Leader of Vision Montréal, Louise Harel is now the Leader of Official Opposition of the City of Montreal. Representing Montréal’s Hochelaga district for 27 years, Louise Harel worked in various ministries for different Parti Québécois governments, including serving as official Opposition Leader, interim Leader of the Party, and the first woman to serve as President of the Québec National Assembly. Her political work has been characterized by integrity and humanity.

Daughter of a teacher and a hairdresser, mother of Catherine and soon to be grandmother of a third child, Louise Harel was born in Sainte-Thérèse-de-Blainville on April 22, 1946. With a Bachelor of Arts from the Sainte-Thérèse Seminary, she studied sociology and law at Université de Montréal. She was admitted to the Barreau du Québec in 1978.

Very early in her career, Louise Harel distinguished herself through a sense of social commitment. First vice-president of the Union générale des étudiants du Québec in 1968, she then went on to work for the Social Development Council of Metropolitan Montréal from 1971 to 1974. Between 1979 and 1981, she was responsible for the status of women at the Social Services Centre of Montréal. A feminist and social democrat, Louise Harel actively contributes to many causes as well as to community and cooperative organizations.

A permanent employee of the Parti Québécois in the early 1970s, she began to serve as president of the Montreal-Centre region for the Party in 1974 and was named vice-president in 1979.

In 1981, Louise Harel entered the Québec National Assembly as Member for the Maisonneuve riding, which changed its name in 1989 to Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. She was re-elected on seven occasions by her constituents. It is also the Montréal borough she has been living in for the past 28 years – since July 1, 1981. In addition to assuming the presidency of various parliamentary committees (including the Transport and Environment, and the Education Commissions) Louise Harel was also appointed head of several departments.

In this MNA role, she led the ministère des Communautés culturelles et de l'Immigration under the René Lévesque government, moving to work as parliamentary assistant to the justice minister the next year. In 1994, Prime Minister Jacques Parizeau assigned her to the ministère de l’Emploi. His successor, Lucien Bouchard, entrusted her in 1996 with two departments: Employment and Solidarity, as well as Income Security. Two years later, she was named Minister of State for Municipal Affairs and Greater Montréal, as well as the Status of Women, a position she held until 2002, during which she became the first woman president of the Québec National Assembly, while assuming, during the same period, the presidency of the Assemblée parlementaire de la francophonie, representing Québec across the world.

In December 2008, Louise Harel announced she was leaving the National Assembly. Her political legacy will leave its mark for several generations. She is behind the Pay Equity Act, the reform of labour relations in the construction industry, the rescue of the Québec Pension Plan, the reform of social assistance, the creation of Emploi-Québec and local employment centres, the repatriation of federal powers with regards to labour training and the Labour Training Act (better known as the 1% Training Investment Act).

Montreal first

Inspired by tax and social fairness principles, municipal mergers have borne fruit everywhere they have been successfully adopted. Cities like Lévis, Sherbrooke, Trois-Rivières, Gatineau, Saguenay, Saint-Jérôme, Rouyn-Noranda, Matane, Rimouski and Saint-Hyacinthe are all better off as a result of their restructuring.

In Montréal, the Merger Act was intended to apply principles of social and financial equity, to strengthen the competitive position of the city on the international stage, as well as to ensure the delivery of public services to the local boroughs. In an attempt to defuse a de-merger movement, the Tremblay-Zampino administration proposed a decentralization model for governance of the Greater Montréal area, which was adopted by the Québec government.

Since then, while the city has a need to manifest itself on the national and international stages, its identity is rapidly desintegrating. Boroughs are acting independently one from another, a source of inequality between the boroughs with disparities in the distribution of services and application of local surtaxes.

In fact, nowhere in the world do boroughs have legal statuses akin to municipalities. Only in Montreal do we find such incongruity... brought to us at the express request of the Tremblay-Zampino administration.

By running for mayor with the Vision Montréal team of candidates, Louise Harel is betting that this period is over. That Montréalers are determined to shake off this sense of fatalism and helplessness when faced with the dismantling of their city. Montréalers want their city to become great again and they will ultimately prevail.

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