Linda Gyulai has been one of Montreal’s top investigative reporters for
quite a while and her in-depth articles on corruption and slight of hand
over the years at city hall reads like a B movie script with a cast of
of smiling shifty grifters in suits that includes mayors, city councillors, prominent beauracrats and a scary collection of local Mafia leaders who monopolize the construction industry.
It is a portrait of of a city beset with chronic disfunction and systemic mismanagement.
Today the state of our neglected crumbling roads, sewers, and water mains has reached critical mass, a state of disrepair that is like a tsunami that
now promises to keep on giving.
Meanwhile, Montreal doesn’t even know how many kilometres of road it has repaired or rebuilt since 2002. The city was unable to answer a Montreal Gazette access-to-information request asking for that information.
The city also doesn’t know, or won’t say, how much it costs to fix a kilometre of road, the city’s blue collar union says.
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The city said through a spokesperson that it’s working on an “optimal” method to establish replacement costs. However, the city refused the Montreal Gazette’s request to interview city engineer Jean Carrier, the division chief who is responsible for managing the city’s road network.
Carrier also serves as chairman of a standing committee on above-ground infrastructure for the Centre d’expertise et de recherche en infrastructures urbaines (CERIU), a Quebec think-tank on infrastructure that includes the construction industry, municipalities, provincial departments and universities. It also declined the Montreal Gazette’s interview request.
One thing is apparent: Montreal’s bad roads are good business for the construction industry in Quebec.
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In 2005, Tremblay pledged the city would “eliminate” the road maintenance deficit in 2015, after which it would be able to spend much less per year for regular maintenance.
In 2016, Coderre promised to “eliminate” the maintenance deficit for roads in five years and in 10 years for underground water and sewer infrastructure.
Yet a five-year intervention plan produced by Montreal’s civil service for internal use in 2016 and obtained by the Montreal Gazette this past November, said that even if the city nearly tripled its total annual investment in its road, water and sewer networks, the massive spending increase would end Montreal’s roadwork maintenance deficit only around 2040.
Jess has long said that it’s all about corruption. I have said it is all about incompetence. I think this article shows both are present in good measure. Worse, even if the corruption ceased, it seems to me, the incompetence would still lead to overall rot.
There needs to be a revolution in civil culture in this jurisdiction. Civic values matter. Yet, they are absent here. Not transgressed, they just never were part of social life. I believe the volatility and gouging in the price of gas reflect the same absence. I know of no other jurisdiction in the country that shares this volatility. I don’t think you could get away with this anywhere else but here. People just put up with whatever, cuz they don’t really expect that things can function in a systematic or norm based way. You simply operate with whatever. Civics just means some dinky, overspent ceremonial event.