Eagle-eyed Fagstein makes an interesting point about community consultations in Montreal: in some cases they aren’t held anywhere near the community in question. Case in point is the consultation about some changes being made by Concordia to its Loyola Campus sports complex in western NDG. In order to make their views heard, people who live near Loyola will have to schlep all the way to Côte Ste. Catherine Road in Côte des Neiges, a good 25 minutes by bus. Steve Faguy drew a map to illustrate (see above).
2 comments
This seems so strange to me, the really obvious choice would have been to hold the consultation at Concordia itself.
Mais oui, @ Concordia. Duh. (Wait -here’s an idea: hold it in the gym!) But that’s the bureaucratic mind, I guess.
It seems like this is a typical consequence of Côte-des-Neiges and NDG being joined as one arrondissement; I’ve never understood how that happened; even if the old Decarie Blvd. was once the unifying main boulevard (I don’t know the history well enough to know), the trench is now the definitive divider between what would seem to be naturally separate neighbourhoods. I always feel I’m in a completely different part of town whenever I go over to NDG from CDN.
And the aggregate of the two areas is just too big to be a natural administrative area in any case. If there are other arrondissements just as large, that isn’t necessarily a good justification.