Preview Saving the City | The happy warrior

Daniel Sanger took a two-year hiatus to work with Projet Montreal in 2010… an adventure that spanned nine years. It tells from the inside the rise to power of the party, its successes, its failures, and traces the role of its main protagonists.

If there is a giant who [est tombé à l’élection de] 2013 is Louise Harel, candidate in Sainte-Marie, the district immediately west of Caldwell. His election to the heart of his stronghold was taken for granted. Since her first election in the neighborhood in 1981, she had never obtained less than 50% of the vote and had always made more than double of her closest opponent. But never before had she been on a list headed by a conservative federalist. She had probably never faced a candidate with the energy, enthusiasm and optimism of Valérie Plante either.

Projet Montréal has not invested much in this race, neither in terms of resources nor in terms of hope. The priorities in the Ville-Marie borough were to get Bergeron elected in Saint-Jacques, where he ran against one of Coderre’s star recruits, Radio-Canada journalist Philippe Schnobb, and Jimmy Zoubris in Peter-McGill, the third district of the district. Since Harel had announced that she would attend, Projet Montreal considered Sainte-Marie as “a district to be forgotten”, according to Oliver Paré, the doc (campaign manager) of the borough in 2013.

“I’ve been pretty clear with her on this. There was nothing I could do but tell her that she had to move her ass and that she had no chance unless she went all out, he added. And she got the message. I asked her to be at the gates every day and she did. Besides, it never occurred to Bergeron to make an effort to help Plante get elected. “During that whole campaign, I never took care of her,” he says. For me, it was the girl who was going to break the pipe. She consented to go and get screwed. She had no chance there. She can’t win. Point. Ended. ”

Plante had a core of four volunteers in her district with whom she went door-to-door, but sometimes found herself alone for this task – which the party advised against for security reasons. Whether alone or with a volunteer, there were also days when the prospect of another evening spent walking the sidewalks and climbing the stairs of Sainte-Marie was almost too hard for her to bear, Paré says. “She would cycle across the bridge from work in Longueuil, come home, see her children and call me in tears, saying, ‘I don’t want to do it tonight. I want to spend time with my children. ” And I said to him: “Sorry? You are serious ?” I was a real bastard. But I felt like I had to do this, in my brand new campaign manager clothes. He adds: “There were some breaking points in this campaign, where she didn’t really understand the value of what she was doing, why she was leaving her children for so long. Paré, who grew up in NDG, arrived at Project Montreal through Ray Guardia and the NPD. One day he told Plante that she fit, like Jack Layton, the model of the “happy warrior” and that “it was her strength, it was what was going to propel her. And she liked it, and I think she was energized by this image ”.

Save the city – Projet Montréal and the challenge of transforming a modern metropolis

Daniel sanger

Écosociété, September 2021

504 pages