Considered a spoiler in the Montreal mayoral race, Holness waits with his followers

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With the slogan “People before politics,” Montreal Movement mayoral candidate Balarama Holness waited with his team for people to give their response on Sunday night.

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Movement Montreal, which presented 68 candidates for the city’s 103 municipal and municipal council seats, occupied a banquet hall in the Sud-Ouest district to view the results after the polls closed at 8 p.m.

“Montréal have a unique opportunity to leave the past behind and move forward with a new vision of the future of our metropolis,” Holness said on Friday, his latest launch in a campaign that promoted his nascent political formation as a viable alternative to the pioneers. , the incumbent Valérie Plante and the former mayor Denis Coderre.

Holness earned a distant third place throughout the campaign, yet his support grew from 5 percent to as high as 13 percent as the weekend’s voting began. With Coderre and Plante in a tie for weeks, polling experts said Holness had the potential to play the role of spoiler in the mayoral vote count.

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Holness’s co-candidate was Idil Issa, a McGill law student who describes herself as an advocate, writer, and speaker. Issa is running for a city council seat in the Peter-McGill district in the Ville-Marie district. Candidates for mayor of Montreal generally run with a co-candidate, allowing them to become city councilors if they lose their mayoral bid and their co-candidate wins the council seat.

Holness, a former Gray Cup winning Alouettes football player and McGill law graduate, was perhaps best known for successfully compelling the city to conduct public consultations on systemic discrimination and racism by police and departments. municipalities by gathering 22,000 names in a petition in 2019. The minimum number of signatures required to legally compel the city to hold a public consultation on an issue was 15,000.

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Last year, the New York Times described Holness as a Canadian Obama. But even with international recognition, Holness complained from the start of the municipal election campaign that he was largely ignored by the organizers of mayoral debates and the mainstream media.

This was not his first foray into municipal politics. In 2017, Holness ran as a Projet Montréal candidate for mayor of the Montreal-North district. He lost and then accused Projet Montréal of systemic racism. The party, he said, “used visible minorities” like him as an image, but ran them in unwinnable districts and without sufficient support.

The Montreal movement was registered as an official political party last June.

In a move that surprised many experts, Holness and rival mayoral hopeful Marc-Antoine Desjardins announced on the eve of the election campaign launch in September that they were joining forces.

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Holness had already stated that he would seek official bilingual status for Montreal if elected mayor, while Desjardins’ party platform Ralliement pour Montréal listed improving the French language as its first priority.

Raised by a Quebec-born French-speaking mother and an English-speaking Jamaican father, Holness said before the merger that Movement Montreal “would ensure Montreal is recognized as a bilingual city, so whether you want to do business in English or French, you can do it “.

Critics, including members of Desjardins ‘party, attacked the apparent incongruity of the two party leaders’ positions on the language. However, Holness said that the alliance “represent Francophones, Anglophones and Allophones , people of diverse ethnocultural backgrounds, small business owners, families and youth. ”

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Holness also said there was a political strategy behind his agreement to join the Ralliement pour Montréal, which he also said had been requested by Desjardins. Holness said the alliance provided a larger pool of candidates to run under the banner of the Montreal Movement, which he hoped would invite him to more mayoral debates.

However, the political union fell apart a few weeks later.

Desjardins, who had announced that he would run as the Montreal Movement candidate for mayor of the Outremont district, withdrew from the election in October. Some of his party’s candidates running under the Montreal Movement banner also withdrew. Desjardins said he was “totally disassociating himself” from Holness and a statement on bilingualism Holness made days earlier. Holness had said at a joint press conference with Desjardins that he will ask Montréal if they want a referendum on the city’s bilingual status if he wins mayor.

Even with candidate departures, Movement Montreal ran candidates in all 19 city districts.

A Léger poll for the Montreal Gazette and Le Journal de Montréal 10 days ago, which placed Holness at 12 percent of voting intentions, showed he had the support of 21 percent of allophones.

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