Montreal mayor-elect is a former refugee who says her victory breaks barriers

MONTREAL – Montreal’s mayor-elect said Monday that her background as a child refugee from Chile is proof that people from all over the world can be welcomed and find success in the city — even as the provincial government hardens its tone toward immigrants.

One day after winning the race to lead Canada’s second-largest city, Soraya Martinez Ferrada thanked voters for “breaking that ceiling” by electing its first racialized mayor.

“Trusting Montrealers that they can have a mayor that has an immigrant background shows that Montreal can lead the way in terms of having people who come from all over the world and be welcomed and be part of the society here,” she told reporters.

Martinez Ferrada arrived in Canada as a Chilean child refugee in 1980, when her family fled the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.  

On Sunday, the former federal cabinet minister handily defeated the leader of the left-leaning party that has governed the city for the last eight years. She will become the second woman to lead Montreal — following outgoing Mayor Valérie Plante, who did not seek re-election — as well as the first Montreal mayor in recent memory to have been born outside Canada.

Her victory comes as the Quebec government has increasingly hardened its tone against immigration. Premier François Legault has repeatedly asked the federal government to stem what he’s called an “explosion” of temporary immigrants in the province, citing the need to protect the French language and maintain public services.

In June, Quebec’s immigration minister said the government will drop its permanent immigration targets to as low as 25,000 people per year, and keep them low until Ottawa agrees to slash the number of temporary residents in the province by half.

Martinez Ferrada described herself Monday as a “proud girl of the 101 law” — the landmark language legislation that declared French the province’s official language and required immigrant children to go to school in French. Today she’s trilingual and speaks French without an accent.

“I’m the concrete example of what immigration can do to our city, to our country, to our province,” she said.

“I hope that in the conversations we’ll have with the future government of Quebec, they can see the benefit of having people like me in the city.”

Martinez Ferrada said her top priorities as mayor include helping to end the ongoing strike by public transit workers and tackling homelessness. She confirmed the city will no longer dismantle tent encampments, and will work instead on longer-term solutions on the homelessness crisis, including by tripling the city’s budget for the unhoused.

“If you cannot give a solution, if you dismantle, they’ll go somewhere else,” she said.

While she’s giving herself four years to end encampments, on Monday she said her priority in the next few weeks is the coming winter, “making sure that nobody’s going to die because they’re outside and they couldn’t be sheltered.”

Martinez Ferrada served as a Montreal city councillor between 2005 and 2009 before making the jump to federal politics with the Liberal party in 2019. She served as tourism minister and the minister responsible for the Economic Development Agency of Canada for Quebec’s regions before resigning to seek the leadership of centrist municipal party Ensemble Montréal.

On Monday, she said she would draw on her federal experience in order to create partnerships with other levels of government to address big challenges such as housing, homelessness and attracting investment amid a destabilizing U.S. trade war.

“At the end of the day, if Montreal is not going well, then Quebec’s not going well,” she said. “And I think the government of Quebec is very open to that conversation.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 3, 2025.