by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

The last time these two mayoral candidates duelled, Gérald Tremblay beat Pierre Bourque by 310,000 votes to 278,000. Now, with Tremblay losing his west side stronghold, anything could happen. The weathervane should point for the first time next weeks from now, when the first poll surveys come out. This will likely be the last time both square off, as there are whispers in Tremblay’s inner circle that he hopes to win this term and retire four years later. His NDG councillor brother Marcel, 63, has also announced plans to quit after this term.

•: Bourque can shrug off his detractors, such as La Presse, whose constant blasting is, he claims, inspired by an obscure family grudge. But of greater concern is a rift between himself and the 100,000 local Haitians, whom he considers part of his ethnic stronghold. Bourque will soon put up signs in 19 different languages to cultivate that ethnic support.

But Haitians remain standoffish, recalling that Bourque kept his own seat by claiming that of loyal councillor Kettly Beauregard. The city’s only Haitian councillor had kept her Marie-Victorin seat by a landslide in 2001. Mirror 2005 Noisemaker Justine Charlemagne, 29, who runs a beauty pageant and the city’s only Haitian newspaper, is onside as borough council candidate for Bourque for Montreal North. Meanwhile, Bourque hopes to win Haitians back by promising his mayoral salary to the fight against gangs, a big issue among Haitians. Bourque previously shovelled his mayoral salary to a fund for young entrepreneurs, which remains in operation.

•: Warren Allmand, 72, is one of many candidates who appear to have found retirement to be on the dull side. The former Liberal MP looks like a lock in Loyola against Bourque’s candidate, the restauranteur “Souvlaki” George Pentsos, in the seat vacated by independent borough mayoral candidate Jeremy Searle. Not long ago, Election Notebook sat next to Allmand in the audience at an NDG/CDN borough council meeting, and beheld Allmand’s expression of stunned dismay as an endless procession of screaming residents—some of questionable mental health—strode to the microphone to insult and berate councillors about potholes, graffiti and unanswered e-mail.

•: Sleepy Verdun borough council meetings were livened up earlier this year after the Douglas Hospital vowed to build extra facilities on its sprawling verdant grounds. It inspired hundreds of angry NIMBY Crawford Park area residents to flood meetings. Philippe Lalonde, 49, a leader of the refuseniks, is trying to springboard off the campaign to capture the Verdun mayoralty on the Bourque ticket. The financial consultant and father of two claims DNA will compensate for lack of political experience.

“I was born politicized,” he says, promising the standard “more consultation,” blasting the outgoing Bossé-Dugas-Gallagher triumverate of Tremblay-ites as “an old boys’ club,” and finishes with another neighbourhood cliché: “We want to make Wellington more attractive.” His opponent, Claude Trudel, is an old Tremblay buddy and Nuns’ Island councillor, and the save-the-forest agenda doesn’t always sell on the gritty mainland. Replacing the loveable outgoing chrome-dome wrinklepuss John Gallagher on the west side as Tremblay candidate is André Savard, who owns a dépanneur at Bannantyne and Woodland and whose father, Raymond, was Verdun mayor from 1985 to 1993. He’s apparently unrelated to Verdun hockey hero pipsqueak Denis Savard, whose name has adorned the local arena since 2000.

•: Saulie “Landslide” Zajdel, city councillor since 1986, offers the best potential nailbiter in NDG/CDN, which otherwise looks like a series of safe bets for the Tremblay incumbents. In 2001, Zajdel ran for Bourque in Darlington, benefiting from then-colleague Jean Fortier’s gracious offer to swap ridings. Zajdel beat Aline Malka by a mere 200 votes and previously he’d won by only 400 over Michael Pollack. In 2002, he was blasted for handing his wife a $44,000 renovation grant as well as, more recently, for missing many council meetings. Zajdel crossed the floor earlier this year and now battles a Bourqueian bagel-making Sikh from Amritsar for the area near Jean Talon and Victoria. “I’m a clean guy and I run an honest campaign,” says Kashmir Singh Randhawa, the owner of DAD’s bagels, who aims at being the first South Asian to get elected to City Hall.

Bourque has been stumping for a re-centralized city in speeches, denouncing the power-to-the-borough movement. Some see this as a promise to keep councillors weak, but Randhawa says that’s not the case. “Bourque wants the city councillors to tell him what they need in their district, so he can put the package together and see what he can do.”