While Louise Harel certainly has genuine progressive credentials and would represent a marked improvement over Tremblay, I'm still deeply conflicted over her candidacy.
I find her association with Benoît Labonté and Vision Montréal deeply disconcerting. Vision Montréal has proven itself to be a profoundly antidemocratic/autocratic party, both in term of its policies (the Bourque years [all-powerful mayor/executive, abolition of consultative committees, etc.]) and its leaders (Bourque again, Labonté).
Like Tremblay's Union Montréal, Vision Montréal is a party that is very much "of the Chambre de commerce flavor"—before getting involved in municipal politics, Benoît Labonté was the Chambre's president, after all.
One has to keep in mind that the execrable Labonté would be president of the Executive Committee if Vision Montréal were to win. The same Labonté who wanted to hunt down homeless persons living downton—whom he characterized as "trippeux [qui ne lui] tirent aucune larme". Thank you for your courageous crusade, Knight Labonté!
It is unfortunate that Harel sided with the organization deemed to be the more effective electorally-speaking (although this assumption should not be made at face value given the financial woes of Vision Montréal, for one thing) rather than the one true progressive vehicle on the municipal scene, that is, Projet Montréal.
True, Richard Bergeron didn't handle the Harel situation very deftly, what with the flip-flopping and the peremptory tone of his public statement (in itself a poor strategic choice).
Sigh...
BTW, Projet Montréal just posted its program on its website. Pretty solid stuff.