Defeat a rebuke of Coderre’s ‘arrogant’ style
Outgoing mayor is the first to last just one term since Fournier from 1957-60
Montrealers made history Sunday, electing Valérie Plante as their first female mayor.
But the voting results appeared to be just as much a repudiation of incumbent Denis Coderre and his Équipe Denis Coderre pour Montréal party as several members of his executive committee in the last mandate went down in defeat.
Montrealers haven’t had a oneterm mayor since Sarto Fournier’s abbreviated reign from 1957 to 1960, bookended by the landslide victories of Jean Drapeau in 1954 and 1960.
Coderre announced in his concession speech he’s quitting municipal politics.
With 4,044 of 4,138 polls reporting across the city at press time, Équipe Denis Coderre candidates Harout Chitilian and Anie Samson, who served as co-vice-chairmen of the executive committee during the last mandate, trailed Projet Montréal opponents in their respective boroughs of Ahuntsic– Cartierville and Villeray–Saint-Michel–Parc Extension.
Réal Ménard and Russell Copeman, who were responsible for the environment and for housing, respectively, on the executive committee also trailed Projet Montréal opponents in their respective boroughs of Mercier — Hochelaga-Maisonneuve and Côte-des-Neiges — Notre-Dame-de-Grâce.
Ménard was Coderre’s point person for some of his controversial projects to mark Montreal’s 375th anniversary this year, including the granite objects on Mount Royal that were likened to tree stumps and the over-budget Fleuve-Montagne walkway that topped $50 million.
The polls had pegged the Montreal mayoral race as a dead heat in the last days of the campaign, but that didn’t translate in the voting results. Plante took a commanding lead from the get-go when polls closed at 8 p.m.
In what will go down as one of the more exciting election finishes in recent Montreal history, two public opinion polls during the second-to-last week of the campaign had suggested the two-way mayoral race between Coderre and Plante, a relative newcomer to politics, was too close to call.
Coderre, who spent 16 years in Ottawa as a federal Liberal MP, was seeking a second term as mayor on what he and his team declared to be a record of success since taking the reins of a beleaguered city beset by corruption scandals in 2013.
Plante, who was elected leader of Projet Montréal in December in her first term on city council and her first foray into politics at any level, was running to become the first female mayor of Montreal.
It should have been an easy victory for Coderre, a media-savvy career politician known for flippant one-liners. His rival, after all, was a relative neophyte and unknown.
However, the two-way race immediately shaped up as a referendum on Coderre’s personality.
And it quickly became clear that the campaign — the 11th of his political career — wasn’t the cakewalk that mayoral incumbents in Montreal politics have come to expect.
Coderre’s best poll showing occurred in the summer, before the campaign began, before the ePrix race that would later overshadow his campaign and before Plante became known to the public.
From there, his numbers went down as Plante’s pleasant personality and easy smile became familiar to the public.
Coderre wound up spending the campaign reacting to Plante and Projet Montréal’s campaign. He refused all but two public mayoral debates, one in English and one in French. He even seemed to make an effort to smile as the campaign progressed.
Still, a CROP poll late in the campaign found 55 per cent of respondents saying they found Coderre “arrogant.”
As the campaign came to a close, Coderre and his team went into attack mode, warning Montrealers Projet Montréal is “far-left” party and that Plante’s campaign promises, including construction of a métro Pink Line, would cost $800 million and cause a three per cent increase in municipal taxes.
The scaremongering hearkened for some veteran municipal observers to Drapeau’s labelling of the Front d’Action Politique, his opposition in the 1970 municipal election around the time of the Front de liberation du Québec crisis, as sympathizers of the FLQ to discredit them.
Plante countered that Coderre was panicking and tossing out exaggerated figures to frighten voters. It was Coderre who had wasted Montrealers’ tax dollars, she said, and was refusing to say how much he would spend on his campaign promises, including a new baseball stadium.
Coderre’s campaign, meanwhile, was overshadowed by revelations that attendance figures for the Formula E race were greatly inflated by free tickets given away by the organizers.