Category Archives: What were they thinking?

A modest proposal, Montréal Architecture, Montréal Landmarks, Political commentary, Urban Redevelopment, What were they thinking?, Worth reconsidering

If only I had a machine to rage against… {MUHC Superhospital WTF!}

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Conceptual image of the planned MUHC Superhospital - gladly, not the work of the author

So today I was treated to a lecture by a McGill architecture prof on the history of Montréal hospitals, with a focus on the Royal Victoria Hospital as an interesting perspective on local social history. Among several key themes, the idea of a personal and societal connexion to a particular hospital arose, with the Vic serving as an even better case study on some of the cultural and ethical considerations to make when proposing radical modernization of institutions. As we ought to know, the Vic, along with the Montreal Children’s, a sizable chunk of the General and the Montreal Chest Institute will all be folded into the new MUHC Superhospital currently being excavated at the site of the former Glen Yard, near Vendome Métro.

If you’ve been reading the news for the last twenty years, you no doubt have a vague, intrinsically hostile reaction to the mere mention of the new compound word superhospital; it’s a seemingly endless quagmire of incompetence, delays and, compounding it all, that eerie sixth-sense tingling at the back of your spine nagging as to its fundamental necessity. Unfortunately for those of us not yet completely numbed to the inertia of the Québec government (in any form), we’ve been left to go back and look over the evidence, and its pretty damning. Worse still is that the superhospital project has finally broken ground – literally. They’re excavating about five floors worth of highly contaminated soil to eventually build a 2,500 car capacity parking garage – right at the corner of one of the busiest intersections in the entire country. Atop this vehicular birdhouse will sit the hospital digitally rendered above; easily twenty years behind schedule, both new superhospitals have entered the preliminary stages of construction – that is to say, the demolition, excavation component. I encourage all of you to go see the mesmerizing sight of roughly ten construction towers looming over a massive floodlit pit – it’s truly breath-taking. The problem here is that the MUHC Superhospital is gearing up to be yet another white elephant in a city which has too many as is. Given that the buildings are in such an early stage of development, I think a new round of public debate needs to occur to make sure this project doesn’t become a complete disaster.

Here’s a short list of what’s going wrong. We’ve already covered the toxic soil – a result of the site’s former occupation as a freight railyard, pictured here:

The Glen Yard in the 1960s, looking east-northeast (I think)

And the fact that it’s located in the worst possible location, adjacent to the Turcot Interchange – which is due for a major renovation. And that they still haven’t factored in connecting this damned hospital to the Vendome Intermodal station (which is beyond incompetence – it seems clear to me that this omission was on purpose so that a contractor could benefit from an inflated price (estimated at $30 million to build a tunnel under the railway).

So on top of these scandals, and that the project is retarded to the tune of twenty years, it also won’t be able to accommodate the number of beds available in the hospitals it will replace – about 800 for the new hospital compared with about 1200 spread out through the current MUHC system. Read all about that here.

And then there are the common sense issues, like why anyone would build one big hospital when the city and province have already had considerable problems containing hospital based disease, such as C. difficile. Then there are the practical considerations: communities require hospitals, and hospitals build and maintain communities. Institutional memory and public reverence for institutions build character and solidify the social solidarity. It builds community consciousness and civic proprietorship. Building a white elephant superhospital, which is what this plan is shaping up to be, will not only result in cost overruns and traffic jams, it may also result in the hospital’s public losing faith in the institution. I don’t think Montréal Anglophones have much left to lose faith in – can we afford to lose important hospitals for the sake of modernization and efficiency?

That last point is another bone of contention. While the argument that a superhospital will save money because expensive equipment can be shared, the idea that the superhospital will be in any architectural or societal fashion ‘modern’ is blatantly false. This hospital was designed and conceived of in the 1980s. And it has been such an ordeal just to get to the point of breaking ground no one has given much thought to finding a more suitable location (ideally, closer to the city and university it is affiliated with and away from a traffic logjam) or what impact the hospital closings may have on the population it is intended to serve.

Among the hospitals slated for closing, the Royal Victoria Hospital is perhaps the most iconic and established amongst Montreal’s anglophone population; a building with far too many memories to be demolished. It has been expanded several times since it opened in 1893, and carries a caveat attached to the donated land and buildings – they can only ever be used for education and healing. A very old woman in Westmount is committed to making sure the wishes of Lord Strathcona & Mount Royal and Lord Mount Stephen are carried out, if it’s the last thing she ever does.

There has been speculation that the Vic may simply be absorbed into McGill University, which could greatly expand its medical school and potentially convert some buildings into student dormitories – an almost ideal evolution of the built environment at the corner of Pine and University.

But what of the Children’s?

If there was ever a hospital population to be segregated from the general population, it is undeniably children. Sick kids require a special environment, one ideally sealed from adult diseases, pain and suffering. A children’s hospital ought to foster the notion of recuperation, rehabilitation and optimism. I always thought the pediatric hospital and the birthing hospital should be in the same place – I can think of no other kind of hospital where the demand for a miracle be as high as in a children’s hospital, and can think of no better provider of miracles than a maternity ward. Our Children’s should be kept where it is – as it stands now it is an anchor of the Atwater/Shaughnessy Village area, and that area has already suffered the loss of the Reddy Women’s Hospital some years ago.

As for the General, it is unclear as to exactly what will happen here; since it will remain a level-1 trauma center and has a significant amount of space, it seems likely that it will be used to handle ‘overflow’, though how this will work is unclear to me. At the end of the day, the MUHC Superhospital is looking more and more like a highly specialized jack-of-all-trades teaching hospital. High specialization. Concentration. Education. Those are a lot of hats to wear simultaneously, and like anything else that tries to hard to be too many things to too many people, it will likely fail at its intended purpose. The Superhospital is probably going to be looked on as a super mistake, and the taxpayers will be left with a supersized bill. Once the project reaches the state of public derision and ridicule, much like the Olympic Stadium or Mirabel International, it will be seen pessimistically as little more than yet another recent failure of a once proud and successful people. Can we afford such malaise?

A modest proposal, Montréal Landmarks, Montréal Stories, Political commentary, What were they thinking?, Worth reconsidering

A critique of the hyperbolic newspaper *updated*

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Another example of this terrible paper: is the actual situation this cut and dry?

This is the letter I just fired off to David Johnston of the Gazette for the rather poor working of this particular article: Westmount Mini-war

Sir –

“Mini-war”? Really?

A bit hyperbolic don’t you think? I think what’s going on in Bahrain, Libya or Yemen right now qualifies as a ‘mini-war’. Ask an Iraqi or an Afghani what war is like and you’ll be surprised to learn there’s usually very little talk of burying hockey rinks or ameliorating community services.

From my experience, debates of this nature during war time are typically interrupted by massive explosions, choking via chemical gas and the constant, droning rhythms of machine gun fire.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you want to be taken seriously – and trust me when I say this applies to the Gazette as a whole – you can’t keep submitting ridiculous headlines and bylines like this. It’s not the first time I’ve written to complain about your paper’s poor (or exploitative) command of the English language, but I’ve typically been given the run-around. A lot of ‘it’s not my decision, pass the buck, I’m not responsible etc etc’.

The Gazette likes to think it is a Montréal institution, and it should be. But as long as it feeds the innate human desire for scandal and uses the worst kind of Fox News rhetoric to convey information, it will remain a joke. A bad joke, one which brings shame and humiliation to the entirety of the local Anglophone population.

We need a newspaper of record, one which is taken seriously. But more and more I see a scandal rag with an editorial board taking cues from Hearst’s portrayal of the Spanish-American War.

Try harder…

With utmost sincerity,

Taylor C. Noakes

_____________________________________

And here is Mr. Johnston’s response:

Hello Mr. Noakes:

Thank you for your letter. I couldn’t agree with you more. You might not know that writers don’t write their own headlines. That’s a job for copy editors and, like writers, they have good days and bad days, good habits and bad habits. I also think that war metaphors are greatly overused in our business – and as you say, they are particularly silly and inappropriate these days, given what we are seeing in the Middle East. I’m going to talk to the senior editors here and see if we can start making it a policy not to use the word war so loosely.
Thank you,

Dave Johnston

***

Frankly, I couldn’t be happier with this response. I think we have a friend on the inside!

History and Culture, Montréal Architecture, Montréal Landmarks, Montréal Stories, Unrealized development projects, Urban Redevelopment, What were they thinking?

Perspective on the City { No.8 }

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McGill College Avenue during a snowstorm - work of the author

McGill College, once upon a time, was a narrow one-lane street, crumbling on both sides with the remnants of the residential buildings and small-scale businesses once typical of St. Andrew and St. George’s ward. By the 1970s, a good portion of this stretch featured surface parking lots.

The redevelopment of McGill College Avenue was a long and drawn-out process, thanks in part to Jean Drapeau’s insistence in developing a new concert hall for the OSM on the site.

Almost thirty years later, McGill College Avenue is a wide-open success story, acting as a central north-south commercial and retail artery with plenty of tall buildings making the best of this prestige address. Along the avenue, you’ll notice that the two tallest buildings north of PVM are positioned diagonally across from one another, and a variety of building heights permits generous amounts of sunlight to flood the space (enjoy a nice outdoor lunch here in the Summer). Oddly, it’s not the most traveled street, and can be transformed into an open plaza on occasion. It’s long redevelopment saga involved many prominent figures in the local architecture and urbanism scene, including Phyllis Lambert, who opposed the development plan of a company she partly owned. Even more bizarre, the two architects Ms. Lambert engaged to build the CCA, Peter Rose and Errol Argun, both played significant roles in the redevelopment of McGill College. Rose worked on the renovation master plan while Ergun designed the Place Montréal Trust tower (currently, the Astral Media Building, which used to be co-located at the LaSalle College building in the Shaughnessy Village on Ste-Catherine’s, which was also designed by Ergun).

As you can see, the back-and-forth between the city, the developers and the public continued for some time, featuring a wide variety of different proposals, which included some plans to block off the view of Mount Royal entirely, while others proposed odd looking bridges to connect retail shopping centers and department stores overhead, and then underground.

In essence, what we have today is the result of many, many compromises. And despite some bruised egos and a lot of frustration twenty some odd years ago, today we’ve got something that works, and is unmistakably Montréal.

Montréal Architecture, Montréal Landmarks, Political commentary, Urban Redevelopment, What were they thinking?

The STM is planning on selling you out…

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Hector Guimard's Métro entrance at Square Victoria - credit to Wally Gobetz for the great shot

The STM recently announced its intention to solicit corporate sponsorship for the Métro, something which has never been done before. This is not the same as posting advertisements; the new plan seeks sponsorship of the individual lines, with branding occurring pretty much everywhere, from the ubiquitous, landmark Métro signs to the ticket kiosks to the maps, branding, branding, branding everywhere.

Andy Riga has excellent coverage of this issue, which can be found here: Metropolitan News

I think Michael Fish really nailed it when he asks if the corporatist elements of our society have any shame left. No, clearly they don’t – the STM won’t make more than $155 million over ten years. When you compare that to the billions of dollars per year in the operations budget, you begin to get that queasy feeling the corporate branding will be going to line the pockets of city administrators and STM corporate governance. It certainly won’t speed up the deployment of our new trains, that much is certain.

As you can imagine, both Projet Montréal and Transport2000 have come out against this plan. I for one am also against it – our Métro was conceived as being sponsorship-free, or if you’d prefer, people-power is the sponsorship. Frankly it’s bad enough we have to contend with television, advertisements, scrolling-advertisements and the variety of people actually handing things over to you, do we really need to ‘ride the Bell line to switch at Monsanto Station?’ Moreover, do we really want the pride of Montréal’s public-transit network sponsored by, say, General Motors Corporation?

Enough is enough Рif the STM really wants to increase overall revenue, they should stick with the original plan, that is Рto gradually extend the M̩tro to cover the entire metropolitan region. Doing so would allow the STM to collect revenue from more than 3 million people, as opposed to half that number currently.

The system was designed to put art and architecture to the forefront, but gradually, we’ve let the STM remove artwork and alter the design of the stations without adequately consulting the artistic community which designed the stations in the first place. Initially the system was designed to act as a new kind of public art gallery, in which each station could be experienced for its own artistic merit. What happened to that?

Think about the lost artwork the next time you’re in McGill Métro station, where the stained glass mural has big gaping holes which never get fixed, yet the rest of the station can be covered in advertisements overnight.

I strongly encourage my fellow Montréalers to resist this invasion and manipulation of public space. I for one will deface any corporate sponsorship I see. Let’s see how much of that $15.5 million per annum they can save when they have to contend with rider dis-satisfaction and a population hell-bent on vandalizing corporate sponsorship.

History and Culture, Political commentary, Québec sovereignty, What were they thinking?

The Ghettoization of Franco-Québecois Culture

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Pauline doing her best Mussolini impression - clearly not the work of the author

If Pauline Marois truly believes she is protecting and promoting Franco-Québecois culture by proposing an initiative to force Francophone and Allophone students into French-language CEGEPs, than it necessarily implies that she also believes the future of Québec does not go further than our geographic borders, and that our youth need not be trained for the Global Village already in the works. In sum, through this proposed extension of Bill 101, Ms. Marois is setting us up to take a fall, one which will undoubtedly sever our people from fully participating in global initiatives, and will further result in a servile and dependent people. If this is her idea of increasing the individual sovereignty of the people of Québec, than we should prepare ourselves for the bondage-by-fear characteristic of the Duplessis Era. When it comes time for an election in this province, it will be a choice between an embattled neo-Liberal party and one who would have you believe that limiting the education choices of adults is a step towards national independence. That kind of thinking is reminiscent of Sarah Palin’s illogical gaffes and the Tea Party’s fear-based rhetoric than it is of cold, sober Canadian political philosophy. Let’s not go down that road of no return that has called like a Siren to so many befuddled Americans. Make no mistake – Pauline Marois is the bottom of the barrel, and no self-respecting, sovereign Québecois should ever want her to lead this province. It would be disastrous; here’s why.

Nationalism is dead. Pan-Nationalism is the future.

Nationalism has shown its dark side time and time again, a leading cause of world conflict for most of the twentieth century. Think of the Balkans in the 1990s; think of Italy’s mad dash for colonies in the 1930s; I hate to use this point as it’s cliché, but we can’t escape the reality that Nationalism drove the Nazi movement – indeed every fascist movement – and Nationalism can be found as a root cause of every genocide. So why do we, the sovereign people of Québec, pay any attention to a political party which uses Nationalism as its ideological foundation?

The people of Québec are part of a larger Franco-Canadian nation, but we are Pan-National by nature. Neither Québec nor Canada has ever been a homogeneous society – even as far back as our colonial period, French settlers, Canadiens and many Aboriginal nations shared our land, inter-married, learned each others ways, customs and languages. If the Voyageurs had not been accepted into Aboriginal nations and families, we never would have prospered, never would have survived. The ‘purest’ Pur-Laine Québecois has plenty of Aboriginal and Irish in them – our cultural reality is manifestly plural. The foundation of our current inter-cultural society can find its ideological base in the necessities of our people’s colonial experience. We became a new kind of people, one ideally suited for the centuries to come – a people in which adaptation, cosmopolitanism and multi-lingualism were necessary keys to survival.

The world is getting smaller every day. In order to survive and prosper in the decades to come, we, the people of Québec, will have to decide whether we have the collective will to participate in a global economy, a global network of governments, and all the global initiatives required to end war, hunger, disease and the destruction of our global environment. As communications and transportation networks develop, we find ourselves sharing the planet in a manner akin to a large village – and in the process, we are becoming more and more aware that we must collaborate and cooperate in order to achieve trans-national and trans-cultural goals. In essence, we are moving towards an increasingly inter-cultural world, and the future will belong to the people most capable of living a global existence

So when the leader of the Province’s once-respected sovereignist party proposes to limit the education opportunities of the people, of the youth in particular, this same leader is cutting us off from the world, and this will harm us gravely. Pauline Marois is proposing the ghettoization of Franco-Québecois culture, and by doing so seeks to reverse the trend set during the Quiet Revolution. Ms. Marois thinks the Quiet Revolution is over, passé. It isn’t, it is the heart and soul of Québec’s progressive movement. By attempting to extend Bill 101 into the CEGEPs, she is attempting to limit education opportunities for all communities, while further limiting the natural trend towards multi-lingualism in post-secondary education. What’s worse is the fact that Anglophone CEGEPs would have their funding cut in addition to restricted enrollment, while Francophone and Allophone students would go to unilingual CEGEPs and universities instead of the already multi-lingual ‘Anglophone’ institutions.

A better idea would be to ensure all the students of Québec are taught both English and French equally at the primary, secondary and CEGEP levels, so as to guarantee a fully bilingual workforce. This is not something from the pages of futurist science fiction; it could be accomplished easily within a couple generations, yet we lack the will to be daring, creative. This is manifest in the policies of Ms. Marois, who would rather own a little North American fiefdom, with the people of Québec as her dependent subjects, than realize our nation’s full potential. In her rhetoric, she prepares her followers not to lead, but to be held captive by fear – of the other, the Anglophone, of Canada, of the immigrant who learns both English and French. For all intents and purposes, she may as well sell you fear of the British Empire, of Loyalists or the Orange Order. She wants to induce a siege mentality in this province, despite the fact that there is no threat to the French language, culture or society. Each year there are more of us, and each year more immigrants learn French and adapt to our ways – more often of their own volition than through force and coercion.

If our dearly bewildered opposition leader is given carte-blanche, she will undeniably erase the progress made during the Quiet Revolution. She will provoke Québecois of all language and cultural groups to leave the province for better opportunities elsewhere, force a referendum no one wants, and jeopardize our economic stability. But what is worse is that she will turn this province into a ghetto, and our people will suffer the indignity of a ghetto mentality. Such an indignity will leave an indelible mark, and we will perish as a community, as a society, because of it.

History and Culture, Montréal Noire, Montréal Stories, What were they thinking?

The Mengele of Montréal

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This guy is Donald Ewen Cameron, a Scotch-American who, each week from 1957 to 1964, commuted from Vermont to Montréal, where he performed mind-control experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute. Cameron performed his experiments at the behest of the CIA though he also received funding from the federal government, taking otherwise normal people suffering from minor mental health issues, such as depression, and using them as human guinea-pigs. Among other things, the infamous doctor, well-known for his ideas that schizophrenics could be ‘re-programmed’, induced his unsuspecting subjects into comas while playing tapes on loop. Patients were subjected to noise, commands and excessive doses of LSD; when they awoke, they were all permanently disabled.

Allan Memorial Institute - work of the author, Winter 2008

It’s difficult for me to consider this event and not immediately think of the Duplessis Orphans and the insane asylum out in the East End that used to be its own city. Curiously, a few years back some unmarked graves were found at the former Cité de St-Jean-de-Dieu Insane Asylum. I haven’t heard of any follow-up to the demand that autopsies be performed, but the allegation is that Duplessis Orphans may have been used for medical experimentation as well.

When you consider the context of the Quiet Revolution, remember the Duplessis Orphans and Ewen Cameron as examples of what crimes can be committed against a people held in bondage by the collusion of the Roman Catholic Church and an autocratic political regime. Have those responsible actually paid for their crimes? Will we ever finalize the break and seek to resuscitate our efforts at achieving true individual sovereignty for the people of Québec? I think the CIA, the Fed, the Province and the Church still owe us a lot of money for what they’ve subjected our people to. And I still want answers to this.