City’s new mayor, Valérie Plante, in the moment
She’s still the same person, she says, but part of her now belongs to the city
Valérie Plante does not need a cup of coffee, but she’d really like one.
For the past two months, she has been “surfing on a wave of adrenalin,” but on Thursday morning — just eight-and-a-half hours before she was to be sworn in as Montreal’s first mairesse — Plante can feel the crash coming.
She asks her driver Ernst if he can pull over so “we can all get some coffee.”
“Do we have time? Can we? Can we?” she pleads with her press attaché Marc-André Viau.
Viau shakes his head. Ernst chuckles.
“Did you see that? We made Ernst laugh!” Plante says, triumphantly. “Ernst never says anything, but we made him laugh.”
If this is Valérie Plante on the verge of exhaustion, she’s hiding it well. Of all the factors that led her to unseat a popular incumbent on Nov. 6, Plante’s doggedness has to be at or near the top of that list.
“She’s the freaking Energizer Bunny,” said one former campaign volunteer, who knocked on doors with Plante when she first ran for city council in 2013.
“She’s the happy warrior. You’re not going to outlast her, she will run you into the ground.”
It’s just after 9 a.m. on her first day in office and the soon-to-be mayor has already given an in-studio radio interview, held a news conference and gone over her inaugural address. All of this while overseeing a move from the opposition party’s office in the bowels of city hall to the mayor’s chambers.
“Do you know what time we’re moving at?” is the most common non-coffee related question directed at Viau this morning.
He’ll generally fire back some variation of “Do I look like a mover?” before turning his attention to the ink-jet printer. He curses the machine and slaps it a few times in a feeble attempt to get it working.
Plante, meanwhile, jogs up the staircase that leads to council chambers. Before the ceremony at Marché Bonsecours begins, she signs the contracts that make this session of city council official.
“This is the moment, right now, when I’m the mayor of Montreal,” Plante says, in a way that suggests she’s still trying to convince herself it’s really true. “I knew in my heart it would happen. I could feel it in my bones. But it’s still ... I’m officially the first woman mayor of Montreal.
“I’m excited. I didn’t really sleep last night. It’s a huge responsibility, but I’m also proud that I can be a role model for other women, for younger girls and for boys.”
In many ways, Plante says she has already been hit with the reality of governing Canada’s secondlargest city. When going over the city’s books last week, for instance, her team discovered a $358-million hole in next year’s budget.
One staffer calls it a “parting gift” from the outgoing administration.
Then there’s the question of taking the reins in a city whose major roads are paralyzed by construction work.
She’ll also have to win over Montreal’s business elite, which threw its collective weight behind Denis Coderre during the campaign.
Plante says the new job has also affected her in much more personal ways. Less than a year ago, she was a first-term councillor with a background in community organizing and museology. Few outside the tiny world of municipal politics had ever heard of Plante.
Beating Coderre has catapulted her into the national spotlight.
“Last Saturday, my husband and I went out to dinner for the first time since the election,” she says.
“And afterward, we went to this Mile-End bar we like to go to and I wanted to dance.
“But I became really self-conscious of who I am now. I could see people looking at me — and they were being really nice and saying ‘cheers’ and all that — but I couldn’t dance.
“I had this life before politics, you know, and some of that is gone now.
“So I went home and put on some music and danced. I’m serious, I put my music on and literally danced for like an hour.”
This is one of the thoughts bouncing around Plante’s mind in the hours before she officially becomes mayor. That there is a part of herself that she’ll have to give up for now or maybe forever.
At her core, she says, she’s the same person she has always been.
The daughter of a mom who raised her with feminist ideals and a dad who travelled the countryside in a school bus, selling knickknacks and greeting cards to keep the family afloat.
Plante will always be the product of a decidedly working-class family, one that pushed her to get jobs washing dishes, pumping gas and babysitting as a teenager in Abitibi.
She’ll still make breakfast for her sons most days while her husband gets ready for work.
But a part of her now belongs to the citizens of Montreal and that carries a certain weight to it. “I’m excited,” she says.
“I’m the mayor of Montreal. It’s not so much about me anymore, it’s about what needs to be done so the city moves forward.”