The mayor of Longueuil, Catherine Fournier, will seek a second term, we have learned The Press. The 32-year-old municipal representative will argue Thursday that she wants to continue her efforts in housing and will insist on the need to bring more young people into politics.
Published at 9:30 a.m.
Mme Fournier invited the media, Thursday at 10:30 a.m., for an “important” press conference aimed at taking “an update on his political future.” Since Wednesday evening, several observers and citizens have speculated, some suggesting that she will leave municipal politics.
However, it is rather the opposite. According to our sources, the mayor will announce her intention to run again in the next elections, in November 2025, making no secret of having had a long reflection on the subject in recent months.
She will focus in particular on housing, one of the battlehorses of her administration, to justify her desire to stay. From September 2023 to 2024, the number of construction starts jumped by 228% in Longueuil, according to the Association of Construction and Housing Professionals of Quebec (APCHQ).
A few months ago, in February, the Legault government also opened the door to allowing mayors to sell developers the right to build higher than permitted zoning in exchange for compensation intended for non-profit housing, a idea which was originally proposed by Mme Fournier.
Mme Fournier intends to launch an appeal to young people, whom she wants to see be more present in terms of the number of applications in 2025, both in her city and elsewhere in Quebec.
According to our information, the mayor of Longueuil wants, more generally, to breathe a breath of hope onto the municipal scene, after the departure of several of her colleagues. One in 10 Quebec municipal officials has left office since their election in the fall of 2021, according to the Union of Quebec Municipalities (UMQ).
In Montreal, at the end of October, the announcement of the departure of Valérie Plante, who will not seek a new mandate, also created a shock wave, leaving the profile of an election with several new faces in the metropolis.
By being elected head of the City of Longueuil in November 2021, Catherine Fournier became the youngest mayor in the recent history of the five largest municipalities in Quebec. At the same time, she managed to form an overwhelming majority on the city council, which she described as a “real magenta wave”, the color of her party, Coalition Longueuil.
The main person concerned was elected for the first time as an MP for the Marie-Victorin constituency during by-elections in 2016, with the Parti Québécois team, becoming the youngest female MP in the history of the National Assembly. of Quebec.
In 2019, however, she left the Parti Québécois caucus to sit as an independent, before making the jump to Longueuil town hall two years later.
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