Roger-Luc Chayer
The City of Montreal recently decided to implement its new traffic plan on the Camillien-Houde road, this unique artery allowing the passage of the East from the city to the West, via the magnificence of Mount Royal. This new plan, which is far from unanimous among Montrealers, consists of no longer allowing the passage of cars from East to West, by placing an obstacle at the Beaver Lake, forcing motorists who come from ‘Is to return home, same thing for those who come from the West or Downtown. By changing centuries of traffic in the heart of the largest park in the city, the elected officials created a kind of Berlin wall, with the same effects and disasters!
Why make such an analogy? It’s simple, the Berlin Wall aimed to divide and destroy the exchanges between two political, economic, social and military visions in the German capital, and whoever dared to question the wall was treated as a bet. That’s exactly what’s happening with the Montreal Wall!
We will not hide reality, although Montreal is the second largest French city in the world, the facts show a different reality. Since the conquest and especially with the strong European immigration of the 19th century, while people speaking languages other than French were established on the West side of the City of Montreal, because there was more space to develop quite simply, the metropolis has become a kind of bipolar entity, a sometimes schizophrenic city that clearly has two totally different faces. On the one hand, in the East, there is the old French-speaking population and the newcomers of Latin, Haitian and European origin (Italy, Portugal, Greece and Spain), while on the West side there are the English-speakers. Ireland, Great Britain, the Germans and Scandinavians.
The only common and central point of passage between the two historical cultural entities was, for more than 200 years, the Camillien-Houde Way now closed, barred, cut in its heart. The wall of Montreal has been placed there, so as to cut off any possibility of communication between communities that sometimes communicate only in very fragile ways. Even in politics, we do not vote in the East (PQ, QS and CAQ) as we vote in the West (Liberals). We are currently talking about a pilot project from June to October 2018, but we are not mistaken. The city wants to make the East-West schism permanent, under the pretext of favoring pedestrians and cyclists. But what will be the long-term consequences for cultural communities? We’ll see!