By Beryl Wajsman, Institute for Public Affairs of Montreal
Monday, August 20, 2007
I can't imagine why anyone should be surprised by the Johnson Commission report on our failing transport infrastructure. It is just confirmation of more of the same. Particularly for Montrealers.
This city's administration has failed to address and improve any of its basic core service responsibilities. Eighty percent of our water lines leak. Our world-famous potholes are now craters. The transit system is in gridlock. No one intervenes in the cemetery dispute leaving hundreds of bodies unburied. The Agglomeration Council has degenerated into paralysis. The Mayor and the borough mayors can't even get our blue-collar workers to pick up the garbage and clean our streets properly. And to top it all off Montrealers got the biggest percentage property tax hike in North America just before the city announced a $140 million surplus. The city's solution is to deflect public attention from the municipal nonfeasance of an administration unable to deal with a groaning bureaucracy by demonizing all of us.
When Tourism Commissioner Charles Lapointe criticized the cleanliness of our town he wasn't talking just to its citizens. He was criticizing the administrations. But the city's answer was to let Benoit Labonte, mayor of downtown Ville-Marie borough, institute some of the most egregious fines literally criminalizing all citizens. The very pamphlets produced stated in bold type that the "guilty will be punished". Guilty of what? Guilty of not taking over the responsibilities of the city workers that's what. What we're really guilty of is being too lethargic to march on all the city halls and throw the rascals out.
In the past four weeks Ville Marie's cleaning cops have issued almost $1 million in fines. The new regulations make merchants and property owners responsible for cleaning several feet of public sidewalks outside their premises. Taking graffiti off their buildings. Assuring that locks are kept on garbage dumpsters that they don't even control. And attaching ashtrays next to the doorways of all entrances to main buildings and commercial enterprises with street frontage. Here's a memo to Messrs. Tremblay and Labonte. Gentlemen, cleaning is what we pay taxes for you guys to get done.
Among the most insane fines issued were several thousand dollars to Peter Sergakis. He actually installed ashtrays at the entrances to his buildings in the Gay Village but they were ripped off by street people looking for cigarette butts. An owner can't visit his buildings everyday to make sure that the ashtrays are still attached. He didn't even know they had been ripped off until he got the fines.
The owners of the Hermes Building on Peel Street have received over $4000 in fines in one week for the same nonsense. The most egregious cases were those of a caf and a restaurant in the building. Neither had ashtrays next to their doorways. The caf because it didn't allow smoking even on its terrace and there are some half-dozen stickers plastered even on tabletops making this clear. That would exempt the caf from having to install ashtrays even by Ville Marie's own regulations. But that didn't stop the cleaning cop from issuing a fine not to the caf but to the building owner who wasn't even aware.
The restaurant had several dozen ashtrays on tables on its terrace but not a "regulation" one screwed in next to the doorway. The building owner got a fine for that one too. When I asked Ville Marie's director of public affairs what the reasoning was behind that, he said that the ashtrays on the terrace tables wouldn't be there in winter. When I suggested it might be more appropriate therefore to wait for winter to issue fines I got no response other than "we are just applying the law". With apologies to Gertrude Stein, in Montreal an ashtray is not an ashtray.
Crescent Street's Pub Claddagh got hit with fines because its garbage dumpster had a broken hinge. But the owner didn't know it since he had contracted with an outside service that took care of the dumpsters because the city refused to pick up garbage in that lane. Again, the garbage company didn't get fined, the owner did. Some $1200 of them. They are $620 a crack.
Why hit the owners? Easy. Because if they don't pay the fines the city will put liens on their buildings. The "cleanliness" campaign is nothing but an extortion racket. The biggest culprits in producing garbage are the city's own trucks and workers who routinely cascade down streets lobbing garbage through the air into the cavernous rear ends of garbage trucks. Most times it lands. Often it doesn't. Anyone who has followed one can tell you that cigarette butts on the streets are nothing compared to the stuff spewing out of these back-ends.
Dan Romano, founder and President of CAGE, Citizens Against Government Encroachment, mockingly suggested on The Last Angry Man radio program on the New 940 Montreal that Montreal's police should follow the same policy. Whenever a home invasion or burglary is reported don't spend time finding the criminal. Just fine the home or store owner. It's the same logic.
This latest campaign of demonization and deflection comes on top of 300% parking meter hikes announced just before the city released figures showing it had increased its revenues from meters 59% year over year. Once again the citizens were blamed. We have to be taught not to take our cars so often because we are polluting the environment. The city needs more money to clean up after us. Yet another lie. A Mercer International study demonstrated Montreal was cleaner than most cities including "Toronto the Good".
The Mayor's office has yet to answer why its director of communications issued a letter in February insisting that the city needed the meter hikes because it was desperate for an additional $1.8 million for its cleanliness campaign yet we found out that the hikes will give an additional $20 million – and that's above the 59% revenue jump. Didn't the city know it before? Was nobody home at the accounting office? Maybe everyone at City Hall was too busy riding the new Laval metro extension that came in some $350 million over budget.
The operations over which the city has control accounts for only about 2% of emissions in Montreal. All this eco-theocracy is just is another attempt to load onto the backs of citizens what the city itself cannot do. But the stupidity of the argument is revealed by its contradictory motives.
On the one hand the city wants to collect more taxes and fees and tickets to meet its budgets. To do that it needs a functioning, vibrant city business core. The Tremblay administration has burdened small business owners, who account for 80% of new job creation and much of the city's tax revenues, with the highest tax rates Montreal has seen since then Mayor Jean Dor's surtax-driven stampede of business out of downtown. Most are barely hanging on. The Dore years saw 20-25% of downtown storefronts empty due to insanely high business surtaxes that reached 36% of commercial tenants' annual rents. Those taxes were only reduced in the administration of Mayor Pierre Bourque. Discouraging automobile usage will certainly do nothing to revive retail commercial viability. And with so many bars and restaurants closing - and others reeling - from revenue drops of 25-33% after the smoking ban according to Voula Demopoulos, Montreal's downtown may just die for good.
To top it all off this administration, which cut our police force by almost 18% at a time when street gang violence is skyrocketing, found the money to hire an additional 110 cops to give jaywalking tickets. Jaywalking in Montreal! My, my, my. What a heinous offense! What an urgent priority! What is heinous is that Montrealers have to walk around with identification as if this was Beirut or Moscow because if you don't have some with you the police can't give you a ticket. They may just have to take you to the cop shop for "processing".
This administration has no moral authority to govern. It continues policies of profligate pilferage of our pockets to fund programs that no one demanded and no suffrage affirmed. Deflecting Montrealers' attention with nanny-state regulations won't cut it any longer. Legislating niceness is not only not nice – it's not fooling anybody anymore. Where's the money's going? Why all the overruns? Who's responsible for ignoring core priorities? There aren't any straight answers.
The credo of this government is "invent first; tax second; explain never". All levels of government are exciting the people's disgust in fiscal affairs. But Montreal's administration is exciting the people's contempt. And that's just one small step away from civil disobedience.
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