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Lots of joy and heartache coming up on Sunday as candidates for the city election either win or face disappointment.
The big race, o' course is the one for mayor and it the vote has been in the bag for Denis Coderre well before the campaign even began.
Coderre is the only true heavyweight in the race and is a big supporter of minorities and federalism, so those are good things.
Coderre has a 17 percent lead in the only electoral poll, which should lead to an easy victory as he has run an error-free campaign. Assuming he avoids scandals, ill health of loss of interest, he could remain in the job for a very long time.
Here's a possibly-useful timeline of Coderre based upon a quick scan of some of the thousands of articles that mentioned him since 1986.
He vowed to a TV reporter at a young age to
become an astronomer and had a very big interest in UFOs as a child.
In 1980 he worked for the Yes side during the referendum.
He became a federalist and joined the Liberals and in '86, as head of the youth wing of the fed Liberals Coderre supported John Turner over Jean Chretien for the leadership but a year later he was calling for Turner's resignation. He said he called 200 other youth representatives from across the country before making the plea for Turner to give up.
Conservative MP Roch Lasalle had won in Joliette with a massive 23,661 vote margin but he was gone and Gaby Larrivee took over. The young Coderre challenged him in 1988 and Larrivee beat him by 27,000 to 12,000 votes.
In 1990 Coderre was working for an advertising agency and became a big Chretien supporter in the leadership battle against Paul Martin.
In June 1990 he was proposed as a candidate in a Laurier Ste. Marie byelection. He was considered a controversial candidate because of his strong support of Chretien, who hadn't yet won the leadership.
The seat was the poorest in the city and was considered a nationalist hotbed. The vote was hyped up as a big showdown between separatists and federalists and Bloc candidate Gilles Duceppe won by a large margin.
Coderre, who had become a radio host on CKVL by then, was rewarded with a somewhat safer seat in Bourassa in the '93. But he lost by 67 votes (or 53 depending on which source you use) to BQ candidate Osvaldo Nunez who worked at the FTQ union and was from Chile.
During the referendum campaign Coderre called for the reinstatement of laws that would support the deportation of immigrants and refugees who support separatism.
On his fourth try at getting elected, Coderre finally beat Nunez 20,000 to 13,000 in June 1997 and the Bourassa riding has become a federalist stronghold since.
Once in parliament, Coderre got busy blasting Lucien Bouchard as a hypocrite. He sponsored a private members bill to clear Louis Riel's name. He was busy in 1998 helping organize a plan to build a new stadium and keep the Expos in Montreal.
Chretien named Coderre to the newly created post of secretary of state for amateur sport and he was busy in a thousand files, none of them being of the very controversial variety.
In January 2002 he was promoted to immigration minister, as Jean Chretien decided to stay.
Coderre apologized for promoting the deportation of separatist immigrants in 1995
In Aug. 2002 Coderre was seen forcing back tears when Chretien announced that he was retiring.
. As immigration minister he dealt with the Zundel affair, promoted a national biometric identity card that never happened and tried to appease Americans who had worried about border issues following 911.
In May 2003 he offered his support for the Paul Martin candidacy.
Martin put him into the role of president of the Privy Council and minister responsible for la francophonie. in Dec. 2003.
During the sponsorship scandal it was revealed that Coderre had stayed in the home of Claude Boulay, head of Groupe Everest, an advertising agency that has benefited from millions of dollars worth of government business.May 2002. That happened way back when he was still a backbencher however and some said there was nothing wrong with that.
Martin shuffled the cabinet and kept Coderre in place after the revelations.
Another bit of stuff from the sponsorship thing: Public Works Canada also spent $2.6 million on advertising in a single French language magazine, L'Almanach du Peuple, but paid $392,000 more than the ads were worth to the magazine's publisher, Groupe Polygone, once former employee Denis Coderre entered cabinet.
That too wasn't much of a scandal, nor was the revelation from June 1999 that Coderre paid a high rent on his Montreal office, the third most expensive MP's office in the country at $34,164.
