Mayor Jean Drapeau's Civic Party dominated municipal politics in this period, and Gardiner served as a member of the opposition.
After being sworn in as mayor, Doré appointed Gardiner to the Montreal executive committee (i.e., the municipal cabinet) with responsibility for housing and city planning.
[11] In 1989, he announced that Montreal would introduce a tax incentive to make home ownership easier and prevent a drift to the suburbs.
One of the most controversial projects he supported was an unsuccessful condominium development on Overdale Avenue that caused the displacement of seventy tenants.
Its key planks included making Montreal streets friendlier to pedestrians, requiring that no new buildings significantly block the view of Mount Royal, and giving incentives to developers who create "social useful" amenities such as day care centres.
[16] Gardiner followed this in January 1990 with a ten-year downtown plan that included the creation of ten thousand new housing units and significant new office space and a restoration of the area's main commercial thoroughfare.
[17] Gardiner led council in approving the plan later in the year; critics charged that it favoured developers by permitting the construction of more high-rise offices.
"[20] The MCM won second consecutive landslide victory in the 1990 election, and Gardiner was re-elected without difficulty in his new ward of Mile End.
This notwithstanding, he indicated that the city would move forward with a new bicycle path for the St. Jacques cliff, an extension allowing trucks to use the Wellington tunnel, and renovations in the Atwater and Maisonneuve markets.
Social welfare activists argued that this change would leave tenants vulnerable to harassment by landlords (as had happened before the ban was introduced), but Gardiner said there was no danger of this.
[26] The Doré administration launched a major new housing project in April 1993, budgeted at $350 million and intended to bring five thousand people into the waterfront area east of Old Montreal.
Gardiner indicated that twenty per cent of the units would be targeted to low-income families, though he added that he main purpose was to bring people of different income levels into the downtown.
Gardiner indicated that his first priority was to introduce a five to ten per cent tax cut for commercial and industrial properties and also said that he would streamline the application process for city building permits.