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Montreal\u2019s new mayor, Soraya Martinez Ferrada, and Quebec Premier Fran\u00e7ois Legault met for the first time on Friday and shared their priorities at a news conference. <\/p>\n
Martinez Ferrada told reporters that their “good conversation” focused on homelessness and the preservation of the French language. <\/p>\n
“I share with the premier the challenge posed by the decline of the French language,” she said. <\/p>\n
In his speech, Legault once again targeted immigration, suggesting that temporary migrants were responsible for this situation, the housing crisis and homelessness.<\/p>\n
“What we are asking the federal government to do is to reduce a significant portion of the 200,000 [temporary migrants] we have had over the past two years in order to halt and reverse the decline of French,” said Legault. <\/p>\n
The premier and his Coalition Avenir Qu\u00e9bec government have faced backlash for controversial comments about immigrants<\/a> and asylum seekers, with some critics arguing that they’ve been repeatedly used as scapegoats<\/a> for various issues in Quebec. <\/p>\n Martinez Ferrada also stated that both her and Legault would like for Montreal to become the headquarters of a future defence, security and resilience bank \u2014 an international organization that is currently being established and would evaluate and monitor defence investments made by different governments around the world. <\/p>\n “We have an extremely beautiful opportunity to position Montreal, Quebec and Canada within this multilateral institution that will emerge from NATO,” said Martinez Ferrada.<\/p>\n The new mayor of Montreal also re-emphasized her commitment to tackling homelessness. <\/p>\n “Montreal will take responsibility. We, too, will tackle this issue,” she said, adding that she wanted to triple the city’s budget for homelessness and invest in emergency services.<\/p>\n Martinez Ferrada mentioned that she asked the government to speed up the granting of certain powers that facilitate decisions and efficiency in the fight against this issue.<\/p>\n New mayor’s priorities for Montreal<\/p>\n During her electoral campaign, Martinez Ferrada criticized her predecessor, Val\u00e9rie Plante, for what she considered a failure to develop good relations with the provincial and federal governments.<\/p>\n On Friday morning, Martinez Ferrada\u2019s team issued a news release announcing a freeze on external hiring for white-collar and professional jobs \u2014 including positions in engineering, science, architecture and law \u2014 and a freeze on internal and external appointments to management positions.\u00a0<\/p>\n The freeze on external hiring does not apply to boroughs or to police, firefighters, school crossing guards and blue-collar workers. <\/p>\n “The city’s workforce has grown considerably in recent years, while services to the public have slowed down,” Martinez Ferrada said in a statement.<\/p>\n Martinez Ferrada takes office with a number of major challenges ahead, including a cash-strapped public transit system, along with a housing crisis and a rise in homelessness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 3 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by text-to-speech, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":298170,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,66],"class_list":["post-298169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298169\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/298170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}