A movement of one
For a party with the word movement in its name, Mouvement Montréal is anything but.
There was a brief moment of elation that rushed through me on the evening of November 5th 2017 in the seconds after the municipal elections were called for Projet Montréal (PM). Like many, this was the first time that a party that I enthusiastically supported took office, and the possibilities for what this may mean for our collective future seemed endless.
And then it hit me. The party would now undoubtedly disappoint me. They would be tempted to embrace a supposedly more pragmatic and conciliatory approach in the hopes that it would make the path to a second mandate easier. I’d have to come to terms with being sorely disappointed by people I genuinely like. Another first, albeit a far more difficult pill to swallow.
I’m still learning to come to terms with this, and as we approach this Sunday’s election, I can say that it saddens me to be heading to the polls with considerably less enthusiasm than I did four years ago.
But this is not a piece about PM’s shortcomings, both small and large, or on how this election would not be nearly as much of a nail-biter had they abandoned the “please everyone” school of politics. We all know that when you try to please everybody, you mostly end up doing the exact opposite.
No, this is a piece about movement building, and for a party that places Movement right there in its name, how the Movement Montréal (MM) mayoral candidate seems uninterested in laying the foundation to build a truly transformative movement. Which is a shame, as cities across North America have never been more ripe for such radical change.
Red flags and questionable aspirations aside, I was drawn to Mouvement Montréal for the same reason as many: its principled position on police funding. Projet Montréal left the playing field wide open for opponents to outflank them to the left on the matter, and Balarama Holness seized that opportunity before committing some major, inexcusable, and entirely avoidable fumbles.
Strange bedfellows
Short-lived as it may have been, Mouvement Montréal’s twenty-day romance with Ralliement pour Montréal (RPM) was disastrous on several levels. It was abundantly clear to any outside observer that the parties were fundamentally incompatible, and that the only thing that united them was their respective leaders’ unquenchable thirst for power.
Balarama Holness had been very vocal on making Montréal bilingual, whereas RPM leader Marc-Antoine Desjardins found that English already took too much space in the city. Holness has been an outspoken opponent of Bill 21, whereas Desjardins applauds it. Defunding the police had arguably been Mouvement Montréal’s most defining policy proposal, whereas the RPM leader was mocking those who supported such measures as being “woke”. Desjardins even called himself the “vaccine” against everything Holness claimed to stand for a mere 48 hours before the parties merged.
Beyond the utter nonsense of the merger, what was even more alarming was how it all happened behind closed doors, and that candidates, supporters and volunteers found out about it at the same time as the rest of us. If you want a sure-fire way to deflate a movement, look no further.
The alliance between MM and RPM naturally gave many people pause, with folks concerned that it would lead to the watering down of strong platform points.
Desjardins and Holness promised to come up with a unified platform within 72 hours from the merger announcement. What followed instead was over a week of contradictory public statements from candidates from both original formations before the leaders finally announced their new joint platform thirteen days later.
As suspected, many positions had considerably changed. Most notably, defunding the SPVM had become a budget freeze, which was still better than what either main party was proposing, though a significant step down from what had been touted in the months leading up to the campaign. Stranger still, in one of the most bizarre interviews ever given by a mayoral candidate in recent years, Holness purported that he would freeze the police budget, yet somehow still find ways to hire more cops.
The supposed #DefundTheSPVM poster candidate went from proposing the reallocation of police funding towards social programs, to freezing their budget, to seemingly improvising policy on air by saying he’d still find a way to hire more cops. All in the span of forty-eight hours, another tried and tested way to break a movement.
Inadvisable
Insignificant as it may seem, I would be remiss to mention that by all accounts Holness handles his own communications and media relations, and this was made abundantly clear by his stranger-than-life interview with Paul Arcand. He does not have any media advisors to help prepare him, field his calls, or finesse his message. A refusal to surround yourself by a team of professionals who want nothing but to help you build a movement is alarming, as it completes a portrait of a candidate who has too often been described by people who have worked with him as being unable to play well with others.
Without such advisors, you may end up engaging in behaviour that is below the office you seek to to hold by wasting precious time picking online fights with your opponents at midnight in neighbourhood groups, which reminds me of another infamously inadvisable politician.
All over the map
Now, the strange marriage between MM and RPM has predictably already collapsed, and MM has reverted back to some of their original positions. But this chaotic leadership style cannot be ignored when considering movement building and what the strongest choice is to build a fairer city that prioritizes justice and equity.
And though MM’s platform has some solid progressive proposals, it is also riddled with regressive platform points that should leave any leftist scratching their head.
From privatizing services (STM, Bixi), mandatory licensing for cyclists (something that has been long-abandoned by cities for very well-documented reasons), to lowering the city’s climate objectives, to reducing parking ticket fees, to designating areas of the city as “tax exempt”, there is no shortage of evidence that contrary to popular belief, Mouvement Montréal is not the natural choice for the left. Holness even goes so far as to suggest breaking existing collective agreements by firing workers that do not live in Montréal. As a McGill Law graduate, you would think Holness would know better than to include campaign promises that illegally contravene both collectively negotiated agreements and the charter of rights and freedoms, but here we are.
Moreover, he has also accepted some very-much-not-progressive candidates in his ranks, seemingly just to be able to claim that they have a larger team.
On the ballot we find a former Conservative Party of Québec candidate running in Parc-Ex, a few anti-vaxxers sprinkled across boroughs, and an individual who has vocally supported dismantling the Sud-Ouest REV.
And all this was before the merger with RPM, as many from that original formation are still running under the MM banner, and I somehow doubt they have drastically changed their politics since they agreed to be part of Dejardins’ original political formation.
Democratic structures as a path to movement building
Why has all this happened? Simply put, MM has no democratic structure. The buck starts and stops with whatever their leader thinks is best at any given moment. Their very foundation is the antithesis of movement-building.
Projet Montréal, on the other hand, has a legitimate and tested internal structure. They have a mobilized membership that can hold their leaders’ feet to the fire when they stray from their platform and raison-d’être. The party existed before Valérie Plante and will continue to exist once she is gone. This is an anomaly in municipal governance in Québec, and one that should be applauded. It is arguably one of the only ways to ensure that political campaigns are more than an ego-project or CV padding exercise for narcissists.
Many members, both past and present, are justifiably outraged over the morally unacceptable direction that party leadership has taken on police funding. A position that does not align itself very well with motions adopted at PM’s most recent convention. But unlike Mouvement Montréal, there is a vehicle to influence the positions that Projet leadership must follow in the future. We have the collective power and responsibility to organize to bring the party to where it needs to be.
In that sense, I am of the belief that defunding the SPVM is most feasible under Projet Montréal’s democratic structure rather than by electing a party that is led by an individual that seems to choose his political priorities based solely on filling voids that he believes will lead him to power or greater notoriety.
At the end of the day, if your new party has the word ‘movement’ in it, you must make it about more than just yourself. Anything less is a betrayal to the movement that we desperately need right now. Gone are the days where you can engage in secret backroom dealings, unilaterally change policy, or refuse to work closely with people interested in building a radically different city alongside you.
Advancing PM’s position on police funding will not be easy, and as with any democratic party, there will be people close to the leadership that are more concerned with winning the next elections than by doing what is right, but organized members can affect change. Hopefully, the PM caucus will include some strong voices for racial justice, including Will Prosper and Alia Hassan, who alongside other more leftists elected officials can help elevate the voices of members who are demanding the party do far more than it presently is to dismantle institutional racism.
So even though it is with considerably less enthusiasm than four years ago that I shall be voting for certain Projet Montréal candidates, I do so energized and ready to work to drastically improve the party’s stances on police funding, all while being relatively proud of much of what has already been accomplished during their first mandate, notably on matters of climate justice, designing a city on a human scale, and housing (slowly but truly). There is still so much work to be done, and we’ll need a movement of engaged individuals inside and outside the party structure to force leadership to tackle the challenges we face with the gravity they command. Electoralism be damned.
