Quebec Municipal Elections 2017

[lilTommy]

November 5th is the Election day for the provinces more then 1100 municipalities:

Montreal: Looking like a two way fight between current mayor Coderre (Equipe Denis Coderre, Personalist centrist) vs opposition leader Valerie Plante (Project Montreal, urbanist, progressive, social democratic)
*Denis Coderre (Equipe Denis Coderre) - current mayor, former Liberal Cabinet minister
*Valerie Plante (Projet Montreal) - Councillor since 2013 (Ville Marie Borough, she defeated former PQ cabinet minister Louise Harel)

Recent poll shows a basic dead heat, represented under lists:
Equipe DC (Coderre)  - 30%
PM (Plante) - 25%
Undecided - 41%

Were seeing a growing linguistic divide as well:
Francophone:
PM - 33%
eDC - 29%
Undecided - 36%

Anglophone:
eDC - 36%
PM - 10%
undecided - 53%

Not surprising, Plante leads among younger voters while Coderre leads among older ones. It would be nice to see this broken down by Borough as well since that will be an indication of Council seat distribution.

http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/indecision-reigns-as-poll-puts-coderre-plante-in-dead-heat-for-mayoralty

Interesting that a number of former NDP MPs are running for Mayor's position in the Montreal area:
Hoang Mai is running for Mayor of Brossard,
Sadia Groguhe is running for Mayor of Longueuil,
Jamie Nicholls is running for Mayor of Hudson

[lilTommy]

Whats really telling is that Coderre is trailing among francophones, in Montreal you can't win without them. But a huge undecideds group so right now its anyones game and to me that is bad news for Coderre.
The issues in MTL is that there is really only one viable "party" or list, and that's Projet Montreal; most of the other groups are personalist or Borough specific. Coalition Montreal, which is running for some reason, is only pulling less then 5% and I think has maybe 2 Councillors. PM seems very grassroots and organised as a party, which is why its continued to succeed even when former leader and founder Richard Bergeron left, where as other parties have collapsed when leaders left like Union Montreal, Vrai Chagement (remember the outfit to get Melanie Joly elected) and Coalition Montreal.

With how fluid and loose the lists are, you can see there's been lots of movement by elected officials since 2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_municipal_election,_2017
 

[lilTommy]

The guy running for mayor for coalition Montreal is a former Tory candidate? Wikipedia says they are a "centre-left" party though...

They scrape what they can, now one of their candidates is in trouble for saying then feminism is a mental illness.

Ahh. Should change their ideology to "alt-right"

Is it possible that the party was hijacked? I imagine it couldn't be that hard to hijack a municipal party.

Maybe, but hijacked by Coderre himself? it's a personalist list "Equipe Denis Coderre" so I think anyone from the centre to right wing who are looking for a name to jump onto and a vehicle to be elected tried to run for the nomination under his list. Most of the candidates/Councillors were from the old Union Montreal which says it was centrist but looked more centre-right.

[lilTommy]

Leger Poll from Oct 22:
http://montreal.ctvnews.ca/new-poll-shows-race-for-mayor-in-dead-heat-1.3647746

Both Equipe Denis Coderre and Project Montreal are at 38% (eDC -5% PM +9%) 21% undecided

http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/mayoral-race-a-dead-heat-as-non-francophones-turn-to-valerie-plante-poll

Interesting: "The latest poll suggest that non-francophone electors, a voting bloc that helped propel Coderre to city hall in 2013, are paying attention to Plante, the Projet Montréal candidate seeing an 11 percentage point spike in support, placing her at 36 per cent, two points ahead of Coderre."

http://blog.qc125.com/2017/10/exclusif-qc125-denis-coderre-et-valerie.html?m=1

Francophones:
eDC - 43%(-6)
PM - 40% (+8)

non-Francophones:
eDC - 34% (-3)
PM -36% (+11)

[lilTommy]

Honestly, I'm so torn as to how I'll vote. I dislike Projet Montreal's platform but like Plante personally. I dislike Coderre personally but like Equipe Denis Coderre's platform.

Vote Plante for mayor and for Equipe Denis Coderre's for council/borough, no?

[lilTommy]

I'm somewhat confused by the numbers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_municipal_election,_2017

If you count, Borough Mayors, City and Borough Councillors its (from wiki above):
PM - 49
eDC - 39
eBarbe - 7
eAnjou - 5
CM - 1

Any reason why the count isn't shown like that?

Also, interesting physical divide on the map here on La Presse
http://www.lapresse.ca/multimedias/201711/03/01-5142260-resultats-des-elections-municipales-2017.php if you look at the results for mayor, Coderre won the Boroughs along the north side of the City (except L'Ile-Bizard), Plante won those along the south.

[lilTommy]

Anyone who will listen to me rant, I tell them over and over again Toronto needs to move to a borough system. Were already kinda getting there with the Community Councils (basically the old cities but still some mergers: Etobicoke-York, Toronto-East York)

[lilTommy]

Toronto having four "community councils" while Montreal has 19 boroughs is kind of a laughable comparison.

I won't disagree... but it's a step in that direction, baby steps with Toronto now

[lilTommy]

That's not true at all. John Tory's majority on council is made up almost exclusively of suburban councillors - he systematically excludes any downtown councillors from having any say in anything and won't let any of them even sit on the public works committee. Under Tory and before him under Ford, Toronto has been run by and for the suburbs and downtown has been screwed every step of the way

I agree, Etobicoke on its own only has 6 Councillors, and this right-wing swing really began with Ford to some extent.
When you combine Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough, that's 25 out of 44 (not including old York which has 2 Councillors that swung to the right/Fordists) if they vote on a block, which happend in 2010 Fordists, far-right wing Mayors can win... and this is why we have some terrible plans in place like Scarborough Subway.
Tory managed to win over Key areas of the suburbs like South Etobicoke (3 wards) and central North York (5 wards), and one in Scarborough. That's how he became mayor. The only way to govern is to placate, as DL mentioned, the suburbs which is why you see a definite anti-tax pro-subway tilt to Tory's admin. Of the 12 members of the executive, 3 are from Toronto-East York, one being Palacio (conservative) the other two are liberal-like.
But all of Etobicoke elected right-wing Councillors, so did York; Scarborough is a mix, 1 NDP aligned Councillor, I'd say 3 maybe 4 Liberal-like councillors (I'd put them centre-right, except De Baeremaeker, he's confusing, but lets call him dead centrist) the rest more traditional conservatives.
North York has 2 NDP aligned Councillors and at least 2-4 Liberal-Like Councillors (Carroll, Colle and Matlow are centre-left for the most part, the other one, Pasternak i'm not certain but likely Centre-right) Toronto-East York is almost all Urban Progressives (NDP, Left-Liberal types), one notable exception being Palacio.
Sounds like a lot of centrist and leftist, but the lines are blurred because many of those suburban centrist fall into the pro-car, low-tax group that hinders urban development around transit and housing. 

[lilTommy]

That's not true at all. John Tory's majority on council is made up almost exclusively of suburban councillors - he systematically excludes any downtown councillors from having any say in anything and won't let any of them even sit on the public works committee. Under Tory and before him under Ford, Toronto has been run by and for the suburbs and downtown has been screwed every step of the way

Here is a map showing the vote from the most recent Toronto budget, debated in Feb. 2017.  John Tory won the vote by a 26-17 margin with two absentees.  The councillors voting yes represent the green wards, the no voters are from the red wards, and the absentees are beige.

What's interesting here is that 14 of those 17 who voted No, are leftist/progressive Councillors; the three others are extreme right-wingers (Ford, Mammolitti and Karigiannis)