Gatineau's mayoral race is in the homestretch. Here are the candidates' top priorities

The race to pick the next mayor of Gatineau, Que., is into the homestretch, with advance polls Sunday and election day set for June 9.

A byelection was triggered after former mayor France Bélisle announced she was stepping down in February, citing a poor political climate and abuse from the public that included death threats.

Now seven candidates are vying for the top spot, which they'll hold until the next general election in November 2025.

CBC asked candidates what Gatineau's biggest issue is — and how they'd address it — and for most of them, housing was the number one priority.

"We have seen an increase in the number of people in a homelessness situation, and we don't see enough solutions so far," said Maude Marquis-Bissonnette, a professor of municipal management and former councillor for Gatineau's Plateau ward.

Marquis-Bissonnette, who ran unsuccessfully against Bélisle in 2021 and is the head of political party Action Gatineau, said the long-term solution is to provide more social housing.

In the short term, the city should do more for people on the streets by keeping places where they stay clean and providing showers and locked units for their belongings, she said.

"This is one priority that I want to work on as soon as I'm elected on June 9," she said. 

"I want to see what are [the] solutions in the field. I want to work with the community organizations that have already been working a lot. They are doing a wonderful job."

Real estate broker Stéphane Bisson, the former president of the Gatineau Chamber of Commerce, also believes housing and homelessness are top priorities.

Bisson said the city should carry out a full assessment of all the land it owns. 

"How could we redevelop those lands?" he asked, citing the development of a housing "SWAT team" with input from urbanists as one key idea.

Residents should be allowed to add apartments to their bungalows to create more units, he added. 

Daniel Feeny, the former director of communications and intergovernmental relations for the city's mayoral office, said he has a 20-point plan to stimulate the market so that more social housing will be built.

Those initiatives include offering financial incentives for developers who build social housing, accelerating the delivery of permits, and imposing a tax on vacant housing to encourage it gets used.

"I'd like to deploy those measures in the next 16 months, by the end of this mandate," he said.

Olive Kamanyana, former councillor for Carrefour-de-l'Hôpital, said she plans to invest more money in the issue. 

"I'm putting $20 million on the table to ensure that all those NGOs can make decisions on how many housing places they can put in place and [what] services they can put in place," she said 

Kamanyana also wants to ensure developers would get permits and licences within 45 days, or else have an explanation from city staff as to why the deadline was not met. 

She also wants to make it easier for people to convert their houses into multi-unit spaces, which could both boost the number of rental units available and make home ownership more affordable.

Services and taxes key priorities for others

Former Gatineau mayor Yves Ducharme did mention housing as an issue — saying the city needs to find ways to make it easier to get building permits and licences — but his main priority is improving services and making tax rates more "affordable."

"Services in Gatineau over the last 19 years have been diminishing too much. Our roads are in a very bad shape. We need to reinvest," said Ducharme, who was mayor of Hull before the city amalgamated.

"We need to take care of our finances so that we are able to have a tax level at a point where citizens are able to afford it."

Reducing taxes and getting the city out of debt is where Mathieu Saint-Jean, a former People's Party of Canada candidate for the riding of Gatineau, is setting his sights.

He said there are other ways to balance the books beside raising taxes. 

"[The city] can raise money by producing energy," said Saint-Jean, citing a hydroelectric project in Portland, Ore.

"I want [to] get on this, to produce another kind of income for the city [in order] to not raise the taxes higher ... than they are."

Saint-Jean also said he isn't opposed to budget cuts if they're needed.

Secondary school teacher Rémi Bergeron is also concerned about services, especially transit. He would like to fully evaluate the transit provider STO and see where changes could be made.

Bergeron said he's against Gatineau's tramway project  and has a plan to help out the city's struggling transit system.

"I propose to replace the big buses [with] electric buses, mini-buses and taxi buses to increase the efficiency of the STO immediately," he said.

New poll suggests 2-way race

A poll commissioned by Radio-Canada that was published Wednesday shows Marquis-Bissonnette and Ducharme are the favourites so far. 

This Sigma Research survey was conducted from May 13 to 23 among 1,000 voters in Gatineau. It has a margin of error of 3.1 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

After distributing undecided voters proportionally, Marquis-Bissonnette led the way with 37 per cent support, with Ducharme at 23 per cent.

Kamanyana received 14 per cent support, according to the poll, while Bisson got 11 per cent and Feeny got nine per cent. 

Still, polling doesn't always reflect what happens on election night, said Thomas Collombat, a political science professor at the Université du Québec en Outaouais.

Marquis-Bissonnette was ahead in the mayoral polls in the last mayoral election, Collombat noted — and still lost to Bélisle.

"We don't know how many people are actually going to go vote," he said. "And in particular, we don't know if the constituencies that traditionally support Action Gatineau and ... Marquis-Bissonnette in particular — namely, the younger voters — are going to come out on June 9th."