Montreal’s mayoral election is about affordability and the homeless — and bike lanes

MONTREAL — In a recent debate on Radio-Canada, Soraya Martinez Ferrada, one of the leading candidates for mayor of Montreal, brought up comments made more than two years ago by a borough mayor comparing a car to a refrigerator.

The local mayor — Laurence Lavigne Lalonde — said during a 2023 council meeting that the City of Montreal has no more responsibility to guarantee residents free parking in front of their homes than it does to give them free public storage for their fridge. Public space needs to be shared, she said, even if that means removing some parking for bike lanes and pedestrian-friendly infrastructure.

“She says your fridge is like your car — that it’s not (her) role to know where you put it,” Martinez Ferrada dismissively told her main opponent, Luc Rabouin, leader of Lavigne Lalonde’s party. But the city shouldn’t remove parking spaces to make way for bike lanes without proper consultation, Martinez Ferrada said.

Her example touched on a seemingly eternal question in Montreal politics: how far should the city go to make room for bike lanes and pedestrian streets? The attack line also tapped into broader frustration among residents over a growing list of urban problems in the eight years since Rabouin’s party, Projet Montréal, has been in power.

Many of those problems, however, require help from other levels of government to solve.

Aside from bike lanes, the campaign ahead of Montreal’s Nov. 2 election has been marked by the twin crises of homelessness and housing affordability. Rabouin wants the city to be the continent’s most affordable metropolis; Martinez Ferrada is giving herself four years to find a solution to the homeless encampments that have sprouted across the island.

Université du Québec à Montréal political science professor Danielle Pilette noted that many of the candidates’ top priorities require federal and provincial funding to get them over the finish line. “I would say that the City of Montreal has very little control on the question of affordable housing,” she said. Homelessness, too, requires higher levels of government — notably provincial health resources.

A Segma research survey for Radio-Canada released Oct. 16 shows Martinez Ferrada leading in voting intentions with 26 per cent, ahead of Rabouin at 18 per cent. The biggest portion of the voters, at 37 per cent, were undecided.

Pilette said whoever wins will be facing a tight municipal budget without much room to manoeuvre, and a city that is unwieldy to govern, given its decentralized structure that is administered through different boroughs.

But more than issues, she believes this campaign is marked by “fatigue and discouragement.”

It’s a contrast to 2017, when outgoing Mayor Valérie Plante swept to power with her party, Projet Montréal, on a wave of optimism and big promises for environmentally conscious urban mobility.

But recently, Plante has drawn criticism for her penchant for car-free streets and bike paths, and about growing housing costs, endless road work and difficult cohabitation with the city’s homeless population. A recent poll by Léger for Postmedia found that 55 per cent of respondents were unhappy with her administration.

Martinez Ferrada, a former federal Liberal cabinet minister, is portraying herself as the candidate of change — and the one who will defend Montrealers who feel Plante’s party has gone too far with bike lanes.

“Citizens, when you speak with them, they say, ‘I’m not against bike lanes, but can they take into consideration the impact they have on my life?'” Martinez Ferrada said during the Radio-Canada debate. Groups like business owners, disabled people and seniors have been negatively affected by some bike projects, she said.

“Projet Montreal has created an enormous amount of bike paths without consulting anyone.” She has promised to launch a comprehensive assessment of bike paths in the first 100 days after taking office. Some bike paths, she has suggested, may be removed and parking restored.

Even Rabouin has backed away from some of Plante’s signature policies, promising to put on hold a controversial plan to restrict car traffic across Mount Royal Park. Martinez Ferrada has already promised to scrap the measure.

But Rabouin is a fierce defender of the city’s bike paths, which have made Montreal renowned in North America for its cycling infrastructure, especially the reconfiguration of St. Denis Street with its REV — or Réseau express vélo — a protected bike lane on both sides of the commercial artery.

“When we did the REV, we spoke with each business owner — and we kept parking on both sides of the street,” Rabouin said in the Radio-Canada debate. Ensemble Montréal, the party led by Martinez Ferrada, was “tearing their shirts off, saying (the project) would destroy St. Denis Street. Now she thinks it’s incredible!”

Rabouin says he wants Montreal to be the continent’s most affordable metropolis by promoting the creation of non-market housing through bylaws and other tools. “The issue here is to be sure that Montreal, a very large Canadian city, continues to be led by a progressive and ecological party,” he said in a recent interview.

Rabouin said he is limiting his promises to things he knows he can accomplish without other levels of government, such as bus lanes and modular housing units. “It’s not enough, but I can do it,” he said. “And if the other level of governments are there we will do more.”

Martinez Ferrada said in an interview that her signature promise is to solve the problem of homeless encampments, whose presence she described as “proof of our failure as a society that we are not doing what we need to do.”

Unlike the current administration, which has periodically dismantled encampments, she said her approach includes letting people stay in tent cities while she works to transition the occupants to housing. Her promises include tripling the city budget for homelessness and developing at least 2,000 transitional housing units.

“I’m giving myself four years,” she said. “Of course, it’s very idealistic, but I think it can be done.”

Other candidates in the race include businessman Gilbert Thibodeau, municipal councillor and former federal NDP candidate Craig Sauvé, and consultant and manager Jean-François Kacou.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 27, 2025.

Morgan Lowrie and Giuseppe Valiante, The Canadian Press