It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment during Montreal's mayoralty campaign when the odds shifted in favour of an ever-smiling Valérie Plante from the never-smiling Denis Coderre. But the nail in the incumbent's political coffin was almost certainly hammered by a quintet of big-name businessmen who made an eleventh-hour plea for voters to stick with the white guy in a suit.
These kinds of trust-us interventions by the elites have become the political kiss of death. Witness Britain's Brexit campaign and the Never Trump movement. And this one, by a group that included federal Liberal bagman Stephen Bronfman, had a particularly tone-deaf ring to it. At the end of a campaign that coincided with a string of sexual harassment scandals that rocked Quebec and the world, it looked as if the old boys were just trying to keep a good woman down.
Then there was the pathetic outburst by former Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe, thrown out by voters in the 2011 federal Orange Wave. He warned that Ms. Plante was "too close" to the federal New Democratic Party and the provincial far-left Québec solidaire, which has of late been eating the Parti Québécois's lunch in Montreal ridings that it used to easily carry.
"It's fine to dress up as Mary Poppins," Mr. Duceppe condescendingly said of Ms. Plante. "I like it better when one wears the suit of a mayor."
With friends like these, as they say, Mr. Coderre hardly needed enemies. But of those, he had racked up plenty. After all, he had won in 2013 thanks to vote-splitting in a four-way race. From the outset, he alienated the media with his dictatorial and dismissive style. He seemed to think that, by rolling over anyone who opposed or criticized him, he could become mayor for life.
And, indeed, many of us in the media had come to believe he might be right. One French-language columnist nicknamed Mr. Coderre Omnimaire owing to his ubiquity. The opposition at City Hall was no match for the fast-talking mayor who seemed to slither out of every corner he backed himself into. One by one, the opponents who had failed to beat him, joined him. They included Richard Bergeron, the founder of Projet Montréal who had repeatedly run for mayor, only to see all but a rump of single-issue environmentalist voters reject his pro-bike, anti-car platform.
Hardly anyone noticed when Ms. Plante replaced Mr. Bergeron as Leader of Projet Montréal 11 months ago. Most figured the leftist formation had all but ensured Mr. Coderre's re-election by choosing an unknown plain Jane over its best-known city councillor and media favourite Guillaume Lavoie. And during the first eight months of 2017, Ms. Plante did nothing to change that impression. Mr. Coderre, it seemed, had only to point to Projet Montréal's anti-car policies in the Plateau Mont-Royal borough that it controlled to scare voters off Ms. Plante's party.
Then the campaign began. Ms. Plante went from zero to 100 faster than the electric race cars that Mr. Coderre had stubbornly promoted by injecting $24-million (and counting) of taxpayers' money into a Formula E non-event that walled off a downtown neighbourhood for three summer weeks. Ms. Plante burst out of the starting blocks with an eye-grabbing ad campaign that declared her "The Man for the Job." She promised "less show, more go." And she never stopped smiling.
As Ms. Plante's campaign manager Guillaume Cloutier told La Presse: "What we wanted was to rapidly take control on the ground." And that they did. Projet Montréal ran perhaps the most well-oiled campaign in recent Quebec political history. It produced an ambitious platform that contrasted with Team Denis Coderre's clear lack of one. The incumbent seemed to think he deserved all the credit for Montreal's recent return from the economic dead. But while the city is on a roll compared with its recent past, and carving out a place for itself in the digital economy, it continues to suffer from the highest business taxes of any major Canadian city and a decrepit infrastructure that will take years (and endless construction bottlenecks) to bring up to snuff.
The tide really turned when Mr. Coderre started getting even more irritable than usual. The decision of a third candidate to drop out and back Ms. Plante helped transform the contest into a referendum on the incumbent. Mr. Coderre lost by 27,273 votes to Ms. Plante, who will now become Montreal's first female mayor.
She deserved to win as much as the old boys deserved to lose.
Konrad Yakabuski