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At the beginning of summer, Mayor Valérie Plante wore a pink dress to a press conference that she insisted was a major step toward building a new Pink Line of the Montreal métro, her signature election promise.

Plante’s office sought to remind citizens of this supposed achievement Monday, issuing the first in a series of communiqués touting the mayor’s accomplishments during the summer.

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Indeed, the announcement in question occurred in late June, between the Fête nationale and Canada Day holidays, when many Montrealers were not paying much attention. But the timing also obscured the peculiarity and vagueness of this apparent development, something that deserves re-examining now.

First of all, Plante seemed to be the only one celebrating the news as anything to do with the Pink Line. The announcement itself was of a complicated shell game, whereby Montreal renounced $800 million in federal cash so it could be put toward Quebec City’s far more advanced tramway project in exchange for equivalent funds from the Quebec government for its own transit initiatives. But in a nod to Montreal’s magnanimity, the Coalition Avenir Québec agreed to study a western spur of its east-end tramway project linking Lachine to downtown and inscribe it among capital works priorities for the next decade.