Geophysicist and bell-ringer Micha Horswill runs for Transition Québec
Peter Black, Local Journalism Initiative reporter
peterblack@qctonline.com
If being a geophysicist on city council wouldn’t be a first, Micha Horswill might well be the first church bell-ringer with a council seat, should she get elected in November.
Horswill, who on June 5 launched her campaign for the Cap-aux-Diamants council seat at a bar on Rue Saint-Jean, is a woman of many interests, now including municipal politics.
Her day job is as a research professional with Université Laval’s geophysical instrumentation group, but she still finds time to attend neighbourhood council meetings, make TikTok videos about “the city’s hidden gems,” and, yes, ring church bells.
As she explained in an interview prior to her launch party, friends had encouraged her to consider a city council run, which she initially rebuffed, but the idea “grew on me and I kept thinking about it and I said ‘why not?’ I was born here, I live here … and I have ideas. So, I decided to jump into the pool.”
Horswill, 31, said she only knew Transition Québec lead- er and Limoilou Coun. Jackie Smith from media reports, but she “loved” the social and environmental values of the party. She said the municipal politics bug took hold thanks to her experiences at neighbourhood council meetings.
One of those experiences was pushing for the creation of a mural on a side street off Rue Saint-Jean; the effort was a success and taught her a lot about how things get done in a city bureaucracy.
As she says on her Facebook page: “I’m in love with Quebec City–and I dream of it. I see it bigger, more vibrant, more avant-garde and more fair. I allow myself to dream, but I don’t just have my head in the clouds.
“I have my feet firmly planted, with my geophysicist’s perspective, which requires rigour, consistency and pragmatism. I’m trained to analyze complex systems, read between the layers and find the root causes of problems. I want to bring that perspective to the city as well.” Though her father is an anglophone from British Columbia who moved to Quebec City when he was young, Horswill was raised and educated in French. She said she learned her (fluent) English in school and perfected it in the years she worked in Europe, where “everything was in English.”
She recalls a high school rivalry with Quebec High School, but she said, “Now I’ve made peace with QHS and accepted that my basketball team wasn’t exactly the best.”
Her more recent interaction with the city’s anglophone community was with bell-ringers, a largely English-speaking group. She got involved about two years ago when she heard the bells being rung at the former St. Matthew’s Church on Rue Saint-Jean (now a public library, Bibliothèque Claire-Martin), was intrigued, and after some internet searching, found the change-ringing group and signed up.
“I discovered a nice community that is very vibrant,” she said. She was happy to participate when the city recently welcomed change-ringers from around the world.
“We’re the only city in Canada that has two bell-ringing towers,” Horswill said with some pride. The other bells are in the Anglican Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in the Old City, where she lives.
Horswill is proud of the his- tory of her city to the extent she highlights many aspects through brief videos on her TikTok channel. One of them features the top three libraries in the Old City, one of which is that of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec at the Morrin Centre.
Horswill said it “pains her to see” not enough local residents live in the Old City. “It’s the birthplace of an entire nation. People should be living there, we should see children, neighbours.”
She said one measure to encourage people to live in the Old City would be to improve public transportation. “Having a walled city is great for tourists, but it keeps [residents] captive.”
Among other issues on her agenda are homelessness in the central city, the lack of trees in the Saint-Jean- Baptiste neighbourhood and the lack of a large grocery store for Old City residents.
Horswill said, “I think I will win,” although she does have competition in the form of Mélissa Coulombe-Leduc, the incumbent councillor from the ruling Québec Forte et Fière (QFF) party and member of the executive committee for heritage, planning, tourism and quality of life in the Old City.
QFF has announced candidates for all but two of the 21 council seats. Two notable additions to the party’s slate are Marchand’s media attachée Élainie Lepage, running in Saint-Roch–Saint-Sauveur, and Manouchka Blanchet, who was actually elected in 2021 in Beau- port’s Sainte-Thérèse-de-Lisieux district as the running mate of Jean-François Gosselin, the unsuccessful mayoral candidate for the now defunct Québec 21 party.
Sam Hamad’s Leadership Québec party added three more candidates to its slate last week: Mégy Gagné in Val-Bélair; Donald Gagnon in Louis-XIV and former Équipe Labeaume candidate Émilie Robitaille in Neufchâtel-Lebourgneuf.
Municipal elections are held across the province on Nov. 2.