As she tabled her final budget as mayor of Montreal on Wednesday, Valérie Plante reflected on how running the city has evolved since she first took office in 2017.
City budgets are normally a forward-looking exercise, a spending plan for the year ahead and a blueprint for upcoming investments.
“All I can say is that from the first budget until now, I feel like the general context of managing the city has changed and the pressure is higher,” Plante said at Wednesday’s news conference. “I feel like I’m navigating the city through all kinds of crises.”
“We need more fiscal tools and we’re doing work in many fields that are not our responsibility,” she said. “But we always raise our hands.”
With one year remaining in office, the budget is also a road map for Plante to cement her legacy.
“That’s four times more than when we arrived in office,” Plante said.
“Winter is at our door,” she said.
Plante noted that during her two terms as mayor, the city has invested about $1 billion in housing. With her Loger+ strategy, she has set an ambitious target of ensuring 20 per cent of all new stock is off-market by 2050.
To accomplish this, the city bolstered the budget of the Service de l’habitation by $100 million for the next three years — and turned it into a “real department of its own,” Plante said. The budget allotted a new envelope of $38.2 million to help reach agreements with various partners to assist in creating and managing this non-market housing.
Montreal is also setting aside $566 million over 10 years from the $24.8-billion capital works budget to acquire strategic properties and lands for non-market construction, using the city’s newly granted right of first refusal.
Even when it comes to new market housing, starts are down. They dropped steeply below the 10-year average of about 23,000 units in 2022. They have rebounded slightly in 2024, but not to previous levels. Projections for 2025 remain below 20,000 new units.
Here again, the city is investing significant sums in resilience. The capital works budget prescribes $160 million in the coming decade for natural or hybrid infrastructure like sponge parks and roads, as well as $698 million to improve drainage. There is $336 million to create new parks and $271 million to acquire new natural spaces.
In the home stretch of her tenure, Plante still has much work left to do.
“Climate change is not going to stop; inequalities are not going to stop,” she said. “I don’t want to scare the next mayor, by the way. It’s just that there are challenges.”
But as Plante was applauded by members of her administration and posed for photos with the budget documents, no one has officially stepped up to fill her shoes.