Montreal mayor Denis Coderre

Many Citizens of Montreal (and other Canadians too) are obsessed with the American president (especially the current one ) but the politicians who are most likely to affect their lives are local and national Canadian politicians.

We already have a thread on PM Trudeau, so we may as well have one on Montreal's mayor Denis Coderre

Coderre will be up for re-election soon. Lately he has not been so popular. But unlike several recent Montreal mayors, at least he hasn't been accused of or arrested for corruption...yet.

Here's a column from the Gazette that criticizes a pet project of the mayor, this weekend's Formula E electric car race.

Allison Hanes: Coderre offers Montrealers bread and circuses

Published on: July 28, 2017 |
Montreal gazette.com
When Marie Antoinette was told the people of Paris had no bread, she is alleged to have quipped: “Let them eat cake.”

The historical accuracy of the quote has long been debated, but the statement is considered shorthand for the hubris of a monarchy out of touch with the needs of its people. We all know how that ended for the court of Versailles.

Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre may be having a “let them eat cake” moment, as he scrambles to contain the fallout from the Formula E race this weekend. With discontent growing over the onerous disruptions for residents of the eastern downtown neighbourhood where the electric car race is being held, Coderre is doling out goodies to placate the restless masses.

Free Bixis! Free public transit! Free tickets distributed to nearby constituents (worth over $200 each)! These are on top of the $24 million the city is spending to host the event, which also includes $7.5 million for brand new concrete safety barriers emblazoned with the city logo, money spent on alternative parking arrangements for neighbours, and compensation for nearby restaurant owners whose terrasses have to be temporarily taken down.

All this uproar, all this fuss, all this money and all this mollification for an event few aside from the enthusiastic mayor really seem to want. What Coderre is calling an “audacious” move to make Montreal “a player” on the international scene is, to many citizens, little more than an expensive nuisance.

This disconnect illustrates how out of touch the mayor is with the concerns of average Montrealers with an election campaign looming in November.

Perhaps if Coderre was spending less time with dignitaries at international-calibre events, both in foreign countries and here in Montreal, he’d realize how skewed his priorities are compared with those of constituents at home.

Sure, it’s important to raise this city’s profile around the globe and be involved in important collective efforts, like the fight against climate change. But bread-and-butter local issues that affect people’s everyday lives shouldn’t take a back seat.
In Coderre’s eyes, residents should be willing to make “sacrifices” for the privilege of hosting the Formula E. Maybe those whose access to their homes has been impeded, whose bus routes have been detoured, who have been woken from slumber by the din of late-night preparatory work would be more willing to do their part to accommodate an event intended to promote the electrification of transport if the mayor was leading by example.

But according to La Presse, public records show Coderre is the owner of two SUVs. The mayor issued a Twitter denial and said the city car he uses for official business is a hybrid. He also tried to deflect from the controversy by claiming his privacy had been violated. This demagogy was called out by Patrick Lagacé (who was spied on by police as a result of questioning Coderre’s office about whether he had paid an old traffic ticket).

In typical fashion, the more annoyance over the Formula E mounts, the more Coderre digs in his heels defending the honour of the event. He’s going all in on the merits of conducting the race in the streets of Montreal, saying it would have required costly modifications to run it on the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve instead.

Meanwhile, his main challenger for the mayor’s office, Projet Montréal leader Valérie Plante, has decried the exorbitant price tag, denounced the poor planning and promised to renegotiate the agreement with the race proprietors in an attempt to move subsequent editions to Île Notre-Dame.

Coderre is trying to portray the complaints over the ePrix as a media- and opposition-driven tempest, claiming only a few vocal locals really have a problem with the event. But he’s missing the fact that legions of other Montrealers are shaking their heads in sympathy over the inconvenience and dismay over the cost.

This seems to be a recurring theme in 2017, with Montreal’s 375th birthday celebrations.

If Coderre thought all the 375 hoopla was his ticket to another term at city hall, he may have badly misread the public mood. The billion dollars worth of birthday gifts — a.k.a. legacy projects — have mostly turned out to be impractical vanity items.
A walkway from the river to the mountain is a lovely concept. But if you’re a Montrealer whose street is roughshod with potholes, whose route to work is dug up for water main repairs, who is hoping for a bike lane or more frequent public transit, decorations like granite stumps are hardly a priority. It’s like wallpapering the dining room when the roof is leaking.
Ditto, a flashy race seems an extravagant and superficial way to promote electric cars that does little to help ordinary citizens wean themselves from fossil fuels.

With voting day a few months away, the ePrix is the latest example that Coderre is offering Montrealers little more than bread and circuses.

I would not be surprised to see Coderre lead a bigger crackdown on the MP industry as the November mayoral election approaches.

Do we know who will be his main opponent in the election?

CaptRenault said:

Do we know who will be his main opponent in the election?

Click to expand...

To to answer my own question, Coderre's rival for mayor is Valerie Plante:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/projet-montreal-new-leader-1.3880962

She does not seem like a particularly formidable rival. But if enough citizens tire of Coderre's "bread and circuses" administration, then maybe she has a chance.

She doesn't seem like someone who would look favorably on the MP industry but I can't find anything indicating her position on it. She might influence Coderre to further crack down on it, but it's hard to say until the campaign begins in earnest.

Based on the comments so far, maybe Plante does have a chance to upset Coderre in November's election.

EagerBeaver said:

Hasn't the "highlight" of Coderre's reign been the pit bull ban which was bitten and shot down by the Quebec appeals courts?

Click to expand...

That is one of them. But lots of people don't like him because he tends to focus on grand schemes and self aggrandizing projects like the lighting of the JC Bridge and the city's expensive 375th anniversary celebration instead of fixing the city's infrastructure.

Based on what I read about it and what I saw of the race on TV, I agree with this columnist's opinion about the Montreal Formula E (electric car) race. It was a pet project of Mayor Coderre and he has declared that it was a success. But it seems like it was a success mainly for the organizers and the race teams and not for the hotel industry or the businesses and residents who were inconvenienced by the location of the track on city streets.

I also agree that the money spent on the race and other crazy Coderre projects could have been better spent on improving the city's infrastructure. Coderre seems vulnerable in the upcoming (November) election but is his opponent appealing and popular enough to beat Coderre and his political machine? I don't know. On verra.

Jack Todd: Coderre's E-car fiasco doesn't bode well for return of Expos
Montreal Gazette
August 7, 2017 |

Not since Mayor Jean Drapeau was blithely assuring us that the Olympics could no more run a deficit than a man could have a baby have we seen a sports fiasco in Montreal on a par with the Formula E debacle.
The question now is what effect the E-car fiasco will have on the political future of Mayor Denis Coderre and Coderre’s biggest baby, the effort to bring back the Montreal Expos.

In any rational, informed society, Coderre would be out on his ear in November, soundly trounced at the polls for his cavalier ways with public funds and his tendency to throw wads of taxpayer money at everything from granite tree stumps to Formula E.
But voters do love a circus, even when that circus might threaten their very existence: see our friends south of the border. With Coderre, circuses are his thing. People say that he’s about bread and circuses, but from where I sit, he is circuses and circuses. There’s no bread involved.

Begging the question: Would you trust this man to quarterback a stadium project? And will the rapidly eroding public trust in Coderre undermine efforts to build a baseball stadium and bring back the Expos?
The problem is that Coderre is a man who never met a costly extravaganza he didn’t like. I’m not the first to point out that we live in a city where the streets are cratered like the moon, where schools have to scrape and scrounge for the most basic supplies, where the infrastructure is crumbling — and yet Coderre tosses taxpayer dollars around like so much confetti.

I had a chat or two with Coderre when he was with the feds and I always found him witty, informed and engaged. I admire the man’s work ethic, his sly wit, his gregarious manner, his determination and tenacity when he wants to get something done.

Related

• Formula E was mismanaged, too expensive and in the wrong place: poll
• Montreal's Formula E race is an 'audacious' investment: Mayor Coderre
• Restaurant owners forced to remove terrasses for Montreal Formula E race, fear losses
• Marvin Rotrand demands Mayor Coderre make Formula E costs public
• Montrealers raise eyebrows at $3.4-million granite 'stumps' on Mount Royal
  
  

But Coderre lost me with the granite tree stumps for Mount Royal. It would be hard to find a more concrete example of that moment when a politician’s vaulting ambition o’erleaps itself and falls on t’other, to drag the Bard into it.
The concrete-stump idea was so bizarre, so over the top, that it was hard to imagine how anyone could entertain it for an instant. It somehow bubbled up from the city’s planners during the giddy preliminaries for the utterly necessary 375th anniversary observations — and like so many bureaucrats before them, Montreal’s planners mistook an artistic con job for art.
The tree stumps, to my eye, look more like broken chunks of concrete pipe. In any case, when the stumps sparked a public outcry, the play for Coderre was to say, ‘y’know what? You’re right. That is a stupid way to spend $3.45 million. I’m killing the whole thing right now.’

Instead, hizzoner doubled down on that prime bit of foolishness, as he has since doubled down on Formula E after a ruinously expensive race made it impossible to navigate the city.
Coderre’s personal style may be very different from Drapeau’s, but he operates with much of the same absolute lack of transparency, the same arrogance, the same disregard for his constituents, the same desire to bring international attention to his city (and himself) through sheer extravagance.

Coupled with the bridge lighting and the granite tree stumps and all the rest of it, the Formula E debacle ought to spell electoral disaster for Coderre in November. Unfortunately, it’s hard to unseat the incumbent. The real question is whether a new ballpark would be feasible, no matter who is in the mayor’s office. First of all, the plan shouldn’t get off the ground without a guarantee from Major League Baseball, because you don’t want to get caught like Quebec City, with a state-of-the-art arena and no team to play in it.

Once that guarantee is in hand, the litmus test for a new ballpark should be simple: If the project is financially viable, then it makes sense for private investors to bear the brunt of the cost, as Molson did with what is now the Bell Centre. If it isn’t, then it doesn’t make sense to sink anyone’s money into it, public or private.

With the very real problems we face in this city and this province, this is not the place to squander millions on tree stumps or hundreds of millions on a baseball stadium. One Olympic-sized stadium debacle in this city was quite enough, thank you very much.
Look, I very much want to see the Expos return to Montreal, but not at any cost. Perhaps we can’t rule out some level of public investment — but Montrealers are not going to sit still for anything like the heist Jeffrey Loria pulled off with the Miami Marlins, a piece of chicanery that left Dade County taxpayers with a tab comparable to our own Olympic Stadium debt.

One shudders to think what Coderre would consider a viable stadium project. A ballpark with a praying mantis tower from which a retractable roof could be suspended, maybe? Surrounded by millions of dollars worth of ugly granite stumps?
Hey, but maybe the Formula E race could wind around the infield.