I've been unable to find data for the 1998 municipal election in Montreal, the last pre-merger one, but that's not a huge deal seeing as how it was very boring and basically just a rehash of the 1994 one, so here's that one.
The thirty-year reign of Mayor Jean Drapeau and his personalist, federalist, vaguely right-of-centre, extremely corrupt
Parti civique was ended in 1986, when he was defeated in an open race by Jean Doré of the
Rassemblement des citoyens de Montréal (RCM), an alliance of social-democratic associations, student action groups, community activists, anglophone minority rights activists and trade unions. The RCM simultaneously captured the vast majority of the city council, which it would continue to hold for eight years as the city continued to struggle with population loss and a sky-high municipal debt left behind from Drapeau's lavish spending habits and love of megaprojects (having brought both the World's Fair and the Olympics to the city along with the construction of the Métro). Doré found himself unable to do much about either problem.
In 1994, the citizens decided to toss the RCM out and instead elected Pierre Bourque, the manager of the Montreal Botanic Gardens and organiser of the 1980 Floralies Internationales (because of course Drapeau made sure to bring those to Montreal as well). Bourque was also responsible for the construction of the Montreal Biodome, still an icon of the city, out of the former Olympic velodrome. This had brought him into the public spotlight, and in 1994 he formed a political party which he called
Vision Montréal. Bourque's plan combined fiscal responsibility with environmental initiatives, and he's credited with a number of urban renewal projects as well as the stabilisation of the city budget during his first term in office.
Bourque's second term would be more controversial. He believed the root of Montreal's economic problems lay in the municipal boundaries, which kept the city mostly working-class while the more affluent West Island communities governed themselves. This, in Bourque's view, meant that their residents used Montreal's services while not paying tax to the city, and the PQ government of Lucien Bouchard broadly agreed with this view. Bouchard planned a series of municipal amalgamations, similar to those undertaken in Ontario a few years earlier, and Bourque became an enthusiastic participant in this project, calling for the entire Island of Montreal to merge into a single city. Despite some hand-wringing by the West Island towns, who feared their anglophone residents would be poorly taken care of in a majority-francophone city, the merger went ahead on New Year's Day 2002.
Ironically, the merger would prove Bourque's undoing. His two primary opposing groups - the RCM and the West Island anglophones - united into a loose coalition christened the Montreal Island Citizens' Union (MICU, soon shortened to
Union Montréal), and nominated businessman Gérald Tremblay for mayor. Tremblay turfed out Bourque as unceremoniously as Bourque had Doré, and Montreal would go on to have absolutely no more troubles ever.