Denis Coderre, Valérie Plante make final pitches before Sunday's election

Montreal's two candidates for mayor wrapped up their six-week-long campaigns Saturday as Quebec's municipal elections draw closer. 

The race in Montreal is tighter than expected with incumbent mayor Denis Coderre and relative newcomer Valérie Plante neck and neck in the latest CROP poll commissioned by Radio-Canada. 

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The results, released Monday, showed Plante had a slight lead at 39 per cent of the poll's votes and Coderre at 37 per cent. 

The results pressed Coderre to defend his record and even his personality. 

Saturday, flanked by a gaggle of Équipe Denis Coderre candidates outside City Hall, and reading his speech from sheets of paper, he highlighted his experience and laid out what he sees as his wins over the past four years. 

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'We need to show more humility, maybe'

He poked fun at himself, saying he'd lost count of the caricatures of him with an orange cone. He joked that's he should get another four years — "for the cartoonists."

When a motorist driving by honked a dozen times during Coderre's speech, he paused and said, "honking is support, right," laughing.

"It's not a contest of personality or popularity, it's a matter of efficiency," Coderre said later.

The majority of CROP poll respondents qualified Coderre as arrogant and some critics say he has an authoritarian style. 

"I have a lot of ambition," Coderre said Saturday with a shrug. "I've got my style, but I think what people have told me is, 'We don't like everything that you're doing, but at least we know what to expect.'"

He added that, "sometimes, you know, we need to show more humility, maybe," but that his authenticity made up for it.

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Coderre played offense, too. Without naming her, he took aim at Plante, saying, "You don't make yourself become a mayor overnight."

He said his opponent and her team were "improvising."

Plante tours Montreal's public markets

Plante went for a more informal setting Saturday. She toured Montreal's public markets, making stops at Jean-Talon and the Maisonneuve market on Ontario Street. 

She said she believes her campaign injected energy into Montreal politics and made people care about the election.

"The campaign we run tried to talk about subjects that speak to Montrealers in their everyday to garner interest and make them want to vote," Plante said in a short interview with reporters. 

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"For people to go vote, they have to see how it's beneficial to them, how it's interesting, so I'm very proud of the campaign that we ran that touched on very specific subjects."

Those subjects, she said, included housing, safety, mobility and traffic. 

"I'm very hopeful that tomorrow [Montrealers] will turn out in large numbers at the booths."