“I don’t want to come back to the past,” she added. “I look to the future and the future is to maintain boroughs. You know I am the minister who introduced boroughs for the first time in Bill 170. But I’m sure that it’s really a wrong thing that boroughs became like cities in the Tremblay-Zampino administration.”

Asked whether demerged suburbs such as Westmount could find themselves challenged by a new administration if she were elected Montreal’s mayor, Harel replied, “No. You know, they left Montreal and I don’t want to do more with them. But I want to do more for those who have chosen Montreal.”

However, Benoît Labonté, whom Harel succeeded as leader of Vision Montreal, suggested there could be more in store for the suburbs than Harel would readily admit.

“The fact is, by law the mayor of Montreal is also president of the Agglomeration of Montreal,” Labonté said. “So in this context, of course these new cities are part of the Agglomeration, so we’ll have to deal with them. We’re still neighbours, and it’s one of the responsibilities of the president of the Agglomeration Council — which is the mayor of Montreal. So there will be relations.”

While noting that Harel recently went on record to say that if elected she would not try to change Montreal’s relationship with the demerged cities, Trent told the Examiner, “I take that with a grain of salt … She has made it clear over the last little while that she’s against the decentralized model of the megacity and if she were elected mayor she would centralize things a lot more.”

Although this in itself would not affect demerged cities like Westmount, Trent sees the possibility of Harel being in charge of the Agglomeration as a matter of great concern. “If we thought we were dealing with a butcher who was putting his or her thumb too much on the balance with regard to the amounts of money that are charged to the Agglomeration Council, it would be a lot worse with her,” he said.