Denis Coderre and Valérie Plante will face off in the municipal election with Montreal on a roll
On stage, they were a study in contrasts: Denis Coderre in a sober business suit and thick-framed glasses; Valérie Plante smiling broadly in an informal pink button-up shirt.
Both candidates have had something to do with that winning streak, but larger factors are at play, and regardless of who wins on Sunday, few observers expect the boom times to end soon. As the Chamber of Commerce president Michel Leblanc acknowledged days after the debate he had organized, “If Denis Coderre wins, it’ll be fine. If Valérie Plante wins, it’ll be fine.”
“When Montreal lost its status as a metropolis, it became a city of vice,” said Glenn Castanheira, executive director of Montreal’s downtown business association, in an interview before the fire. “We’ve moved beyond that.” When Projet Montréal insurgents unseated him in 2017, they set about implementing an urbanist vision centred on the almost totemic figure of the bike lane. The party had already governed the bourgeois-bohemian borough of Le Plateau-Mont-Royal for years with an aggressive program of narrowing streets, removing parking and otherwise reorienting life toward cycling and walking.
Ted Rutland has seen this sometimes-unsettling transformation up close as an associate professor of geography, planning and environment at Concordia University. “It’s become a cleaned-up, more aesthetically pleasing city,” he said, “at the expense of some character, and affordability.”
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