By Daniel Béland

October 16, 2025

On November 2nd, province-wide municipal elections will take place across Quebec, including in Montreal. Montrealers will elect not only a new mayor of the city but will also choose mayors for each of the 19 boroughs, and city and borough councillors in each of the 58 electoral districts.

In power since 2017, left-leaning Projet Montréal is facing a clear electoral challenge, as a recent Léger poll suggests that more than 60 percent of Montrealers want a new team to run the city, against only 16 percent who support the status quo. While the race is far from over, especially because so many voters remain indecisive, what is certain is that Montreal will have a new mayor in a few weeks from now, as Valéry Plante, who has been in power since November 2017, is not running for re-election.

Replacing Plante on Projet Montréal’s top ticket, mayoral candidate Luc Rabouin is lagging in the polls behind Soraya Martinez Ferrada of Ensemble Montréal, a party previously known as Équipe Denis Coderre pour Montréal, which was in power between 2013 and 2017. Coderre, who failed to beat Plante in both 2017 and 2021, is not running again but Martinez Ferrada is also a former Liberal MP and cabinet minister. Born in Chile, she settled in Montreal with her family back in 1980. If she is elected on November 2, she would become the first foreign-born Montreal mayor since the Irish-born Richard Wilson-Smith (1896-1898).

The fact that Martinez Ferrada is leading in the polls should not obscure the fact that Projet Montréal has delivered on key promises since the last municipal elections back in 2021, including expanding public transit, launching the Express Bike Network, and adopting a climate plan aiming for carbon neutrality by 2050. Yet, the progressive and environmentalist party is now facing competition on its left from Transition Montréal, a newly formed party led by musician and former Projet Montréal city councillor Craig Sauvé. The only right-wing party in the race is Action Montréal, led by third-time mayoral candidate Gilbert Thibodeau.

Regardless of who wins on November 2, beyond the general question of public finance, the new mayor and their team will have to focus on at least two broad categories of policy issues. The first category concerns infrastructure-centered matters such as housing, transportation and roads. On the housing front, as in other large Canadian cities, affordability is front and centre. This is the case partly because the monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Montreal hasincreased by 71 percent since 2019. At the same time, the vacancy rate for rental units in Montreal remains low. This is especially the case for apartments with a rent that is priced below average.

If many have argued that building more housing is the key to solving the affordability crisis, community organizations like the RCLALQ (Regroupement des comités de logement et associations de locataires du Québec) have rightly stressed that quantity alone does not guarantee accessibility and that social housing should be treated as a core priority where municipalities need to mobilize every tool at their disposal to ensure enough affordable units are built to meet the growing demand. Municipalities should therefore adopt regulations that require residential developments to include social housing as part of their plans.

Of course, the housing crisis includes homelessness, a problem that is getting worse in Montreal and elsewhere across Quebec. Non-market housing — including social and affordable units — plays a vital role in addressing homelessness and promoting long-term housing stability. Despite its importance, it remains vastly underrepresented in Greater Montreal, accounting for a small portion of the rental market. Because homelessness shelters struggle to keep up with demand in a city where encampments have multiplied, the Montreal metro system has become a refuge for many homeless people, a situation that is creating clear challenges, especially in winter.

The fact that Martinez Ferrada is leading in the polls should not obscure the fact that Projet Montréal has delivered on key promises since the last municipal elections back in 2021, including expanding public transit, launching the Express Bike Network, and adopting a climate plan aiming for carbon neutrality by 2050.

Despite the acute nature of the housing affordability and homeless crisis, what Montreal’s municipal parties have put forward thus far in terms of policy solutions looks far too modest, a situation that reflects the limited capacity of municipalities and the fact that these crises cannot be tackled by one level of government alone. This is why the Quebec government has been asked not just to help fund social and affordable housing, but also help create a free, public rent registry so tenants can see what previous renters paid, making it easier to spot and challenge illegal rent hikes and introducing stronger rent control measures, like capping annual increases.

On the transportation front, road repairs and the ever-present and now iconic orange cones are key issues in this campaign but bike lanes are especially front-and-centre because they remain a source of controversy, with some critics like columnist Loïc Tassé from the Journal de Montréal even arguing that “Damn bike lanes are killing Montreal.” Yet, although the reduction of parking space remains a sensitive issue for many residents, a recent poll suggests that 70% of respondents believe that more, not less, should be done to support the bicycle as a mode of transportation. This data seems to vindicate Projet Montréal, which under Mayor Plante has significantly expanded and modernized Montreal’s bike lane system.

Responding to complaints from local residents and business owners negatively impacted by construction sites and the decline in the number of parking spaces, Martinez Ferrada and her party have pledged to bring about an audit of all bike paths on Montreal during the first 100 days of her term, if she is elected. At the same time, she has stated that she was not “anti bike” nor “pro car” and that the political polarization over bike lanes was counterproductive. In other words, Martinez Ferrada is very much unlike people like Rob Ford, who was once accused of waging a “war on bikes”. Considering the state of public opinion in Montreal today, a purely antibike campaign would be hard to sustain politically.

While big items like housing and transportation are central to the mayoral race per se, when you look at what is happening in the 19 boroughs (arrondissements) and in the 58 electoral districts of the City of Montreal, you realize that residents are also very much focused on a second category of policy matters: the mundane policy issues such as snow and trash removal that can make or break a municipal government.

This is something that I recalled this when I moderated a debate among the candidates of the Jeanne-Mance distinct last week. Based on the questions asked that evening by community organizations and residents present at the debate, it is clear that basic things like cleanliness and sidewalk maintenance are serious matters for residents, as they should be. Yet, the district-level debate in Jeanne-Mance also witnessed passionate exchanges about things such as housing affordability and homeless, which are hyper-local in the effects and yet grounded in multi-level governance realities that require different actors and levels of government to cooperate.

In this context, the Montréal campaign points to the institutional limitations of municipal governments in Canada and the need to improve integrated governance structures without which problems like housing unaffordability and homelessness cannot be solved. This is why, once elected, the next mayor of Montreal will have to strongly advocate for the city vis-à-vis the provincial government, a task rendered particularly difficult by the fact that Premier François Legault and his Coalition Avenir Québec are not particularly interested in Montreal, where they only hold two seats.

Yet, without strong support from the province, through which most federal funding to municipalities flows, and an expansion of Montreal’s fiscal capacity that breaks away from its excessive reliance on property taxation, the next mayor and their team are unlikely to successfully tackle the mundane and not-so-mundane policy challenges at the centre of this fall’s municipal campaign.

Daniel Béland is professor of political science and director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University. He thanks Stéphan Gervais for his excellent suggestions.