Pierre Bourque

Pierre Bourque , OC , CQ (born May 29, 1942 in Montreal ) is a Canadian politician and landscape architect . He served as mayor of Montreal from 1994 to 2001.

biography

Bourque studied in Belgium , where he trained as a landscape architect. From 1965 he worked for the city of Montreal and was mainly responsible for the design of all green areas on the site of the World Exhibition Expo 67 . In 1969 he moved to the Montreal Botanical Garden , where he was director from 1980 to 1994. In his first year as director he organized the international horticultural exhibition Floralies internationales de Montréal . Other milestones were the opening of the Biodôme de Montréal in the former Olympic cycling stadium and the largest insectarium in North America. For his services in the field of horticulture, Bourque received the Order of Canada and the Ordre national du Québec .

In the 1970s, Bourque was close to the Québécois Party and headed a constituency office. In 1994 he founded the ecologically oriented local party Vision Montréal (VM), in protest against the ineffective administration of Mayor Jean Doré . In the mayoral election that took place on November 6, 1994, Bourque prevailed with 47% of the votes, the city council election held on the same day resulted in a comfortable majority for the VM. As mayor, Bourque launched numerous environmental and urban development initiatives. These include the reopening of the Lachine Canal , the expansion of recycling facilities, the conversion of a quarry into a city park and the promotion of information technology companies.

In 1998 Bourque was re-elected with 44% of the vote. With the support of the Parti Québécois, which provided the provincial government at the time, he wanted to merge all the municipalities on the Île de Montréal with the city under the motto une île, une ville (“one island, one city”) . Against some bitter resistance, especially in the predominantly English-speaking region of West Iceland , this project was implemented. Although Bourque received the most votes in the 2001 mayoral elections in the old part of the city, the many protest voters in the former suburbs resulted in the election of his challenger Gérald Tremblay . Two years later, most (but not all) church mergers were reversed.

Bourque retained his mandate on the city council until 2006. He was opposition leader during this time and continued to be chairman of the VM. For the Action démocratique du Québec , he entered the 2003 elections to the National Assembly of Québec without success . In 2006 he ran again for mayor, also unsuccessfully. In 2007 he was awarded the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun .

literature

• Pierre Bourque: Ma passion pour Montréal . Éditions du Méridien, Montreal 2002, ISBN 2-89415-286-8 .
• André Cyr, Gilles Amado, Laurent Lapierre: Pierre Bourque - Le jardinier et l'ingénieur . Presses de l'Université du Québec, Montreal 1995, ISBN 2-7605-0801-3 .

Web links

• Biography on the website of the city administration (French)