By creating an independent party under her own name, incumbent mayor Manon Barbe retained her position in the borough of LaSalle.
Her popularity also benefited the rest of her team with four of her six candidates easily elected and two others facing local recounts. Monique Vallée from the Denis Coderre team will be the only opposition voice on council.
Barbe’s pro-business vision and her fiercely local stand appealed to many.
“Montreal’s strength is in her boroughs,” said Barbe, when she initially created her party, Équipe Barbe—Pro-Action LaSalle. “The boroughs are functioning just fine. Montreal’s problems aren’t there.”
Barbe beat her closest competitor Jean-François Labbé by 2,901 votes for a total of 36.61% of the vote, but other positions were harder fought.
Long-time councillors Richard Deschamps and Laura Palestini were elected as city and borough councillors for the Sault Ste Louis district with 32.58% and 34.01% of the vote respectively. Équipe Barbe newcomer Nancy Blanchet took the second borough council seat, with 3,367 votes or 31.36%.
Recounts will probably be necessary in all three Cecil P. Newman district seats.
Monique Vallée from the Denis Coderre Team won the city councillor position for Cecil P. Newman, but her lead over Luciano Di Sante from Équipe Barbe was only 141 votes.
Serge Declos and current councillor Josée Troilo were both elected as borough representatives for Cecil P. Newman. Astonishingly, both won by only 59 votes against competitors Dino Masanotti and Anju Dhillon from the Denis Coderre team.
There are 51,562 registered electors in LaSalle, but only 20,555 people cast votes for mayor. The local turnout rate of 38.86% was almost five percentage points lower than the island as a whole. The turnout rate was brought down by the Cecil P. Newman district, where only 36.61% of eligible people cast votes as opposed to the Sault Ste. Louis district’s 43.86%.
Note: This story also appeared on pages 7 and 8 in the City Edition of the Suburban.
Note 2: Statistics Canada has an interesting summary of voting at <a href=”<a href=”http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/75-001-x/2012001/article/11629-eng.htm” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”>
Monique Vallée was confirmed elected by the chief returning officer on Thursday by a margin of 135 votes. In other words, The Barbe team did not ask for a recount, presumably because that is a clear enough margin. (I noted that Richard Bergeron thought that it was “inelegant” of Denis Coderre to ask for a recount when his candidate was 81 vote behind). There are still no results re the two recounts for the borough council seats in Cecil-P.-Newman.
Along with you, I also noted the low participation rate in LaSalle, or rather, in the Cecil-P.-Newman district, which brought down the LaSalle average. I recently saw an article by an expert in the area that I am not currently able to put my hand on, which stated that, contrary to what one might expect, people do not turn out to vote against a candidate but rather for a candidate. In other words, low turnout would indicate that no candidate excited the popular imagination, another factor that makes me doubt that Manon Barbe’s team is strong in the Cecil-P.-Newman district.
Also of interest is the fact that no particular action to get the vote out was undertaken by citizens opposed to the mega-developments in the area this election, and that would of course change in the next election if Babre proceeds with her plans to revive high-density highrise developments in Cecil-P.-Newman.
So when the local journal, the same one that benefited from all those double page Barbe ads during the election, and benefited from a great deal of advertising from the Barbe administration in the last decade and more, crows “Easy victory for Manon Barbe” on its front page and curiously appears to state, if I am understanding the French correctly, that she swept the election (“Manon Barbe fait table rase”) in spite of the fact that an opposition councillor was elected for the first time since the nineties (!), I remain unimpressed and, I suspect, so do a lot of other citizens.
Hi Sonja,
Thanks for this comment. It would be interesting to read a study explaining why people don’t vote, particularly at the municipal level. Most of the people I speak to have one of two reasons–I don’t like any of the candidates and I don’t want to figure out who I should vote for.
Dear Tracey,
I’m not so sure that Manon Barbe’s team is all that strong this time around.
Your text states that “four of her six candidates [were] easily elected”. In fact, Barbe’s team elected three councillors with a decisive margin, all of them in the Sault-Saint-Louis district. In the Cecil-P.-Newman district, the city councillor position went to the Coderre team, while both borough councillor seats are subject to a recount.
Ms. Barbe’s “popularity” is debatable, as two out of three citizens who cast a ballot in LaSalle (63.4%) voted for someone other than Ms. Barbe. In fact, her popularity has been in a steady decline since 2001 when she obtained 13,131 votes: she had the support of 11,730 voters in 2005, 9,359 in 2009 and 7,276 this year, the last representing only 14.1% of eligible voters. Barbe and her team won a proportion of votes ranging from 26.0% to 36.6% this year, about a third less than in 2009 when their percentage of votes ranged from 42% to 49.4%, and considerably less than in 2005, when they obtained 60.7% to 65.4% of the vote.
This in spite of running the slickest and most expensive campaign of any of the parties in LaSalle, with many double full page ads in the local paper.
There is also a case to be made that this time, as the incumbents, they benfited from vote-splitting among the large (six) number of parties vying for votes in LaSalle.
The continuing slide in the number and proportion of votes obtained, the fact that this year for the first time since 2001 the citizens have elected an opposition, and the slim margins in the Cecil-P.-Newman district (incumbernt Josée Troïlo’s lead of 1,744 votes in 2009 melted to just 29 votes this time around) certainly suggest that the Barbe team should avoid complacency.
The fact that the results are not stellar in Cecil-P.-Newman, where the main issue in the last four years was citizen opposition to high-rise developments, with the administration forced to withdraw, temporarily or permanently, large-scale projects such as Le quartier de la gare LaSalle, the Cecil-P.-Newman school conversion to condos and Projet Wanklyn, should give pause to Ms. Barbe as she ponders her plans for reintroducing the up-to-2000 unit Quartier de la gare LaSalle.
Sonja Susnjar
Good points, Sonja. It will be interesting to see how the next four years shape up.