Montreal Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada says police were doing their job when they seized her car over an unpaid ticket in March, and regrets how the incident has been conflated with the broader issue of racial profiling in the city.
Speaking to reporters after a news conference Tuesday, Martinez Ferrada addressed the incident publicly for the first time since Le Journal de Montréal reported it on Aug. 7.
“What’s important for me to say is that I’m not shirking my responsibility — that’s not who I am as mayor, and it’s not who I am as a citizen,” the mayor said. “There was a ticket that hadn’t been paid. As soon as I found out, I paid it.”
The mayor’s car was seized in March after her husband, Pascal Delinois, was pulled over for speeding in a 50 km/h zone. Officers discovered an outstanding ticket during the stop and had the car towed to an impound lot.
The mayor has said the matter was resolved the same day and noted Tuesday that the ticket had been forgotten “in the maze of SAAQclic,” the digital portal for Quebec’s public auto-insurance board.
“The police did their job,” she said. “They saw that a vehicle needed to be impounded, so they impounded it. I thank the officer for their work.”
Since the story broke, many online commenters have used the unpaid ticket as a way to undermine or call into question the mayor’s previous comments about her husband, who is Black, being repeatedly stopped by police for no reason.
The mayor had spoken about his experience in June, shortly after it was revealed a Montreal North police unit had been disbanded over allegations of racial profiling.
She denounced Tuesday how the incident with her car has been linked to her comments on profiling.
“To conflate traffic tickets with profiling, that’s where I draw the line,” Martinez Ferrada said. “These are two different things. We need to be careful not to confuse them.
“The comments I have made about my partner’s police stops and profiling are experiences that many Black or Arab communities face every day, or regularly,” she added. “But that doesn’t call into question the work of all police officers.”
The mayor added that Montreal police officers work under difficult conditions and denounced how the actions of a few have “cast a shadow over the extraordinary work” others do every day.
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Martinez Ferrada did not address why she hasn’t spoken about the incident since it was reported, but said she refrained from commenting online to avoid being “drawn into a debate that lumped a lot of things together.”
“I didn’t want to get involved on social media because, as you know, all sorts of things are said on social media, and I simply don’t accept that kind of rhetoric,” she added.