Pauline Marois is delighted at the péquiste infiltration of Montreal municipal politics, saying it’s a hopeful sign that separatism is not dead.
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Mayor Tremblay presented his slate of candidates today and spoke about the future; Louise Harel mocked Tremblay today, saying he’s in a panic.
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Union Montreal is vowing to list its donors on its website, meeting the challenge of both Vision and Projet, which are doing the same.
Union met Saturday to work out its platform for the election, nailng public transit to their mast as their main theme. The beginning of the official campaign is still 19 days off – you could’ve fooled me.
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Vision Montreal has a renovated website and the party is making much of the fact that they’re listing their donors on the site. It also has links to Facebook and Twitter presences.
Projet Montréal (now clad in a sober blue – I seem to recall it used to be mostly green) and Union Montréal of course have sites, as does the Louise O’Sullivan party, the only one which has left me any kind of physical promotion so far – a business card stuck in my door.
Projet has a cluster of links to Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia. O’Sullivan’s site is the most minimal, but Union’s site is also lacking in social media links, pushing instead its achievements as the incumbent to beat. Which isn’t too surprising, as most of its folks in the photos are a little long in the tooth.
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Mayor Tremblay and Louise Harel are ramping up the rhetoric about City Hall ethics and, in particular, about an incident back in 2001, when Harel was municipal affairs minister: she arranged, three days before that year’s municipal elections, to give the mayor of Montreal much wider powers to award contracts. This would seem to run directly counter to the notions about municipal contracts that Harel seems to be favouring now that she’s criticizing the current administration herself.
In the ongoing pickup game, Harel has picked Pierre Lampron, who has a history of involvement in cultural affairs, to run in Vieux-Rosemont.
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Diane Lemieux will run for councillor in Ahuntsic-Cartierville with the promise that, should she win, she will become the mayor’s right-hand woman, taking the job once held by Frank Zampino and now occupied by Claude Dauphin.
If I were a smidge more politically cynical, I’d say Mayor Tremblay is trying to attract the nationalist vote by adopting a high-profile péquiste himself.
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Mayor Tremblay is said to be sounding out ex-PQ MNA Diane Lemieux as a new president for his party.
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In an echo of other cases in which songwriters have seen their works misappropriated by politicians they didn’t support, Ariane Moffatt’s catchy Montréal was used by a Union Montreal worker to accompany a motivational video. The party has apologized.
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Vision Montreal is on a high horse about the new code of ethics being voted on at city hall this evening.
Every so often I make a prediction, so here’s one: Should Vision Montreal win the election (I’d estimate they’re 60/40 against right now, but a lot may happen before November), they will find that staying pure as the driven snow is damnably difficult at city hall, and within two years will have had at least one major episode of revealed municipal corruption themselves.
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Sammy Forcillo is to stay in the municipal game after all, running in the Peter-McGill district of Ville-Marie for Tremblay’s Union Montreal party.
Louise Harel launched several barbs at the mayor yesterday while presenting her candidates in Ville-Marie. She’s also making a point of asking Quebec to return Ville-Marie to standard borough status: Mayor Tremblay had wanted the borough mayoralty of the city’s central core to be ex-officio a position held by the city mayor.
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Projet Montréal has lost three candidates today to Vision Montréal.
Later clarification: Projet Montréal indicates that the three people mentioned were not longtime members of their party and are in fact better described as fellow Péquistes of Louise Harel. Interesting how her party is making so much noise about poaching people from Projet, even going to the extent of inventing a connection with the party for David Hanna…
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Mayor Tremblay has filled up his dance card with mayoralty candidates for all the boroughs including a veteran police officer in Montreal North. There’s also a call for election workers, as tweeted by @election_MTL.
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Carrot-topped Nathalie Rochefort is to run for Vision Montreal in Mercier while onetime PQ MNA Elsie Lefebvre is going to turn municipal and run for councillor in Villeray, also for Vision.
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Mayor Tremblay’s party is swearing off election placards in the upcoming campaign, at least on public property. Other parties are making slighty hedgy-sounding responses to this announcement. It’s a nice move, but is it perhaps because other forms of advertising (and the mobilizing of social media) have proven to be more effective?
Tremblay also announced that Nicole Boudreau will be running for borough mayor of Sud-Ouest, where another new candidate, Benoit Dorais, is running for Vision Montreal. The current borough mayor is stepping down.
La Presse has an ongoing election dossier now, and I don’t doubt other media will soon have similar data pipelines in place.
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As August slips through our fingers I’m noticing more municipal election items cropping up, a trend that’s inevitably going to keep growing till November. I’ll try to summarize in one daily entry unless something huge comes up.
First Brother Marcel Tremblay, who had left the job of city snow czar and indicated he was leaving politics, is planning a comeback by running for borough mayor of Villeray/St-Michel/Park Ex this fall. The job’s currently held by Vision’s Anie Samson; Marcel currently represents CDN/NDG.
Louise Harel has picked up another PQ confrère, Rémy Trudel, who will run in Rosemont-La-Petite-Patrie. I am wondering, should Vision win, how much municipal money and time will be drafted in support of nationalist-tinged efforts and language policing.
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John Gomery, whose fame derives from being the judge at the sponsorship scandal inquiry, has joined Projet Montréal on a quest to clean up Montreal politics, although characterizing this as making the party more respectable is going over the top. He’ll give Richard Bergeron an edge in criticizing the current administration’s methods, though.