Paul Wells: I used to wonder where all the politicians with heart and wit went. Turns out they are in Montreal, trying to turn a parking lot into a place where people actually live.
Plante leads a rarity in the politics of the city of Montreal: a party that existed before she arrived and that can still survive her (Paul Chiasson / CP)
One of my favorite theories is that politics in Canada is okay. But not at the federal level. And, of course, not always at the provincial level. But municipal politics will give you hope, at least often enough. In cities and towns, citizens can still mobilize to make a difference. They can build an alternative when headlines forget how to listen. Municipal politicians are less often rewarded for brutal antagonism and blind loyalty than their more glamorous cousins in Parliament, so real debate and thoughtful give-and-take are not a thing of the past.
I don’t want to romanticize things. Municipal politics can be uninspiring and ugly. Too often, you can even buy and sell. But in many cities and towns, it doesn’t feel stagnant. So it’s still worth doing.
Exhibit A, this municipal election season, is Montreal, where the top two candidates for the mayor’s office will stage a rematch on November 7. Denis Coderre, you know. He was a utility player in the federal governments of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, competed for an advantage in the shrinking Liberal Party of Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, and was then elected mayor of Montreal in 2013. At age 58 , Coderre is finally almost as old as he always seemed to be. He’s an old-school brokerage politician. You can work with anyone, until you get tired of them. He garnered similarly fleeting loyalty from Montreal voters, who left him after a term in 2017. This year he’s trying to make a comeback.
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The woman who hit him once and hopes to do it again is Valérie Plante, mayor since 2017. She is 11 years younger than Coderre and more cheerful. She leads a rarity in the politics of the city of Montreal: a political party that existed before she arrived and can still survive her, a grassroots, progressive and green party called Projet Montréal. To caricature, Coderre is in politics to be. The Projet Montréal gang is in politics to do. This corner does not offer any predictions on who will win.
But my goodness, I have enjoyed discovering more about Projet Montréal, thanks to one of the most fascinating Canadian political books of all time. Saving the city: the challenge of transforming a modern metropolis is a long and detailed history of Projet Montréal and, more broadly, of the politics of the city of Montreal since the 1970s. Its author is Daniel Sanger, whom I met as a reporter for The Canadian Press when I lived in Montreal, too briefly , in the 1990s. Most recently, Sanger worked as an organizer for Projet Montréal and, once she gained a position in a key district and then throughout the city, as a senior staff member. He was fired a few years ago, in a way that left him with a lot of good anecdotes and no reason to suppress them.
Saving the city it combines the clear eye of a very good reporter with the inside approach of a sympathetic supporter. Almost everyone in this story spoke to Sanger, at length and without a filter. Almost all of them are enthusiastic students of the flaws of others and are reasonably happy to admit their own. For an Ottawa reader of Justin Trudeau, where everything is a written understatement, Sanger’s frankness and that of his sources is a tonic. I have always thought that politics is about imperfect people pursuing perfect goals, often wrong, always with heart, and sometimes even with a little ingenuity. All my life, I’ve been wondering where those people went. Turns out they’ve been to Montreal.
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Sanger’s main source is Projet Montréal founder and three-time failed mayoral candidate Richard Bergeron, “who is brilliant and knows it, as warm as a block of ice and unable to get along with most of the members of your group, regardless of the electorate. ” (I should note that the English edition of Sanger’s book is yet to come out, so I am translating from the French edition. Please treat these quotes as paraphrases.)
Basically, Plante comes after it finally becomes impossible to ignore how bad Bergeron is at politics. But by then Bergeron has already accomplished a lot. In politics, a powerful idea doesn’t need a glamorous messenger, just as no amount of glamor can fill a void for long.
Bergeron’s idea is simple: He wants to tilt Montreal’s urban balance away from cars and drivers, back toward pedestrians and neighborhoods. Raised in an orphanage in the small town of Chicoutimi, he becomes a Montreal taxi driver, cruising every inch of the city’s back streets and arteries, and learning to hate cars. “A car is a machine for killing cities and building suburbs,” he says. He wants trams, which are cleaner and quieter than cars. He teams up with residents of Plateau Mont-Royal, the middle-class residential steppe east of the rugged “mountain” of downtown Montreal, who want some main streets closed to all traffic except pedestrians.
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The new party builds its agenda from that nucleus. New recruits and supporters arrive at a steady pace. They are driven, quite reliably, by two things: First, by the fear that Montreal will become uninhabitable at street level. A man discovers that when he takes his clothes off the clothesline, he smells like diesel fuel. Second, by a dismissive response from incumbent politicians and city officials the first time they suggested doing things differently.
In 2009, Projet Montréal gained control of the administration of the Plateau Mont-Royal district. Sanger is going to work for the district mayor, another key figure in Projet Montréal. They diligently implement a detailed program, never caring much about the opposition: eventually, supporters outnumber opponents. More than a decade after taking the Plateau, the party has never lost it.
The rest of the city, less boho go-gauche, is harder to sell. The group eventually learns that they cannot win on a larger scale without a charmer like Plante. It’s slower to realize that you can’t win without a dedicated grassroots movement like Projet Montréal. Many partygoers worry that she is a reached that does not share your goals. Many resigned in dismay at what the party has become on its way to town hall. Sanger is surprisingly open in sharing these concerns. Almost everyone in the book encounters moments of disappointment, betrayal, and frustrated hope. Many are only to blame themselves.
In short, it is politics, a word that I pretend as a compliment without pretending that it is synonymous with perfection. In the end, these days, Montreal feels less like a parking lot and more like a place where people live: crabby, imperfect people who don’t pretend to be anything else. From Ottawa, it seems like a tempting mirage.
This article appears in print in the December issue of Maclean’s magazine with the title “Imperfect people who pursue perfect goals”.
Reference-www.macleans.ca