Former Montreal mayor Jean Dore is being remembered as the man who helped make city hall accessible to ordinary Montrealers.

A lawyer by trade, Dore was the 39th mayor of Montreal and led the city from 1986 to 1994. He died Monday of pancreatic cancer at 70 years old.

Last year, he told the Journal de Montreal the diagnosis surprised him.

"It was a shock to me and my family. It is a vicious cancer, I had no symptoms. I did not expect it at all," he said.

A moment of silence was held in city hall Monday afternoon to commemorate Dore. He will lie in state at city hall this coming weekend and will have a civic funeral at city hall as well.

When Jean Dore's Montreal citizen's movement (MCM) won the 1986 election, it did so convincingly.

The party took all but three of the 58 council seats and the 41 year old became Montreal’s first new mayor in 26 years,  succeeding Jean Drapeau and his civic party - an administration that brought Expo 67, the metro system and the Olympics, and the resulting deficit.

“The MCM that [Dore] offered had at least something that was new in Montreal - a real collaboration between francophones and anglophones. The francophones were basically pequistes, the anglophones weren't but somehow we were able to manage to put this together,” said Marvin Rotrand, who was elected as a MCM city councillor.

Dore ushered in a period at city hall where elected officials were no longer sealed off from the public, a stark difference from city administration under Drapeau, said former MCM city councillor Arnold Bennett.

“It was highly centralized, autocratic, antidemocratic administration which a lot of people don't remember,” he said.

But with the successes came missteps, including when Dore decided to stay up north at a chalet instead of returning to the city when the Decarie Expressway flooded in 1987.

He also courted controversy when he skirted protocol to speed up the renaming of Dorchester Blvd. to Rene Levesque Blvd.

And while Dore's party was committed to better housing, the administration gave the go ahead to tear down homes on Overdale Ave. downtown for a new development. The city condemned the properties, tenants were forced out and the buildings were torn down, but the development never happened.

Rotrand quit the party after being part of Dore's administration for just two years, but he says Dore should be remembered for ushering in changes still in place today.

“The number one achievement I would credit him, changing the culture and the bureaucracy from [elected officials being] hermetically sealed to one where [the attitude was] ‘Yeah, we work for the citizens so we actually have to understand what they're talking about,’” he said.

Present-day Mayor Denis Coderre tweeted that Dore was a "great Montrealer" and offered his condolences to Dore's family.

The city recently named the beach at Parc Jean Drapeau after Dore.

He is survived by his wife, two daughters and their families.