Benoit Dorais wins again, in dominant fashion this time
Borough Mayor Dorais will head city’s executive committee after easy victory
On the night their party leader became the city’s first woman mayor, Projet Montréal secured a clean sweep of the Sud-Ouest borough Sunday.
Benoît Dorais walked away with an easy victory over Équipe Denis Coderre candidate Denise Mérineau, winning his third consecutive election as borough mayor. Dorais led Mérineau by 44 percentage points with roughly a third of precincts reporting.
Just as they did in 2013, the party took both borough council and municipal council seats.
“Even today, with the bad weather and everything, we could feel an energy on the ground,” Dorais told the Montreal Gazette. “We’d be going to the Tim Hortons and the little cafés in St-Henri and PointSt-Charles and people weren’t talking about ‘Madame Plante.’ It was ‘Valérie pour la mairie!’
“I think our message resonated with people.”
Valérie Plante’s historic election also places Dorais as the No. 2 person at city hall — where he’ll be president of the executive committee. He said he isn’t worried about balancing his new responsibilities with his job as borough mayor.
“I’m not just going to be in meetings all day, I’ll have my finger on the pulse of the Sud-Ouest,” he said. “I’ll be among the people, I’ll see them at the grocery store and in the cafés and on the streets.”
Dorais’s team had braved the rain and cold Sunday in hopes of squeezing every last minute of canvassing out of the 44-day campaign. Throughout his scrappy career in municipal politics, Dorais says he has learned not to leave anything to chance.
When he ran on the Vision Montréal ticket in 2009, Dorais squeezed into the Sud-Ouest mayor’s office by just 27 votes. Four years later, he was the lone candidate to resist the Projet Montréal wave.
Projet Montréal recruited him onto their team in May. “They have a “bottom up” approach to making policy instead of “top down,” and I believe that’s how you have to govern,” Dorais said.
The traditionally working-class borough is undergoing dramatic changes. New condo projects have brought a cohort of upper middle class residents and luxury restaurants along Notre-Dame St. and other major arteries.
The gentrification of St-Henri, in particular, caused tensions within the neighbourhood, as new businesses were frequently targeted by masked vandals.
“You want new businesses, you want a dynamic local economy but you also want to create a city that works for the people who’ve been here for decades,” Dorais said.
Earlier this year, Dorais and Projet Montréal councillor Craig Sauvé championed a bylaw that limits the number of upscale restaurants that can operate on Notre Dame St. The party also wants to invest in co-op housing to keep low-income and working class families in the neighbourhood
While traffic woes and the omnipresence of construction sites have been a city-wide problem these past few years, few communities have been as hard hit as the Sud- Ouest.
The borough is sandwiched between the new Turcot Interchange and Champlain Bridge projects — two of Canada’s largest construction sites.
“These sites are not going anywhere,” Dorais said. “But the planning around this has been terrible. You’re seeing people go from a detour into a detour into a detour.
“The city has to co-ordinate its work with the federal and provincial governments or else it’s just going to add to the headaches. There are ways around this whether it’s using geo-positioning technology or just common sense.”