Valérie Plante will be the next leader of the opposition at city hall. The councillor for the Ville-Marie district of Sainte-Marie won the leadership of Projet Montréal with 52% of the votes to 48% for her opponent Guillaume Lavoie, councillor for Rosemont's Marie-Victorin.
Plante made some big promises during the leadership campaign, including a much-touted plan to build a whole new métro line, the pink line, that would start downtown and run diagonally across the eastern-half of the city to Montréal-North.
The 42-year-old will bring a very different energy to her party's leadership. She has a style quite unlike the professorial Luc Ferrandez, who served as interim leader until tonight's leadership vote. When council resumes, she says she hopes to reset the party's caucus and get to work preparing for what she says will be a long and hard road to victory next year.
Indeed, the real challenge for the party begins now, as the opposition party readies to take on Denis Coderre in less than one year's time. Coderre remains popular and will likely head into next November's election the favourite to win, but Projet Montréal believes the Mayor is vulnerable after a series of unpopular decisions over the past few months, especially his controversial new ban on aggressive dog breeds.
Key to the fight will be winning over voters in critical suburban boroughs, where the party has historically fared poorly. The party's environmentalist and pro-public transit policies are wildly popular in boroughs like Rosemont, le Plateau Mont-Royal and Ville-Marie, but many in commuter boroughs view the party as being against cars, something both candidates pushed back against over the course of the leadership campagin.