After 4 years away, Cathy Wong hopes to return to Montreal city council
Former Montreal city council speaker, Cathy Wong is seeking to replace Coun. Luc Rabouin as borough mayor for Plateau-Mont-Royal in the next election — four years after she exited municipal politics.
Wong will run as a candidate with Projet Montréal while Rabouin vies for the city mayor's office in November.
Wong, who represented the Peter-McGill district in downtown Montreal from 2017 until 2021, said she did not know she would be coming back when she chose not to seek re-election to prioritize her family.
"It's really since I would say December, after the American elections but also after a lot of different crises — climate crisis, social crisis, democratic crisis — that I felt the need to come back to be more involved in building policies that are feminist, that are inclusive, and that are green," she said.
"In the last six months, every time I was opening the news, I felt so much anger, felt powerless," she said, adding that it created a feeling of wanting to be involved.
If elected, Wong says she'd like to work to improve accessibility in the Plateau-Mont-Royal focusing on traffic-calming and street safety measures, housing and increasing universal accessibility. She moved to the borough in 2021 and lives there with her family.
For the last four years she's been working as the vice-president of Telefilm Canada.
Wong was first elected as a member of Ensemble Montréal in 2017, becoming the first elected official of Chinese descent at city hall.
She was named speaker that same year, making her the first woman to hold the job in Montreal. She quit her party to sit as an independent and later joined Projet Montréal in 2019.
She also became the first executive committee member in charge of fighting racism and discrimination.
"I believe that the city has advanced in terms of inclusivity and in terms of accessibility but of course there's still work to be done," she said. "Today I'm running for mayor of a borough where I believe that there is still so many opportunities to make our borough more accessible, more inclusive, and this is the work I want to focus on."
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