Tag Archives: 2013 Montreal Municipal Election

Kondiaronk - My Montréal Experience, Let's make this an election issue, Perspectives on the City

Your City, Your Candidates – Mary Ann Davis

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Wellington Street in Verdun (photo by StudyInMontreal.info)
Wellington Street in Verdun (photo by StudyInMontreal.info)

Part of an on-going series I’m contributing to. Mary Ann was a joy to interview. The original, as with a lot of other things I’ve written, can be found on Forget the Box.

***

Mary Ann Davis has lived in Verdun for over twenty years, having moved to Montreal as soon as she could get out of Thetford Mines. As a child, her father had taken her to Montreal on a business trip and in Phillips Square together they sat munching on ice cream cones. She vividly recalls taking in all that was around her, enjoying the comings and goings of so many people and deciding that this was the city for her.

Ms. Davis is a union organizer, LGBTQ activist and Projet Montréal candidate for Verdun borough mayor.

What’s the big issue, for you and the people you wish to represent, that will define this election?

Nun’s Island needs a new school. The current primary school on the predominantly residential and upper-middle class island is the largest in the province with over 900 students. A new school has been officially required since 2007 but there’s been too little movement on the issue.

The biggest problem is that there’s little available land left on the island and all of it is in private hands waiting to be developed into townhouses and condo complexes. With more than 22 000 residents living on the island, we believe a new school is a major priority.

The current borough government wants to place the school in a park, adjacent to two of the island’s major thoroughfares. The site is too small to accommodate the large new school which is required to serve residents’ needs, meaning if the current plan goes ahead, we’ll be right back where we started, needing another school, in but a few years’ time.

We think this is profoundly irresponsible. Moreover, Nun’s island will soon need a secondary school as well, given current demographic trends. We feel it’s far better we plan for those future realities now rather than deal with the consequences later on.

What has the current administration done about this issue?

The current Union Montreal borough administration has not handled this well. They made it a needlessly divisive issue; people are being harassed, tires have been slashed. Keep in mind that the Verdun borough mayor’s office has been raided by UPAC three times; it’s clear to me someone may have some significant real estate interests.

There’s enough undeveloped land on Nun’s Island for between eight and ten thousand more apartments or condos. That’s a lot of potential tax revenue. But Projet Montréal has thoroughly studied this issue, has analyzed the OCPM’s 71-page report and we’ve come to a different conclusion: private land should be used for new schools.

It’s ridiculous to put a too small school in the middle of a park. Other lots have been offered by private developers, so we’d really like to know why the current Union Montreal government is so insistent on the location the OCPM deemed insufficient.

How has Verdun changed since you moved here?

Well, the first week I lived here there was an arsonist on the loose.

So it has improved?

Ha! Yes, by leaps and bounds. There were parts of Verdun you simply didn’t walk around late at night by yourself back then, today Verdun’s nothing like that. Real estate speculators keep indicating it’s one of many ‘next Plateaus’ in our city. There’s certainly been some gentrification, but this has been problematic as well. Verdun is an affordable inner-ring suburb and I’d like to keep it that way.

Tell me about the community you wish to represent, what are their needs?

Verdun is now a very multi-cultural community, with large Chinese, Haitian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Rwandan communities. We also have a surprisingly large Latino community.

But all too often I find these diverse communities living in silos – I’ve been walking around visiting apartment buildings where only one ethnic group can take up an entire building. That needs to change.

Further, many immigrants feel completely disengaged from civic politics, some have even been incredulous when I told them that they had the right to vote in our municipal elections. Can you believe it?

What do you want to accomplish if elected borough mayor?

Aside from solving the public school problem in Nun’s Island, I want to revitalize our main commercial arteries with more locally-owned small businesses. We also need to avoid a ‘condo ghettoization’ of Verdun and secure low-cost housing.

I’d also like to get citizen committees up and running on specific issues, be it new schools or what our needs are vis-a-vis the Champlain Bridge replacement. Ultimately, we need a far more engaged citizenry, so that we can resuscitate Verdun’s greatest single characteristic – its community spirit.

Is Montreal a gay sanctuary?

From my perspective, yes, absolutely, but we need to be aware of how recent this is. When I first moved to Montreal I did so because small-town Québec wasn’t terribly interested in being open and inclusive towards homosexuals.

But we absolutely must remember that, even as recently as twenty years ago, gay-bashings were far more frequent and the Montreal police even had a ‘morality squad’ which was all too often employed in raiding underground gay clubs, beating the shit out of people, and/or patrolling Mount Royal ticketing men for ‘cruising.’ It’s probably very surprising for young people today to hear such things.

What changed on a local level?

About twenty years ago the gay community in Montreal got organized and began pushing for reforms. It helped that there was a human rights commission set up to investigate anti-LGBTQ hate crimes, not to mention all the bad press the Sex Garage raid produced. But things really picked up when the gay community began concentrating in what is today the Gay Village and local politicians realized that the LGBTQ community as a whole was increasingly wealthy and far better connected.

Once politicians realized we were organized and resourceful (not to mention swimming in disposable income), they became sincerely interested in ‘the gay vote.’ The rest, as they say, is history.

***

Montrealers go to the polls November 3rd 2013. For the love of all that’s good and holy, please go vote. Make sure your name’s registered by calling Elections Québec.

Commentary, Kondiaronk - My Montréal Experience, Let's make this an election issue, Perspectives on the City

Your City, Your Candidates

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The City Along Mountain Street

Part of an on-going series of interviews of local candidates I’m doing with Forget the Box, an excellent Montreal blog. This is the full version of the interview I did with Jimmy Zoubris, a local businessman looking to represent Projet Montréal in the Peter-McGill district of Ville-Marie borough.

And just a note – the answers are paraphrased. Otherwise you’d be reading a transcript of a recorded conversation, and that’s just too… NSA, FBI & CIA-ish for my tastes.

***

I met up with Jimmy Zoubris, city councillor candidate for Projet Montréal in Peter-McGill district, at one of my favourite local cafés, the Shaika in NDG. It occurred to me on the walk over that Sherbrooke Street West and Saint Catherine’s Street West have something in common – high concentrations of medium/high density urban housing and a surprising number of independently owned and operated businesses. I wondered if there was a correlation; St-Cat’s runs down the middle of Peter-McGill district, which is defined (working counter-clockwise from the north) by the mountain, Westmount, the 720/Guy/Notre-Dame in the south (i.e. including everything up to Little Burgundy and Griffintown), with an eastern edge created by University, Pine and Parc. It includes Concordia and McGill, the remnants of the Square Mile, much of the modern central business district not to mention a multitude of institutions.

It is a demonstration of the incredible contrasts of our city, and the juxtaposition of so much diversity in a part of town you could walk across in half an hour makes it a fascinating place to want to represent.

Consider the district has a very high median income – over $70,000 per annum in 2009, yet also a significant homeless problem, at about 10% of the local population in 2006 (and I’m assuming both these figures have increased since). Moreover, an incredible 45% of the district’s residents live below the poverty line (many of which are students). Though only 22% of residents speak French at home 63% are bilingual in both official languages. Immigrants represent 44% of the local population, the majority of them Chinese, though immigrants from Lebanon, Morocco and France are also well represented in the district. What’s curious about Peter-McGill, is, first, that small-scale enterprises seem to thrive near the large residential sectors of the district, and second that the district has large depopulated areas – notably in the central business and retail district towards the eastern edge of Peter-McGill. Suffice it to say there are a lot of competing interests here, and it will be a difficult task for any potential candidate.

I asked Jimmy off the bat what he likes about this city, and he simply looked around and waved his hand; “this,” he said, “small, independently owned and operated cafés, bistros, restaurants etc. These are a rarity in the suburbs, but in the city, they’re everywhere. Trendy little coffee shops are competing one-on-one with major chains, and it often looks like the little guy’s winning. There’s a lot of potential. It’s certainly what my district could use more of, especially as you get closer to the downtown core. Projet Montréal wants to empower entrepreneurs and support the development of more small businesses. Too much of the downtown is dead after five or six.”

Where’s your favourite place to bring tourists to the city?

First, I’d take them to Mount Royal, the lookout, Lac des Castors etc, so that they can see the jewel we protected. It’s hard to believe fifty years ago Jean Drapeau had half the trees cut down to ‘prevent immorality’, as they used to say. But today we’re smarter, we value our green space, especially a park of such quality design, so universally enjoyed by all Montrealers. I think I would bring an eager tourist to see Montrealers using something they cherish and love very much. But after that, we’d go to the market, Jean Talon, Atwater, just to enjoy the experience, have a bite, watch people go by. I know it sounds odd, but I think we can all appreciate it, there’s something calming and refreshing about a market place. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of them, I think they’re a hit with an increasingly food-conscious population.

You’re a small businessman and we’ve spoken before of your thoughts concerning the necessity for a better business climate for small-scale entrepreneurs; what can the city do to improve the situation?

The fact is this – people don’t like empty storefronts on our main commercial arteries. It’s a peculiar problem – it doesn’t mean one business has driven others out of business and are ‘winning capitalism’, it means property values have increased out of step with actual business revenue. And like a virus it can spread to a whole block; remember what Saint Catherine’s from Fort to Lambert-Closse looked like a few years ago? It was a ghost town! Projet Montréal wants to change all that and so do I. The city has the resources to initiate buy-local campaigns and develop web portals and social media sites and applications for local businesses and business development. The city needs to pay attention to merchant’s needs, especially on the small end of the scale. Simple improvements to sidewalks – be it by repairing old cement, or installing recycling bins and benches, whatever, improvements like these can do a lot to help local businesses. And on top of that, the city should probably become more involved in promoting the creativity and uniqueness of local goods and services, and the fact they’re so much more available to urban citizens than suburbanites. Facilitating a better business environment that supports local entrepreneurs is one part of a broad plan to reverse population loss to the suburbs.

What do you like the most and what do you like the least about living in your district?

Like? Well, for one thing the nightlife. It’s not just Crescent Street, on the whole we’re well equipped with a wide variety of restaurants, bars, bistros, nightclubs to suit all tastes. It’s the part of town that seems to be on all the time, and I don’t mind that. For a lot of Montrealers this is an exciting, entertaining district. As to what I like least, it’s the class extremes, too much obscene wealth next to abject poverty. We have about 2,000 homeless in this district, that’s a problem that’s been ignored for far too long.

What do you propose to fix it?

The city should take the lead, partner with established charities like Acceuil Bonneau, and work to increase their capacity, possibly by securing abandoned residential and institutional properties that haven’t sold in many years. Coincidentally, there’s an abandoned old folks home across from the CCA that hasn’t sold in over a decade. No doubt we should definitely collaborate with established charities and see if we can help them help others better.

What’s Projet Montréal’s greatest challenge in the forthcoming election?

Getting the message from one end of the island to the other. We’re a big, complex city with a lot of moving parts, so it’s definitely going to be a challenge not only to get the message out, but to make people care enough to listen in the first place. We’re dealing with a local population that’s already fed up with local politicians and it shows, only 40% of citizens voted in the 2009 municipal election. That’s pathetically low, but to me it seems like some people are getting turned off by local politics and politicians. Suffice it to say, this only makes the job of the honest politician that much more difficult.

But I’ll say this, despite those challenges, and despite Montreal’s size, Projet Montréal is about Montreal first and foremost, the affairs of the province and country come second. We are a party for the citizens, and we know once elected the citizens will be our boss. Projet is cognizant there are no one-size-fits-all solutions for Montreal, and that what works well in one borough may not necessarily work in another. We know this because we’re the grassroots party, built from the bottom up, not paid for from the top down. Though Richard Bergeron often likes to look at the big picture in terms of how Montreal is going to evolve, on the person-to-person basis, at the district level, it’s about being a good representative, listening to constituents’ needs and correcting local problems.

How did Montreal end up in the political mess it currently sits in?

There were far too many people with far too many powers, too much control at the borough level while the city executive, the mayor etc. all took the laissez-faire approach. Tremblay was either complicit or wasn’t paying attention – in which case his negligence is nearly criminal. Either way safeguards are needed, and increased transparency is one way to begin fixing things. We need an active, involved mayor, not some guy who only shows up for photo ops but is otherwise a ghost. It’s funny, I was reading recently that Denis Coderre wants to champion an ‘intelligent’ city and yet of all the former Union Montreal councillors now running with him, not one is participating in the live broadcasting of their meetings. Projet Montréal is going to great lengths to ensure we respect the letter of the law and the people’s interest in greater transparency. All you get from Coté or Coderre is a lot of hot air; all talk, no action.

There are well over one hundred thousand students living in what most would consider to be ‘downtown’ Montreal or in the most urban first ring suburbs. It’s clear they’re politically motivated, and yet the youth don’t participate in Montreal municipal elections. What’s Projet Montréal doing about this?

For one we have 19 candidates under the age of 35. Granted that’s not exactly young, but we’re doing what we can and as you might imagine, we have a lot of volunteers under the age of 30. Richard Bergeron proposed a few years ago that the city open week-long voting booths in the CEGEPs and universities to facilitate voting for Montreal’s students. It’s no different than absentee voting anywhere else, and we certainly have the technology to make it work. But Union Montréal struck down the idea, instead permitting those who own property in the city to vote even if they live and pay municipal taxes elsewhere. We were pretty upset about this. That students wouldn’t get help integrating into the democratic process, but the wealthy are allowed to participate in elections in places they don’t actually live? It’s sickening really, and it’s a kind of disenfranchisement as well. Of course, the political establishment in this city has been leery about the student vote since the early 1970s, when the party created by the students nearly ousted Mayor Jean Drapeau.

What would you like to see wiped off the map or otherwise expelled from Montreal?

What a question! Ha! Well, I’ll tell you what, I’ll answer it in two parts. For one, I’d like to officially banish Jeff Loria (chuckles all around, Jeff Loria is the art collector who ran the Expos into the ground). I’d put up a sign telling him to go back home to Florida (more laughs).

As to what I’d like to see disappear, definitely the big gaping hole where the Ville-Marie Expressway divides Old Montreal from the rest of the city. It has to be covered. Even if nothing’s put on top of it and we leave a big open field of grass, it would be a major improvement over how it currently stands. My understanding is that the Palais des Congrès is looking to expand on the western edge of the remaining trench, and the CHUM will expand on the eastern edge, the city should step in and cover the rest. We need to stitch this city back up, it’s been divided – physically, culturally – for far too long. Projet has a plan to change all that.

A modest proposal, Commentary, Let's make this an election issue, Perspectives on the City, Political commentary, Social commentary, Urban Redevelopment

A short list of what the candidates aren’t talking about…

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Lachine Canal Sunset - Taylor C. Noakes, 2013

Admittedly this article isn’t based on the results of scientific polling, or polling of any kind really. It’s just a compilation of various ideas that various friends and acquaintances have recommended when asked what they thought was particularly important vis-à-vis improving and developing our dearly beloved city. In essence, it’s what the candidates aren’t talking about, though I think some of these are neat if not really smart and useful, though unconventional and unlikely to be mentioned simply because they likely wouldn’t poll well at all.

I’ll keep the individual ideas short and sweet, let me know what you think. Let’s get a conversation going.

1. Smarter, less crime-infested snow removal. After Maisonneuve Magazine threw the spotlight on bid-rigging w/r/t snow-removal contracts in the city I expected action from city hall, though so far it looks like we’re sticking to the existing plan. Snow removal is of particular concern for Montrealers given our long and generally snowy winters, so I think this one has broad appeal, especially when considering the city subcontracts numerous local construction and landscaping firms to handle snow removal on our city’s streets. Generally speaking it seems to make sense that we subcontract out a lot of this work; private construction and landscaping firms have the equipment and the equipment generally isn’t being used in winter months, so it’s particularly valuable for those firms to get lucrative snow-clearance contracts as it allows them to keep operating in an otherwise ‘dead’ season. This system is also thought to be good for the citizens in that the city doesn’t need to pay for all that expensive equipment and long, often irregular hours of work.

But this system now appears to be broken; not only are we now aware of bid-rigging, there’s the other troubling issue of the state some of these snowplough drivers are in when they’re doing the job. I’ve heard about eighteen hour days without rest being the norm rather than the exception. Granted they’re not doing this all the time, but still. Private contractors take that risk, despite government labour laws. I know a guy who did this for his father’s company for many years; he told me the training, on average, lasts about fifteen minutes and is entirely focused on the operation of the vehicle. There’s no safety training. Each year we lose at least one person, more often than not a child, during the hectic snow clearance operations that take place after every major storm.

Snow removal is something we have to contend with – it’s a fact of life – so why not get smarter about it?

For one there are systems that have been developed – and if I recall correctly are being used in some Scandinavian cities – wherein rubber mats are placed over city streets in which a heating system melts snow atop the mat and then funnels the water into the sewer system. If implemented city-wide, well, I think we may have a possible solution to our snow clearance problem.

Now if only we could figure out a use for all the snow that will inevitably accumulate everywhere else…

2. Open street commerce. Yes, the food trucks experiment is definitely a step in the right direction, but what has so far confounded me and a lot of other people is why there’s such strict regulation. There’s no question there’s a need for health inspectors and service standards, but to limit potential entrepreneurs to only those who already have a restaurant, a truck and ‘who provide products of gastronomic excellence, highlighting Quebec culinary prowess etc. etc.’ The end-result has been that it’s not quite street food, it’s expensive and more a fad or gimmick than legitimate arena for small-scale business.

Ultimately, its this latter point that needs to be addressed – a citizen should still be able to hock a product even if they can’t afford to rent downtown real estate to do so. Walk down St-Catherine’s and see for yourself – the businesses are mostly large chains, often repeated – there’s no room for small-scale operations. The city needs to relax restrictions on commerce, especially at the small-end of the scale. Taking street food as an example, I don’t care if the food is prepared in a restaurant or on the curb, and I don’t mind if it’s from a wagon, a truck, a horse-drawn cart or a 64 El Camino – as long as it meets health code standards I’m down to try it. If the rules were relaxed we’d suddenly have much more choice and many more small business operators and I guarantee you St-Catherine’s Street merchants would see major returns if only there were vendors and kiosks on every corner. We need to bring business back, and the city needs to become more of a market in the broadest sense. We don’t have to go to the extreme one might find in New York City, but I don’t think it would be so bad if we pushed a little in that direction.

3. Our very own Rikers Island. Another good idea from NYC; why not use one of the many uninhabited islands in the Montreal Archipelago as a large jail? I was discussing this one with a cousin who’s completely enamoured with all things New York – Rikers Island is a massive correctional and detention facility that houses about 14,000 inmates and is the city’s main jail for all manner of offenders. It’s accessible only by a single unmarked bridge. Now while we clearly don’t have such a large prison population, we do have several correctional facilities on-island that could just as well be located elsewhere. Moreover, removing these institutions from the island and putting them together on an island of their own not only further facilitates their isolation, but removes some NIMBY-typed obstacles from our urban environment. I think we should ask ourselves whether we want to keep the Pinel Institute or Bordeaux Prison operating where they are – near residential zones – or whether these facilities might be better off relocated.

4. Public rest facilities. Why? Because that’s not what Tim Hortons are for. They could even be their own small businesses, with attendants both keeping things clean and hocking various toiletries, smokes, gum etc. Point is, if we want this city (and the Métro in particular) to stop reeking of piss, we should probably do the bare minimum to address the problem.

5. The Forum. I don’t care who and at this point I don’t really care what, but this eyesore needs to go and get replaced with something better. The Forum, as it stands today, is a hopeless mess that somehow manges to work despite itself and looks like shit every waking hour of the day. I would personally consider it a wise use of tax revenue if the city were to simply pay for a neutral, modernist facelift. The unfortunate people who call Cabot Square their home deserve something better to spend their days looking at.

Cultural commentary, Economic commentary, Kondiaronk - My Montréal Experience, Let's make this an election issue, Perspectives on the City, Social commentary, Urban Redevelopment

Projet Montréal’s 2013 Platform & A Soft Landing for the Montreal Real Estate Market

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Sunset on Beaver Lake
Sunset on Beaver Lake

Projet Montréal, the only clean political party left in Montreal, is first out of the gate with a campaign platform.

With a dozen weeks or so left before the November 3rd municipal election they are so far the only party to have developed a program, including 71 specific campaign promises. No other candidate has come up with anything even remotely similar, as the PM program covers everything it feels a city administration ought to be involved in (from transportation to quality of life, health, culture and economic development, among others), a smart move in that it will play a role in deciding the terms of future debate. With this document PM is pushing an issues and ideas-based election, as opposed to the facebook-styled popularity contest it’s been up to now.

I’ll save my judgement of the other mayoral candidates for when they actually come up with their own plan. As far as I’m concerned elections are supposed to be issues-driven, not personality-based. Thus, this is so far a one-party race; until the other candidates produce some kind of document outlining just exactly what they propose to do for this city, I can’t in good conscience even consider them legitimate candidates. I refuse to vote for a self-described political vedette.

What strikes me about PM’s platform is that it seems to be anticipating a long expected crash in the Canadian housing market and, further, seems designed to carry our local real estate market into the much desired soft-landing. In essence, investment needs to be coaxed away from suburban developments and big-box shopping centres and back towards the urban environment. In this respect, PM’s 71 promises are methods by which that investment will be secured. Our mayors have been of the laissez-faire variety for too many years. Now is not the time for the laissez-faire approach. Investment needs to be re-directed into improving city living as much as possible. The city and its urban neighbourhoods will continue to be a desirable place to live long after interest in suburban bungalows has waned, but we need an active administration to ensure investment follows interest.

It’s clearly one of Projet Montréal’s main goals to correct the population loss our city suffers to suburban development, now in some cases more than an hour away from the city centre. If the housing market bubble bursts, in my opinion it will be these suburban developments that will be suspended first. As it stands these new developments are a burden on available health and education services in the outlying suburban regions. It stands to reason a more forward-thinking civic administration would capitalize on this as part of its broad effort to get people to stay in the city. Simply put the city can offer a far higher quality of life in terms of available services, culture, variety of employment opportunities etc. It’s stylish too, and it just so happens our city benefits immensely from several large urban residential areas, most of which are extremely desirable to live in (case in point the Plateau, faithfully administered by Luc Ferrandez and Projet Montréal and perhaps our city’s most iconic neighbourhood and the envy of urbanites the world over. Consider what makes the Plateau such a success and ask yourself how many other urban neighbourhoods offer something similar).

The plan is hyper conscious of what Montrealers love about living in our city and as such much of the program aims to build on what we already appreciate. More bike paths, urban agriculture, Métro extensions, a tram system, fewer cars and less traffic in the city – the list goes on and on, but it’s all built around improving the lives of urban residents. I can’t help but think the entirety of the plan will result in higher property values city-wide, and I’m also encouraged that the party has outlined new poles for residential development within the existing city; new construction in the city isn’t going to end, it just has to be managed better. I think we’re getting pretty close to maxing out on the need for single or dual occupancy condominiums as an example, so hopefully private developers (who will have many more reasons to build under a PM government, at least based on this platform) will react and adjust appropriately.

Other interesting components of the PM program include a six-point plan to increase and empower independently owned and operated businesses and to revitalize ‘neighbourhood economies’ and the city’s many commercial arteries. PM also wants to improve public education by working more directly with the provincial government and local school boards.

Further, a significant plan to broadly develop the Métro, including prolonging operating hours til 3:30, replacing all Métro cars with the new model over the next seven years, and extend three Métro lines (Orange west to Gouin Blvd., Blue east to Anjou and west to Lachine/Ville-St-Pierre, and Yellow up to Sherbrooke and McGill College, effectively ‘twinning’ the McGill Métro station. A bold plan to say the least, but one that will certainly make it much more desirable to live in the city.

Anyways, here’s the link again – check it out, well worth the time.

A modest proposal, Commentary, Cultural commentary, Economic commentary, Let's make this an election issue, Perspectives on the City, Political commentary, Social commentary, Urban Redevelopment

Repurposing Institutional Space in Montreal

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Montreal Children's Hospital
Montreal Children’s Hospital

What should we do with this building?

I ask what we should do because I believe this building, like all public and institutional space, belongs to the citizenry, and not the government or any of its ministries. The government exists for and by the people, and thus, because it is the people’s taxes which pay for the construction and operation of hospitals and schools (to say nothing of the operation of the government in and of itself) it should be the people who get to decide what we do with institutional space once it’s determined the facilities are no longer ideally suited to their original purpose(s). In the case of the Montreal Children’s Hospital, it is slated to leave this building for the greener pastures of the MUHC Superhospital in 2015, a project I’ve derided at some length.

So what will become of the building that once housed the Children’s?

Most likely it will be sold off to private real estate developers and either be demolished or converted into condominiums. It’s also possible (though not probable) that the building be demolished for the purposes of a new office tower or (god forbid) a shopping mall.

Of course, in all of these cases, the people lose vital institutional space, and lose their investment and ownership of the land and its buildings. We paid for it, but government gets to decide what happens to it, and apparently privatisation is on the table.

In my opinion there’s a far greater need for institutional space than new sites for condo development, and it just so happens that this particular part of the city – Shaughnessy Village – already has several other sites slightly more ideally suited for medium-height condominium projects (again, assuming our local real estate market could even handle more).

Aerial Perspective of Montreal Children's Hospital and Surrounding Shaughnessy Village
Aerial Perspective of Montreal Children’s Hospital and Surrounding Shaughnessy Village

Above you can see the area in question. The Children’s and Cabot Square are outlined in blue. Places where we’re likely to see demolitions for new construction (or where it’s already occurred) are outlined in red. The yellow arrow points to an existing RÉSO tunnel linking Place Alexis-Nihon, Dawson College, Westmount Square and Atwater Métro station with Cabot Square, the green arrow points to a potential RÉSO tunnel linking the aforementioned with the Forum and pointing to what is now the Seville Condominium project, and the purple arrow demonstrates how another tunnel could link the Children’s to the rest of the Underground City. This would allow someone to ‘warmcut’ from tony Greene Avenue in Westmount to within two blocks of the Canadian Centre for Architecture and its sculpture garden. Not too shabby.

But what could we use the Children’s for?

In all likelihood the Montreal General Hospital, located just up the street, will remain open and fully operational once the MUHC Superhospital comes online in 2015. I think parts of the Vic or some other slated-to-close-hospital might have to stay open as well simply because the Superhospital likely won’t have sufficient beds to replace all the hospitals it’s intended to. But I have a feeling the Children’s won’t be one kept open. From what I’ve heard, it would require a significant renovation in order to continue being useful, regardless of future functions.

If we were to look beyond continuing to use the Children’s as a hospital, what other functions could it serve?

A long-term care facility?
Subsidized housing?
Old age home?
The greatest daycare of all time?

Or perhaps as a school?

I think the Children’s might be a very interesting location for a rather large public school. Ideally, it would be an experimental joint venture between the CSDM and EMSB, a bilingual immersion school serving grades K-11. The Children’s is big enough it could easily facilitate such a school, and considering the downtown’s near total lack of public schools (FACE and Westmount High are the only public schools I can think of that are actually in the ‘downtown’) and the city’s stated goal of encouraging more families to move into the city, it makes sense to me that Children’s might be repurposed into such a role. Far better to recycle something already standing than start from scratch.

The most useless street in the city.
The most useless part of a street in the city.

The principle drawback however, is the lack of green space. The hospital occupies a large block bounded by (clockwise) Lambert-Closse to the east, René-Lévesque, Atwater and Tupper. I think it would be worthwhile to examine the feasibility of removing Tupper Street and reclaiming that space as part of Cabot Square (which would allow the square to grow by about a third) and relocate bus stops located around the square to a single location, outlined in black in the aerial view above. If I’m not mistaken there was once an STM bus terminus located here. A single terminus, ideally heated and hooked up to the Underground City by means of a tunnel, would be ideal compared to the current wide distribution of unheated, piss-drenched glass boxes underserving STM user’s needs. As part of the former Children’s renovation, an entrance on this side would aesthetically link the building to the square and should be considered. Cabot Square would be renovated to be part public square and part school yard. Suffice it to say the presence of a public school in this part of town would likely serve to improve the overall mood, if not the security, cleanliness and upkeep. Necessity would quickly make this one of the safest parts of the city to live and work in.

Though there’s no way a school here would have the green space of a suburban school, this shouldn’t bar us from considering the possibility. After all, other urban schools manage with limited access to green space by securing access to public recreation space and sporting facilities. Playgrounds could also just as easily be installed on the hospital’s ample rooftops.

This would not be a simple project; the Children’s and the public spaces around it would require a significant renovation and transformation, and an entirely new kind of school would need to be created, one that may test the abilities of our two largest school boards and the political will of the provincial government. And this is saying nothing of the lobbying that would be required to accomplish such a large undertaking.

But would it be worth it?

I honestly think so. It would provide a major incentive for families to to move back into the city, keep institutional space in the hands of the people, serve the public good and help kickstart a broad renaissance in a somewhat overlooked and run-down part of the city. Embarking on such a project would legitimately stimulate new residential construction, perhaps finally providing sufficient justification for new family-oriented condo towers. The areas outlined in red would likely be redeveloped very quickly, and the centrality of the location would make this an ideal public school for urban, working families.

In any event, just something to think about. What do you think should happen? What would you like to see here?