Dame-de- Grâce, ÎleBizard—Ste-Geneviève, Lachine, Pierrefonds–Roxboro, Sud- Ouest, Verdun and Ville-Marie.
Joly’s party, Vrai changement pour Montréal, didn’t run a full slate of candidates, but nevertheless elected city councillors in four boroughs.
Projet Montréal’s mayoral candidate in 2013, Richard Bergeron, was third and close behind Joly. He won the mayoral vote in five central boroughs: Mercier—Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, Outremont, Plateau Mont-Royal, Rosemont– La Petite-Patrie and Villeray–StMichel–Park Extension.
This time, Bergeron is running as a council candidate with Coderre.
Even without an incumbent, Joly was the apparent vote for change in the last election. Voters who didn’t want Coderre voted for Joly, and, close behind, for Projet Montréal.
Joly is haunting this year’s election because her party has no mayoral candidate and is running candidates only in select boroughs, leaving the question: Who will get the spoils of her 2013 votes?
Coalition Montreal’s mayoral candidate in 2013, Marcel Côté, finished a distant fourth with 12.77 per cent of the vote.
The party abruptly announced a mayoral candidate this week, several months later than mayoral candidates usually declare.
The candidate, Jean Fortier, was city executive committee chairman under former mayor Pierre Bourque in the 1990s.
In 2013, Fortier initially planned to run for Joly’s Vrai changement, but backed out. In announcing his candidacy this week, Fortier said he’s hoping to be the spoiler by offering voters a third option.
It’s unclear whether Fortier will be as much of a force as Joly became in 2013. Coalition Montreal has just eight candidates for council so far, and almost all of them are in Côte-des-Neiges—N.D.G.
Perhaps the real spoiler in this election will be a force that is outside of the candidates’ control.
Quebec’s anti-corruption squad, UPAC, arrested eight former Montreal municipal officials and engineering contractors this week, throwing the spotlight back on municipal corruption.
Even if the allegations concern an administration that is no longer in office, the C-word could prompt an angry electorate to cast a ballot for change.