The prospects of Louise Harel becoming mayor appear to be a real possibility, according to two polls released on Monday.

Opposition mayoral candidate Louise Harel had a slight lead over Mayor Gerald Tremblay in both surveys.

A Leger Marketing poll taken earlier this month for Le Journal de Montreal had Harel leading Tremblay 23 per cent to 21 per cent with the vote just over six weeks away.

Harel also had a slight lead over Tremblay, 41 per cent to 38 per cent, in an Angus Reid survey taken last week for La Presse. The two candidates could have been tied once the margin of error was factored in.

Scandals

Nearly a third of respondents to the Angus survey said recent city hall scandals would have a major influence on their vote on Nov. 1.

Tremblay has been on the defensive amid a series of fraud and conflict-of-interest scandals that are the subject of six police investigations, one of which led to the arrest of a former top bureaucrat.

Tremblay has not been personally implicated in any of the scandals.

Divisive figure

The scandals helped pave the way for Harel, a lifelong PQ member, to make the jump into municipal politics for the Vision Montreal party in June.

But she immediately became a divisive figure.

Downtown borough councillor Karim Boulos said he would sit as an independent because many of his constituents were concerned about Harel's leadership.

Party vice-president Oksana Kaluzny quit days later, saying she couldn't work under Harel because of the mayoral candidate's separatist beliefs.

Former Westmount mayor Peter Trent, who has been a federalist stalwart for years, said he was ending his retirement at the prospect of a Harel candidacy.

Harel has also been criticized for her lack of fluency in English.

She says her main focus leading up to the Nov. 1 election is to battle corruption, not to promote sovereignty.

"Ethnic cities"

Harel has said she wants a more centralized city, though her comments about the current municipal structure raised the ire of federalists and ethnic groups in March.

She said she opposes cutting the number of Montreal boroughs in half because she fears the creation of ethnic cities.

Harel said "if we go from 19 to ten boroughs, but these boroughs remain quasi-municipalities as they are now, we will end up in the worst of situations because we'll have cities... an Italian city, a Haitian city, an anglophone city, an arab city ... a jewish city, etc..."

Merger anger

Harel's candidacy has also rekindled lingering anger over the forced municipal mergers of 2001, which Harel orchestrated as municipal affairs minister under then-premier Bernard Landry.

The mergers forced English-speaking suburbs on the island of Montreal to join the city of Montreal, where French is the only official language.

Most of the suburbs split off again two years later after Jean Charest's Liberals took power.