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Canadian Urbanism Uncovered

POLL: Are Montreal’s boroughs too big?

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One of my professors at McGill used to refer jokingly to “NDG angst,” which is what people who lived in NDG felt when they compared their middle-class but somewhat ratty neighbourhood with the fine polish of next-door Westmount. It’s more than just a joke, though: in terms of the quality of its municipal services, NDG fares poorly not only in comparison to the wealthy municipalities that surround it on three sides but even to Côte des Neiges, with which it shares the city’s largest borough, Côte-des-Neiges—Notre-Dame-de-Grâce.

Maybe being part of such a large borough is the reason why the quality of NDG’s public services is so lacking. “NDG needs to separate,” declared lower NDG resident and Coolopolis blogger Kristian Gravenor earlier this week. “When they drew the map and jammed these two boroughs together into one borough, the pencil pushers were clearly tripping on lysergic acid,” wrote Gravenor. “In a city where many boroughs and municipalities have under 20,000 people, this single monster borough covers an area of 20 square kilomters and 163,000 residents.”

CDN/NDG isn’t the only unwieldy borough in the city. Park Extension, Villeray and St. Michel are all combined into the same administrative area. Ville-Marie stretches all the way east to Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, lumping disparate neighbourhoods like Ste. Marie, Old Montreal and Shaughnessy Village together. So what do you think — are Montreal’s boroughs too big? We spent years dealing with the merger/demerger fiasco, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider ways to make Montreal more responsive to the local needs of its citizens.

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One comment

  1. Hi-I found your site while trying to get information about the garbage pick-up schedule for the Lachine borough. They reduce garbage pick-up to once a week during the winter but go back to two pick-ups during summer. They handed out little cards with the schedule but people misplace them and, since I don’t live in the borough but own a building there, have never had one. This morning I called the borough office at seven hoping that there would be an automated menu giving the garbage pick-up schedule. No such luck. Not only do you have to wait ’til 8:30 to get somebody; there is no automated menu at all!!
    This is just one more example of many displaying the kind of rampant dysfunctionality present in the Montreal urban environment. I am becoming more and more impatient with the constant foot-dragging, bickering and general ineptness of our fair city. How long will it take to get a consistent system of curb-side re-cycling going, for example. I live in NDG where at least there is green box collection once a week. For a while now it has seemed to me that one garbage pick-up per week would be sufficient especially in neighborhoods of primarily single-family houses and duplexes. The extra day could be used to pick-up organic and yard waste, which could be composted by the city.
    The whole merger/demerger episode, which is still on-going, is another sad aspect of the Montreal metropolis. The way the mergers were instigated at the behest of the provincial government started things off on the wrong foot from the beginning. Now, the tattered remains of resentful, demerged municipalities, over-sized underfunded boroughs and the top-heavy center city waste time, energy and money in protracted bickering. A prime example of this is the non-extistent bike path in Montreal West. NDG (I guess) painted bicycle images on the street right up to the Mtl. West border along Broughton. This is supposed to be a continuation of the bike path along DeMaisonneuve which leads ultimately to the Lachine Canal bike path through the former Ville St-Pierre. As an act of non-compliance, I suppose, Montreal West has never repainted the lines which once existed indicating the bike path through their little town. To make matters worse, cars are now parked on top of the bicycle emblems put there by NDG along Broughton and bike riders are forced out into the narrow street. A supreme irony is that while NDG has a very long border along the Lachine canal there has never been an access to the Lachine canal bike path in NDG. Instead, bikers have to pass through either Westmount or Montreal West to get to it!
    And another thing, most complaints about potholes come from drivers of cars. There has been little discussion of how potentially dangerous the state of our streets are to cyclists and pedestrians. If you dare to go out walking or oycling you might want to wear a dust mask too since the street cleaners seems to be exceptionally slow this year about getting winters accumulated crud off the streets and sidewalks. Our current dry weather is creating dust clouds whenever a car or bus drives through the piles of dirt along the curbs.
    What Montrealers should ask themselves is why our city seems to be in such constant disarray? Why is there never enough money budgeted to do a good job? Why is there never enough money when we pay substantial taxes? Why do basic services seem to be getting worse? Why can’t police control hulligans in downtown Montreal and yet they slap a $628 ticket on someone sitting in a park because he made the mistake of taking their picture?
    Something is rotten in the state of Quebec…..GG-NDG

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