Election notebook

Neighbourhood watch: the Southwest and Verdun, where the Turcot project casts a long shadow

It’s been almost two weeks since the official writ was dropped, opening up Montreal to municipal electoral madness—but to be honest, things have been more snoozy than hectic. Despite the recent bombs dropped regarding water meters, allegations of mob corruption, Louise Harel’s inability to communicate almost at all in the Queen’s English and the mayor and La Presse’s ongoing mutual loathing campaign, there is little to suggest that we’re getting all up in arms and wild-eyed about going to the polls.

And why should we? Other than exercising our legal franchise, a quick look at the options doesn’t exactly inspire Obamamania. We’ve got a two-term, scandal-plagued incumbent administration, a unilingual Janey-come-lately separatist with a penchant for centralized control and a dark horse community-minded lefty who’s the toast of the Plateau liberal crowd but with little name recognition beyond his base. And then there’s Louise O’Sullivan. Doesn’t ring a bell? Exactly.

So. Let’s make the best of a boring situation and look at some of the things that just might get voters’ pulses quickening. In an exciting new twist on traditional Mirror electoral coverage, for the next five weeks, we’ll focus on specific neighbourhoods and the big issues therein.

? For some years now, official and moneyed eyes have being eyeing the potential for change in St-Henri, Little Burgundy and the Point. But those plucky, mostly un-rich folks aren’t letting themselves get steamrolled. Having kyboshed the casino project and successfully stood up to mall developers Devimco, who’d hoped to turn a languishing Griffintown into a shiny modern Jetsons-esque neighbourhood (just look at the dynamite job they did in Brossard with the Dix30 complex), residents are getting a taste for politics and the blood sport that it is. And the party they’re turning to is, no surprise, Projet Montréal. Two veterans of the Turcot interchange war are running for PM at the borough council level: Mobilisation-Turcot’s Sophie Thiébaut and Ken McLaughlin, of the Walking Turcot Yards blog.

? Thiébaut, a 38-year-old mile-a-minute-talking Frenchwoman who came to Canada 10 years ago and works as a community organizer, gushes that Richard Bergeron’s party is the only one with a vision for sustainable transportation. Full of enthusiasm about tramways and how they will solve traffic and greenhouse gas emission problems, she says the Tremblay administration waffled for eight years before producing a transportation plan. Plus, she believes her party chief is the only one with enough cojones to stand up to the provincial Ministry of Transport.

? For his part, McLaughlin is running in Verdun, and wants better access to the waterfront, among other things. “Things are not too bad,” by the water, he admits. “But I don’t like the history.” The new-ish marina and recent developments nearby are legacies of long-time Verdun mayor Georges Bossé—who subsequently worked as a Devimco lobbyist—and McLaughlin thinks the era of executive diktat has to come to an end. This applies as well to the runaway development that turned Nuns’ Island from “a utopian paradise to an overdeveloped monster.” McLaughlin admits he has a lot to learn about municipal politics but adds, “It’s not brain surgery.”

? Housing groups are also weighing in on the Turcot project. Valérie Simard of POPIR, a social housing advocacy organization in the southwest, says stopping the project is her first priority. “The Ministry of Transport wants to expropriate 166 households, so we want all the candidates to denounce the project and force the ministry to abandon it,” she says. She was glad to note that all three main parties have spoken out against the project, although only Projet Montréal (them again!) has released its electoral platform. She also wants to keep discussion about the project alive—with public hearings now finished, she is worried that concern about it will fade from the collective mind. “They were able to bring back the Grand Prix,” she says. “They can do the same thing by mobilizing the public and the media to do the same thing and stop the project.”

? Whoever does win come Nov. 1, it’s likely the pallor of the top dogs won’t change much. Beyond a handful of visible minorities on council—most prominent among them being the mayor’s economic development guy Alan DeSousa—the skate is snow-blindingly white. So Monir Hossain of Park Extension is hoping to add a little bit of melanin to the city’s governing council. Fielding three candidates in Park Ex and Côte-des-Neiges, the Parti ethnique de Montréal will push for higher immigration, protecting the needs of immigrants and better jobs in their neighbourhoods, which remain consistently poor. (In the two boroughs PEM is fielding candidates, Vision has more visible minority candidates than Union. Check out their websites for details: visionmtl.com and unionmontreal.com.)