Pierre Bourque as he was described in print just a few weeks prior to winning his surprise victory as Montreal Mayor in November 1994.--
In his office beneath an old rollerskating rink, Pierre Bourque uses a red pen to doodle organigrammes - the organizational drawings so popular with francophone bureaucrats. He sketches three equal triangles and joins them with lines to explain the ideal relationship between the City, its workers and citizens. "We have to change the managerial way to run the City and make initiative grow rather than continue with a technocratic culture," he says. In pure pedal-to-the-metal sloganeering, he urges, "Let's be a facilitator, a catalyst for development. We have to work with the people."
As the concocter of the Biodome, Ex-boss of the Botanical Gardens and now leader of Vision Montreal, Bourque is an enigma paper-clipped to a paradox. He's a career manager who wants to cut management. He's a technical expert who seeks to end technocracy. He's a tireless worker who's in bed at 10 every night. And he' a people-first kind of guy who can only maintain fleeting eye contact.
Yet Bourque has become the most serious challenger to an incumbent Montreal mayor in decades. With a sound and look that would allow him to spend the rest of his days as a Lucien Bouchard celebrity lookalike, Bourque outlines his promises, which include balancing the books, beautifying Montreal and starting a massive recycling system. His schemes are so ambitious that pundits liken him to an inexperienced version of Dore, whose unpopularity Bourque is now riding.
Like the mayor, Bourque shows he can play the role of slick politician, pointing out the dangers of splitting the ballot. "A vote for Choquette is a vote for Dore," he says. And when asked whether he considers unfair the media's caricature of him as Chauncy the gardener, he answers an entirely different question. "Everybody is proud of the Botanical gardens; this has given me a fabulous strength here."
Then its back to pen and paper to show how he would scrap the surtax by cutting the administration's bloated bureaucracy. Bourque's proclivity for pictograms could be well put to use in his tourism platform. To help tourists he would "get rid of all those signs," he says, although it's unclear because he's mumbling once the question of English is raised.
He then returns to his favourite theme: his rage against what he calls "Dore's machine."
"This is why I came to politics and I'm going to have to learn fast, because I'm going to be in City Hall in November," he says.