Nov 1 2009
Voting
For the first time as a Canadian, I just voted. It has been 7 years since the last time I voted in the Netherlands.
This year’s Montreal municipal elections are very exciting. There are three parties fighting for our votes and the mayoral candidates (there are also elections for borough councillors) all stand at around 30% in the last polls. A very tight race.
The candidate I voted for, Richard Bergeron, is inexperienced as a politician, a bit of a dreamer but has some good ideas about how to clean up the mess that is Montreal politics at the moments. Canadian current affairs magazine MacLeans called Montreal the most corrupt city in North-America and they might well be right.
Bergeron is an outsider and that’s probably the reason why his poll results are so high. People are fed up with the ruling class of lying crooks that we have now.
[Update 2 November]
The results: our incumbent Mayor strategy of “nobody of the people near me told me they were corrupt” worked and he got re-elected.
Our borough’s Mayor is the candidate for the seperatist party. I briefly spoke with him while he was canvassing, and he is very young and was quite convincing why I should vote for him. I didn’t but a slim majority did.
The city councillor elected in my borough was the candidate I voted for, François Limoges of Project Montréal, the party of Richard Bergeron! (This never happened, I have a track record of voting for the losing candidate.) I wish him good luck. I wish all elected candidates good luck, they’ll need it.
Thursday, 19 November, 2009 @ 17:32
Atleast you didn’t have to choose between Wouter Bos, Geert Wilders and Balkenende……… And how does it feel to be Candian?
Monday, 18 January, 2010 @ 14:44
There is no “separatist” party (you mean “sovereigntist”) on the municipal level in Montréal.
Monday, 18 January, 2010 @ 15:24
You’re right because Montreal as a city can’t separate from Canada, but Louise Harel is coming from the PQ and I don’t think she would have changed her mind in support of a “sovereign” Quebec.
It’s all moot anyway since there’s no way a majority of Quebeckers is going to support separation. They’ve let too many immigrants in :-)
A big chunk of the readership of my weblog is from the Netherlands though, so I simplify things a bit. It’s complicated enough as it is.
Thursday, 21 January, 2010 @ 08:15
Salut Mark,
Ça doit bien faire un siècle que je ne suis pas passé par ici.
Concernant les élections municipales, ce que je trouve décevant, c’est que la division du vote entre Harel et Bergeron a profité à Tremblay. Depuis qu’il a été élu maire il y a…, Montréal est devenue l’une des villes les plus corrompues d’Amérique. Il n’a aucun leadership, il est incapable de défendre les dossiers importants comme l’échangeur Turcot, où Québec a réussi à imposer sa vision complètement dépassée. Présentement Montréal est une ville divisée linguistiquement, enlisée dans une structure administrative complexe et dysfonctionnelle, ce qui l’affaiblit politiquement au profit du gouvernement provincial qui ne demande pas mieux.
Le milieu d’affaires et les anglophones votent surtout pour Tremblay. Tant que le reste du vote sera divisé entre les deux autres partis, le maire actuel ne sera pas inquiété. Personnellement, je préfère de loin Harel à Bergeron. Harel n’a plus d’ambitions personnelles, elle veut que Montréal soit unie et forte. C’est elle qui a réalisé les fusions municipales en 2002, au grand dam de certaines communautés anglophones qui voulaient rester refermées sur elles-mêmes, et ne pas avoir à partager le pouvoir démocratique avec les francophones de Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. Ces communautés ont eu gain de cause en 2006 après que le PLQ a été élu.
Si le veux bien, va voir cet entrevue de 10 minutes qu’elle a accordée à Marie-France Bazzo. Ça va te permettre aussi de pratiquer ton français. Mme Harel est beaucoup plus facile à comprendre que moi ; )
C’est à l’adresse :
https://video.telequebec.tv/shadowbox/?fn=384&tc=5&src=2&sec=1
Friday, 22 January, 2010 @ 13:26
Bienvenue Luc, mais je vais te réspondre en Anglais.
I’m sorry, but the “dividing the vote” argument is bullshit. If people would abide to that we would have a two party state everywhere, not only in the US of A.
You’re probably right that a lot of anglophone West Islanders voted for Tremblay because they hated Louise Harel and her demerger plans, but that was not my reason.
I’ve read Louise Harel’s platform (published only a week before the election and with many ideas blatantly copied from Projet Montréal) and there were just too many things in there I didn’t like. And too many things that were put in there to counter promises done by Tremblay’s party. I just don’t think there was so much Vision in Vision Montréal. But now they’re established and are governing we can see what they do with their campaign promises. It’s also interesting to see what’ll happen in the Plateau borough that is now “ruled” by Projet Montréal. They’ve already put some interesting ideas in action like snow removal on weekdays only. Fortunately for them we haven’t had much snow (yet) this winter.
BTW Funny that this post sparks so many comments (I even deleted one that was shouting in ALL CAPS).