Since announcing her intention to run for mayor of Montreal, Soraya Martinez Ferrada said her phone keeps ringing and people have been stopping her on the street — including outside city hall on a warm, sunny spring afternoon last week.

“I got so many calls and so many emails and so much outreach around people saying, ‘This is great! How can I help?’” said the new Ensemble Montréal leader, who was until recently a federal Liberal cabinet minister.

Martinez Ferrada was acclaimed as the leader of Ensemble Montréal at the end of February after a long search. And many Montrealers are both excited and relieved there will be a real race in November, after two-term mayor Valérie Plante announced she will not seek re-election and her Projet Montréal party chose Luc Rabouin, an executive committee member and borough mayor of Plateau-Mont-Royal, as her successor.

Promising a “progressive but pragmatic” approach to “regain the trust of citizens around the fact that we’re listening to them,” Martinez Ferrada has now taken the helm of the official opposition — although she doesn’t have privileges at city hall, since she is not currently elected.

But Martinez Ferrada is no stranger to the Montreal council chamber. She served as a councillor for St-Michel district, starting two decades ago. She was first elected under the Union Montréal banner, but she “shut the door” on the party in 2007 over concerns about then-mayor Gérald Tremblay’s leadership.

(“Now we know why,” she said — an allusion to Tremblay eventually resigning under a cloud amid swirling concerns about corruption.)

She sat as an independent before joining the ranks of opposition Vision Montréal.

In 2013, she ran for respected businessman Marcel Côté’s Coalition Montréal, but didn’t win her seat. Côté, who died suddenly a year later, trailed in a crowded field that included eventual mayor Denis Coderre and fledgling politician Mélanie Joly, Canada’s minister of foreign affairs in the Liberal governments of Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney.

Now at the helm of Ensemble Montréal (Coderre’s old party, renamed), Martinez Ferrada is drawing inspiration from Côté’s attempt to build a big-tent municipal coalition, which at the time included former Parti Québécois cabinet minister and Vision Montréal leader Louise Harel along with now-retired council veteran Marvin........

© Montreal Gazette