10 questions with Coalition Montral's Marcel Ct

Economist and founder of the SECORmanagement consulting firm, Marcel Ct is taking his first run at the mayor's job as the leader ofCoalition Montreal. He spoke to CBC's Daybreak about his hopes for the city's future, early campaign mistakes and his take on taxes.

• Listen to the full interview

Q: What is the most pressing problem facing Montreal?

A: "Reforming the senior management of city hall. The reason why we had all that corruption and collusion incidents is basically because Montreal is managed with an outdated approach.

"Power is way too concentrated on the end of the mayor and the president of the executive committee. We have to restructure the committee. We have to review all of the business processes involving senior bureaucrats.

We have to simplify things get rid of silos. Thats at the root cause of all the problems we have in the past five to 10 years."

Q: Youre talking about eliminating a fair chunk of the upper level management. How are you going to do that?

A: "What you do is you review what people do and what has to be done and who should get involved and what has to be done. Then you realize theres just too many people attending meetings and too many people sticking in their fingers and thats what silos do.

"Most [organizations] have gone through such reviews, CBC is a good example. Theyve shed hundreds of senior employees. You start from the top. You simplify the organization from the top by going over what the people do, what has to be done and how is it done. And then you realize that theres all kinds of redundancy, which slows down the process, which complicates things.

"You just simplify the process and jobs are redefined and at the end, you find you need much less people to do the senior jobs in most larger organizations. "

Q: In your platform, you are promising to keep raising taxes in line with inflation, but not reduce them. Why cant you reduce them?

A: "Theres a huge deficit in maintenance in Montreal. We can feel it every morning when we drive to work or we wait for the buses or subway.

"So we have to address that maintenance deficit. Politicians over the years have taken away expenditure from maintenance, which doesnt really show up. The results though, after five or 10 years, shows the sidewalks and the streets and the water mains that break."

Q:This robocall fake poll you ran last week with a few days of perspective, do you see why with an election campaign, where integrity is such an important part of what people are thinking about,you failed the integrity test with that fake poll?

• Ct will not drop out over unauthorized robocalls

A: "It was a mistake and I admit it. It was done by my organization and I assume what the organization was trying to do was reduce the cost of our polling because as you know political parties always do polling every night. These costs are expensive. Its done by volunteers."

"The first intent of that poll was to pin point the voters that voted for us and the voters that voted for them because we know the number and on election day, we call them back."

Q: What are your dreams for Montreal?

A: "Its not buses or tramways. I believe in prosperity. I believe that the Montreal economy can be rebuilt on intelligence on creativity on knowledge. We have five universities hereWehave that creativity culture. Is that a dream?

"Its a dream because its what we can do with it with support. If we learned how to manage our linguistic duality better, if we built on our strength our city has the potential to be the most creative city in the world."

Q: There may bepeople who aresuspiciousofyour teaming up with Louise Harel, partly because she was a PQ minister, but probably mostly because she was the oneas municipal affairs minister who oversaw the mergers which were hated in some parts. What would you say to them about those concerns?

A: Theres Louise Harel and theres the pquistes. Lets first talk about the pquistes. Theres no way you can govern this city without including the people from the east side of the metro line and theyre mostly indpendentistes or and you have to deal with that.

"Mme. Harel, Ive gotten to known her, I didnt know her until this spring. Shes a very interesting woman. I think she would benefit from being better known. I think when we come down and talk about municipal affairs, I think the mergers are behind us.

"Its no more on the table this is done and we have to come to terms with that. She is still a public person and we have to live with her and I get along fine with her."