September 20th, 2009
« Dans la réalisation du réseau du métro, priorité sera accordée aux besoins les plus urgents des usagers du transport en commun. »
- Commission de transport de la communauté urbaine de Montréal
Récemment, les maires de Montréal, Laval et Longueuil se sont réunis afin de promouvoir leurs visions du métro à Montréal de la région montréalaise ; Le gouvernement québécois les a acceptées.
J’adore le métro ! Ma dernière rencontre m’a quitté après avoir découvert ma torride liaison avec un plan du métro de Tokyo. Cependant, mon cœur appartient aux 4 lignes de Montréal ; notre réseau de transport s’illustre en tant que modèle de diversité. Tout un chacun doit reconnaître que nous ne vivons pas dans la grandeur du métro moscovite apportée par des années de totalitarisme. Bien que nos stations s’effondrent, nous n’avons pas adopté, non plus, le urinal-chic de Toronto. Nous possédons un parfait mélange de pragmatisme et romantisme qui nous manquait dans le paysage urbain depuis quelques années.
source : Métro de Montréal
Le métro à Montréal nécessite des prolongements. Néanmoins, peut-on justifier les prolongements creusés vers la périphérie pendant que la ville centrale souffre ? La banlieue, se sert-elle mieux avec un réseau ferroviaire à la RER ? Et si la priorité devait être accordée aux besoins les plus urgents des usagers du transport en commun, qu’advenait-il des prolongements vers l’ouest (Lachine, LaSalle) et vers le nord (Montréal-Nord, Rivière-des-Prairies) planifiés depuis un demi-siècle ?
La question se pose :
Pourquoi les politiciens ont-ils privilégié un secteur de notre population à la place d’un autre ?
La réponse réside dans la démocratie :
Laval se veut puissant. Longueuil remporte les votes. Les villes apathiques n’offrent aucun avantage aux membres de l’Assemblée législative.
Prenons l’exemple de Montréal-Nord. L’achalandage de la ligne 139 Pie-IX monte à 36,000 par jour ; elle se classe parmi les lignes les plus achalandées de la STM. Le métro (ou même un tramway) dans ce quartier démuni libérerait ses citoyens de son exclusion sociale.
Il ne reste guère de travail à faire pour réaliser un tel projet. Le besoin les presse. Les plans existent toujours. Les études ont déjà été effectuées. La ligne théorique porte un chiffre préliminaire (7). Jusqu’aux années 90, il s’agit d’un fait accompli. Mais en 2009, Montréal-Nord, ainsi que Rivière-des-Prairies–Pointe-aux-Trembles et l’Ouest-de-l’Île, attend perpétuellement leur meilleur réseau de transport.
Sous l’effet de notre régime démocratique, il faut tenir vos politiciens pour responsables aux fins d’obtenir ce que vous voulez. Il faut les menacer, non pas avec des émeutes et de l’indifférence, mais avec vos bulletins de vote. Virez-les. Réprimandez-les. Déshonorez-les. Par la suite, vous verrez les infrastructures et les équipements qui vous ont manqués.
Il est donc dommage que les secteurs de la population exclus du scrutin ne puissent recevoir les services mérités ; ce qui fait l’impasse de la démocratie.
Quoi qu’il en soit, je voterai dans les élections municipales en novembre. Peut-être la démocratie est-elle injuste. Cependant, elle est la seule option que l’on a en ce moment.
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Permalink for Dimanche démocratique : If you vote, they will come
Posted by Émile Thomas
Categories Elections / Les élections, Laval, Longueuil, Montreal North / Montréal-Nord, Public Transit / Transport en commun
August 13th, 2008
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/uZ_kgFcFGy8" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
Montreal is no stranger to riots. Over the course of its history, it has seen political riots, sports riots, nationalist riots and punk riots. From 1844 to 1849, Montreal was the capital of a united Canada, but imperial authorities stripped it of that status after rioters (most of them conservatives angry over the supposedly light punishment given to the 1838/39 rebels) trashed and burned down the colonial parliament. A little over a century later, Montrealers angry over the suspension of Maurice Richard left Ste. Catherine St. in tatters; the Richard Riot, as it was known, signalled the dawn of the nationalist era in Quebec life and politics. More recently, hockey fans and hooligans smashed windows and burned cars downtown after the Canadiens won the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
So what about Sunday night’s riot in Montreal North, then? It isn’t the first time mobs of angry people have burned cars and looted shops, but somehow it seems distinct from Montreal’s other riots. Maybe it’s the undercurrent of racial tension that seemed to run through the destruction. All riots start with a public united by a sense of injustice; in this case, it was frustration and anger directed against a police force and municipal authorities that seem to treat Montreal’s minorities — and in particular, blacks, Latinos and Arabs — with contempt, suspicion and, at times, violence.
Saturday’s police shooting of an unarmed 18-year-old, Fredy Villanueva, seemed all too familiar to those Montrealers who still remember other incidents in which a police officer, for reasons that are never made clear, has killed a man of colour. Most recently, in 2005, Mohamed Anas Bennis was shot when he passed by an unrelated police investigation in Côte des Neiges. (Police claim that Bennis stabbed an officer, but evidence of this has never been made public.) All told, an average of 20 civilians die every year in police custody, many of them in rather shady circumstances. Whether police behaviour in these instances was justified or not, the reticence of the police to fully explain them has angered many Montrealers. Combined with the often-strained everyday interactions between police and people in neighbourhoods like Montreal North, it creates a toxic atmosphere that can easily ignite.
The Montreal North riot has provoked inevitable comparisons with similar riots in Paris and Los Angeles. In both cases, it was a police action that provoked intense violence, vandalism and looting; the comparison becomes a bit strained when you realize that what happened in Montreal North was far less severe than the complete breakdown of civil order that took place, over the course of several days, in Paris’ northern suburbs and central Los Angeles. Still, it’s clear that there is a problem in Montreal, and the first step is to figure out how things went so wrong in the first place. That means looking closely at why Fredy Villaneuva ended up dead on Saturday, but it also means addressing the much broader social and economic problems that plague many of Montreal’s minority communities.
There is plenty of history to learn from. Studies of many American cities point to poor community-police relations, political exclusion, housing, rapid demographic change and unemployment and poverty as the chief causes behind the 1960s race riots. All of these factors are present in neighbourhoods like Montreal North, a traditionally working-class suburb that has seen a large influx of immigrants from Haiti and Latin America over the past two decades. In the past, Montreal North was notoriously corrupt, and relations between police and the community have always been tense, even before the growth of its non-white and immigrant populations. These days, it is plagued by street gangs that have had great success in recruiting young men who face dire prospects in schools and the job market. Police will have a hard time preventing recruitment when they have such little credibility.
Montreal would seem to have its work cut out for it, but in reality it is doing very little to solve any of these problems. In yesterday’s Gazette, columnist Henry Aubin excoriated the municipal and provincial governments for ignoring the appallingly high unemployment rate among young Montrealers born in Latin American and the Caribbean, and for having such a flimsy record of minority hiring. Just 5.6 percent of Montreal’s police officers and 0.5 percent of its firefighters are non-white. Moreover, the city and province seem reluctant to establish an impartial panel to look into Villanueva’s death, choosing instead to put Quebec’s public security ministry in charge of investigating the shooting.
All riots start for a reason. Beneath the surface of empty violence and opportunistic looting, there is always something more substantial, a deeper problem. Left alone, it will continue to fester, and I wouldn’t want to wait to see what happens if that remains the case.
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Permalink for What to make of the Montreal North riots?
Posted by Christopher DeWolf
Categories Montreal North / Montréal-Nord, Social Trends / Tendances sociales
