Montreal is the most populous municipality in the Canadian province of Quebec and the second-most populous municipality in Canada with an approximate population of 2 million people as of 2017. Greater Montreal has more than 4 million people. French is the city’s official language and is the language spoken at home by 49.8% of the city’s population; Montreal is the second-largest primarily French-speaking city in the world, following Paris. Montreal is named after the triple-peaked hill that stands in the middle of the city—“Mount Royal”—a site formerly occupied by an indigenous village. Today, Montreal is a major tourist city and is recognised as a hub for technology research and development, as many of the world’s cutting-edge companies have located their headquarters there. Montreal is also considered a key cultural capital. It has strong film, television and theatre industries, with, for example, Cirque du Soleil being headquartered in the city. Its music scene has also had an impact worldwide through festivals such as the Montreal International Jazz Festival, the largest in the world.
The government of Montreal is led by a mayor, the councils of the boroughs and the city council, with the municipal council being made up of 65 elected officials. The mayor, Valérie Plante, is the first woman to hold this office since the founding of the city, and she is also a member of the council. In political matters, the mayor is the head of the executive committee, which she nominates, and is in charge of deciding local competencies, services relevant to the urban agglomeration of the île de Montréal (the island that comprehends the city as well as the surrounding suburbs), and the generation of documents that relate to the city budget and its rules. The opposition party (the second runner-up) plays an active role: it has a watchdog function regarding the decisions taken by the mayor.
Montreal is a Metropolis member: https://www.metropolis.org/member/montreal
The Mayor
Valérie Plante was born in 1974, Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec. In 1994, she moved to Montreal to attend university, receiving a degree in anthropology in 1997, and another in museology in 2001. She subsequently worked for several community organizations.
For several years, she directed the Girls Action Foundation, a Canada-wide organization that helps girls and young women. In 2013, she ran for political office under the banner of Projet Montréal and was elected councillor for the Sainte-Marie district of the Ville-Marie borough. Plante was Projet Montréal's candidate for mayor in the 2017 municipal election and was elected the 45th Mayor of Montreal on November 5, 2017. She was the first woman to be elected to this position. The project to improve urban traffic, notably by adding another metro line, the pink line, was the highlight of her campaign.
Valérie Plante is Co-President of Metropolis.
Montreal on the USE platform
Below are three initiatives being implemented by the City of Montreal that demonstrate effective metropolitan governance, sustainable citymaking and the localization of the SDGs:
Montreal has also been involved in several Metropolis pilot projects like Participatory Democracy, which seeks to promote the exchange of successful experience with participatory democracy, with a special focus on participatory budgeting, and to generate knowledge that strengthens participatory democracy in metropolises. Another example is the Public Innovations Lab pilot project, in which Montreal contributes to promoting the cooperation between its public innovation labs in order to exchange successes and lessons learned and to the institutionalization of public innovation practices in the region. With Revitalization strategies through urban projects, the City of Montreal, in collaboration with Brussels-Capital Region, the Metropolis of Lyon, and the Paris Region Institute, aimed to exchange experience on strategies for managing major urban projects.
City profile
For a detailed profile on Montreal including population demographics, administrative structure, industry and economics, click on any of the above case studies and then select "City information".
Find out more about the metropolitan reality of Montreal: see the metropolitan indicators here.
Montreal has recently joined the Call to rethink our metropolitan spaces launched by Metropolis.
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