“If you’re at McGill and you’re thinking of staying in Montreal, it means that you’re, to some degree, falling in love with what Montreal is,” says Vincent Stephen-Ong, looking around Cafe St-Barth, formerly Milton B. “I know this is kinda ridiculous to say, but I feel like there’s a chance we might lose it.”
Over coffee and eggs Benedict, Stephen-Ong, currently running for the position of Borough Councilor of the Jeanne-Mance District (spanning from McGill campus to Parc La Fontaine) in Montreal’s municipal elections, to be held on November 2, speaks to the Daily about his hopes for the vitality and future of the Plateau-Mont-Royal.
His party, Transition Montreal (hereafter, Transition), announced its emergence in a press conference in mid-July 2025, along with an ambitious progressive agenda spanning social housing and Metro construction to safe streets and police reform. Since then, the party has gained significant momentum in the municipal polling, catapulted by their strong stance on key issues such as a steep wealth tax, divestment from genocide, and cost of living. According to Stephen-Ong, many of the party’s candidates are first-time political hopefuls, but provide a compelling story, and have experience in various vital sectors. Polling at eight per cent in early October, Transition still falls behind many other parties in popularity, but with 41 per cent of the voter base undecided, a run for the majority is not impossible.
Stephen-Ong didn’t start out with political ambitions. Growing up in Montreal, he followed the desires of his parents to McGill University, where he studied computer science. After university, he entered the job market in the late 1990s in the fervor of the early stages of the internet, finding work in the developing tech industry. However, the allure of large tech companies in the United States couldn’t pull him away from his city, and Stephen-Ong quickly fell in love with the Montreal music scene. Although he had played the saxophone since high school, witnessing a few “transformative” shows convinced Stephen-Ong to change courses, enrolling once again at McGill, this time in the Faculty of Music (now Schulich School of Music). He began playing gigs around the city, and eventually dropped out of McGill to pursue his professional saxophone career full-time. Stephen-Ong quickly made a name for himself in the Montreal scene both as a band leader and sideman, playing at myriad venues throughout the city. His turn towards politics in recent months comes, in part, from his desire to protect a music scene under threat.
While rising housing prices, and cost of living are central issues in municipal elections throughout Canada, there is another policy point that has risen to the surface in this election as a part of Transition’s campaign: nightlife. Much of the Transition team, in fact, are musicians with strong ties to the local nightlife sector. Stephen-Ong described how Craig Sauvé, the party’s mayoral nominee, is a heavy metal guitarist, and Sergio Da Silva, running for Borough Councilor of the Saint-Jacques district, is a musician and owner of the popular local venue Turbo Haus. This strong musical affiliation is not a coincidence. These figures have decided to join forces to take on the persistent deterioration of cultural fixtures throughout the city.
“I have played at every venue that has closed in the past 12 years,” says Stephen-Ong. In fact, he explains that these experiences are what led him to politics in the first place.
At around 11pm one night in 2013, police interrupted a weekly performance Stephen-Ong was playing with his regular band at Kalmunity’s improv show. The officers were responding to a noise complaint at the then-popular bar Les Bobards on Saint-Laurent Boulevard. The bar was faced with a $1,250 fine, an enormous and unsustainable amount for a small venue to pay. Even worse, they were told that the infractions would compound, making future police encounters exponentially more costly. After investing heavily in soundproofing in the following few years, Les Bobards, unable to reckon with the inevitable noise produced by live music, ended up closing its doors for good in 2015.
In recent years this has become all too common among Montreal’s cultural hubs. As CBC found at the time of Les Bobards’ closure, Stephen-Ong provided a similar autopsy after speaking with me in October of this year, highlighting the unwavering severity of this issue. He believes that the root causes of nightlife venue closures in Montreal are the gentrification of the Plateau, and the suffocating noise complaint laws throughout Montreal.
Currently, when police respond to a noise complaint call, they are allowed to present the venue with a fine if they hear any noise whatsoever from the street, regardless of the volume. Closing their front doors on the night of a show for risk of noise complaints can rob these venues of valuable revenue and attention, which is often enabled by the curiosity of passers-by drawn in by the music.
Stephen-Ong argues that gentrification of the Plateau neighbourhood exacerbates these issues, “If you rent an apartment and there’s a noisy bar next door and you’re [only] paying three hundred dollars in rent, who cares?”
However, as expensive condominiums pop up on these corridors known for nightlife, people begin to believe that the steep price tag should entitle them to silence at night, despite expecting the same vibrancy from the city that attracted them to it in the first place.
“[When] people think ‘music venue,’ that’s like Place-des-Arts, the Bell Center,” says Stephen-Ong. “Yes, those are music venues, but so is Barfly, so is Grumpy’s, so is Turbo Haus.” It is these latter establishments that act as incubators for the local music scene.
After this police encounter in 2013, having had no prior experience or interest in politics, Stephen-Ong took to social media to voice his concerns about the state of the Plateau and the vitality of its night life. He didn’t realize the municipal election was the following week. This political climate helped his post go viral, and Stephen-Ong found himself doing interviews with major news networks such as CBC and CTV to draw attention to these issues, which had so far gone without notice in the media and public consciousness. Realizing the necessity and public support for legislative change, he began working with local policymakers, advocating for venues and cultural institutions, and slowly finding himself emerging into the political realm. Talking to venue owners across the city provided Stephen-Ong the resources and connections to kickstart his largest initiative which continues to this day: Le Cypher X.
Le Cypher X is a weekly improvised music experience that incorporates some of the best musicians and rappers in the Montreal scene. Held every Thursday night in the live music venue O Patro Vys, with the comforting smell of weekly home-cooked catering, it is truly a one-of-a-kind event. Musicians of all kinds provide sonic support for a rotating cast of freestyle rappers — your favorite backing tracks brought to life. There, Stephen-Ong is front and center, giving cues to the band, outlining ornaments on his saxophone, and calling up visitors to the stage. The attitude of the event can be seen throughout Stephen-Ong’s political messaging: Politics, like Le Cypher X, is supposed to be an open and collaborative space; he wants to help make it that way.
Despite trusting his party’s mission, Stephen-Ong doesn’t believe in voting along party lines. “Do your own research,” he says. He believes that his policies, if heard for what they are rather than through reductive labels and buzzwords like ‘socialist’ and ‘communist,’ have the power to swing many self-proclaimed conservatives. Once in power, Stephen-Ong believes he will “100 per cent” be able to solve the nightlife crisis by establishing a night mayor and night council (in the case of Sauvé, Stephen-Ong’s fellow Transition party member winning the mayorship), bringing light to nightlife and safety issues that frequently go overlooked. Stephen-Ong intends to put forward Agent of Change legislation, where “planning policies and decisions should require new development to take into consideration existing businesses and community facilities, that will also be a priority for the party in managing the changing city fabric. Transition also aims to lower rent prices by building more social housing and establish electoral reform using ranked choice voting to ensure that the candidate that wins is a better reflection of the constituency.
“I’m coming in with a lot of raw, unfiltered ideas of what’s wrong and how to fix it,” says Stephen-Ong, when asked about the strengths of being an outsider in politics. “This is a problem, we need to fix it, and this is how.”
Polling day for the Montreal municipal elections will be held on November 2. Don’t forget to vote!