Who Raises Money for the Mayor of Montreal?

What do a lobbyist for private healthcare, an operative pushing Israeli propaganda and the former chief of staff to a disgraced mayor have in common?

They all raised money for Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada’s party.

The party, Ensemble Montréal, recently published its annual report on the City of Montreal’s website, providing a clearer picture of the people it authorized to raise money during last year’s election. 

Ensemble took in $685,898 in political donations last year, nearly doubling the haul of its rivals at Projet Montréal.

The party did this thanks to 191 people registered as authorized solicitors for Ensemble. Among those names are candidates and longtime party loyalists, people who have spent their careers in public service. But the list includes a group with connections to real estate developers, politicians exiled from office and companies that have come under fire for their business practices.

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The Pro-Israel Lobby

Until two years ago, Joshua Wolfe was a regular donor to Projet Montréal, showing up to cocktail events and rubbing elbows with the party faithful.

As a lobbyist and longtime political operative, he wasn’t so much a supporter of the party of Mayor Valérie Plante as someone who needed access to the halls of power. Wolfe is a regional director at the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee (CJPAC), a lobby group that advocates for Jewish rights and pushes for Canada to have closer ties to Israel. 

Last year, he started donating to Ensemble and eventually filled out the paperwork with Elections Quebec to collect money on the party’s behalf.

In a podcast appearance on the eve of the election, Wolfe claimed Martinez Ferrada’s party was the one that would truly prioritize the safety and well-being of Montreal’s Jewish community. But he also depicted Montreal’s pro-Palestinian movement as an existential threat to Jews in the city.

“If you go downtown on the wrong day, you could find yourself in the middle of an antisemitic pro-Hamas demonstration,” he told the Federation CJA podcast. 

A policy goal of CJPAC and CIJA is to get the city to adopt the controversial definition of antisemitism promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The IHRA definition considers the use of terms like “settler colonial state” to describe Israel as antisemitism. This despite the fact that the United Nations and International Court of Justice have ruled that Israel’s settlements in the West Bank are illegal and impose Apartheid conditions on Palestinians.

One former insider at Projet Montréal says that, during her two terms in office, Mayor Valerie Plante resisted efforts to adopt the IHRA definition.

“We got lobbied hard and didn’t back down,” the insider said. “We were called antisemites, supporters of terrorism and all that. I don’t know if this administration would actually stand up to the lobbying or just cede to it but I have my suspicions.”

Wolfe, a Princeton graduate, also worked as a political attaché for Liberal MNA Gerry Sklavounos and is a frequent donor to the Liberal Party of Canada. 

Big Business

Ensemble fundraiser Hugo Delorme was called “a young star” of Montreal’s public relations scene by La Presse in a 2016 article. 

When he was just 28, Delorme became the youngest employee to be promoted to associate at National Public Relations, a firm whose clients include the fossil fuel industry and mining interests.

Now, 10 years later, he is the president of Mercure Conseil and lobbies for Imperial Tobacco, a pharmaceutical company and an agency that staffs hospitals with workers on short-term contracts. 

Quebec is phasing out the use of private healthcare agencies since experts argue they hollow out the public healthcare system and add to the cost overrun crisis. Though his work with private healthcare and pharmaceuticals likely won’t have much bearing on a municipal political party, lobbying for a real estate developer might.

One of Mercure’s clients, Devimco, is the condo developer behind the $400 million Square Children’s project. The company manages rental condo units in Quartier des Spectacles, has massive holdings in Griffintown and is part of a $1.3 billion project to build condos and businesses that connect to the REM train station in Brossard.

Political science professor Caroline Patsias told The Rover there’s nothing inherently wrong with lobbyists having a place in municipal politics. But since lobbying is a costly way of influencing public policy, lobbying tends to favour the priorities of the rich over the poor.

“Lobbyists and lobbying, within our democracy, is a method to influence politicians outside of the vote. You’re paying a lobbyist for access to a politician,” said Caroline Patsias, a political science professor at Université du Québec à Montréal. “When lobbying is pushed to its extreme, however, it isn’t a tool of democracy but rather a tool to capture democracy.

“The question is, do ordinary people have a chance to be heard outside of the vote the way lobbyists do? Between you and me, in this country, you have a much better chance meeting with people in power if you’re the head of an oil company than if you volunteer with the elderly. And that tends to be the problem with lobbying.”

One of the key demands of developers in last year’s election was the elimination of Projet Montréal’s bylaw for a mixed metropolis. The bylaw forced developers of major real estate projects to pay a fee if they refused to include social housing in their buildings.

A majority of developers merely opted to pay the fee rather than build social housing. And while the bylaw generated millions in fees that will go towards buying and developing social housing, critics argued that it didn’t produce results. In fact, during the eight years the Projet Montréal was in charge at city hall, the cost of rent nearly doubled.

One of Ferrada-Martinez’s first acts as mayor was to scrap the mixed metropolis bylaw.

“The bylaw didn’t work so it’s hard to fault her for that,” said Patsias. “There was money in a fund but there’s a big difference between money in a fund and actually building social housing. Now, we’ll see what actually replaces that bylaw. And will it end with more working families having an affordable place to live?

“I can understand the developers when they say that building in the city, it’s like banging your head against a wall. You have different rules in every borough, there’s a library’s worth of paperwork, it’s a lot. But I would also argue that taking away too many regulations drives up the price of real estate.”

Delorme is one of at least two real estate lobbyists on the solicitors list. 

The other, Serge Paquette, has lobbied for Groupe Maurice, a developer that builds private retirement homes in condo towers. Paquette’s lobbying clients also include Groupe CH, which owns the Montreal Canadiens, the Bell Centre and Evenko.

Blast from the Past

Agop Everlekian, an Ensemble solicitor, was chief of staff to Montreal Mayor Gerald Tremblay when he resigned in 2012.

Tremblay had brought Everlekian in to right the ship in 2011 but by then things were already careening towards disaster. In 2009, Tremblay’s administration had to cancel a $355 million public works contract amid allegations of influence peddling and collusion. That scandal, which was uncovered by The Gazette’s Linda Gyulai, was just the beginning.

Eventually there would be a police raid on city hall, arrests, a parliamentary commission and the dissolution of the mayor’s party. The events that led to the fall of Tremblay’s party predated Everlekian’s arrival at city hall.

Outside of politics, he spent four years as the owner of a Kia dealership but declared bankruptcy in 2004. The following year, the Court of Quebec ordered Everlekian to repay a former business associate $30,000 for writing bad cheques.

Questions sent to the mayor’s office were redirected to Ensemble Montréal but the party did not respond to The Rover’s interview requests.

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