by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Montrealers are doubtlessly familiar with the accepted headaches of living in a crowded metropolis. Your neighbour’s loud music is costing you sleep. You wake up with a steaming pile of dog poop on your lawn. You can’t talk to your landlord without daggers drawn.

According to people who work at the grassroots level of urban social groups, they’re all situations that could easily spiral into intense aggravation and potentially violent conflict.

Police and lawyers are one response to such aggravations, but social groups are pushing for an entirely different approach, known as community mediation. Simply put, a volunteer who can be respected by both sides of a dispute listens and considers the complaints, then tries to propose a solution that would make both sides happy.

The practice exists sporadically throughout the province, but a variety of groups want it made more widespread and more available.

Helen Angelopoulos of the downtown YMCA and neighbourhood security organization Tandem Montreal has been converted to the approach. “If a person is playing loud music and gets fined all the time, people think, ‘Throw everybody in jail and they’ll learn,’ but that’s more an expression of retribution,” she says. “Community mediation is more about reconciliation, trying to find different ways to figure things out. If you play loud music, maybe there’s a way to work out a schedule where the person won’t be bothered by it because he’s at work. Maybe there’s a solution.”

Keeping the courts out

Angelopoulos is persuaded of the merits of mediation. “We’d like to find a non-judicial way to resolve conflicts, allow people to iron out differences without always resorting to the criminal courts. Downtown is a microcosm of different types of people: rich, poor, marginalized, workers. There are lots of problems coming into play here so we’d like to offer another solution to resolving conflicts.”

Serge Charbonneau, who runs the Regroupement des organismes de justice alternative du Québec (ROJAQ), an association that organizes Quebec’s 38 alternative justice organizations, suggests mediation in response to the decline of traditional institutions. “There’s a crisis of intermediary mechanisms of social regulation,” he says. “Such things as families, priests, neighbours, schools—all had more influence in the past, but now there’s more tendency to call the police at the first sign of a disagreement. The police are incapable of satisfying all these demands, so we’re in a hole.”

Mediation is cheap, says Charbonneau, requiring almost zero government funding, as proven in scattershot examples where mediation is practice, such as in Drummondville, Longueuil and Duff Court. “These are solid projects, they’re growing all over,” he says.

But fledgling practice has still not taken full flight. “So far, we’re not structured enough to offer citizens a single phone number to get access to community mediation.”

Charbonneau promises people will like the look of it once they inevitably get to know it. “In these cases of conflict, you can get an agreement and it will last,” he says. “Police intervention is a negative symbol of your relations. You want to improve your area you live in, but many people have the impression that police will just accentuate the problem because then it’s no longer about the original conflict, but it’s the intimidation that comes with it. That doesn’t help solve the problem, it makes things worse.”

Power to the people

Another mediation veteran describes the practice as a form of “citizen empowerment.” Sylvie Gougeon, the coordinator of the Centre de formation sociale Marie-Gérin-Lajoie, argues that it would reduce violence, much of which stems from unresolved, festering conflicts that could be prevented. “People want to avoid conflict, but conflict is natural,” she says. “We’ll always have it. The challenge is to manage it.”

She admits, however, the process isn’t infallible. “Mediation doesn’t always work,” she says. “A mediator is neither judge nor referee. It’s somebody who can build bridges, who can listen to and respect and reformulate points of view impartially. We don’t try to convince people, but we try to make them listen and influence them. We don’t promise miracles, but we try to bring peace.”

Gougeon wants to bring mediation onto centre stage. “It’s hard to get a mediator in Quebec. It exists in an informal way, but we want to establish and formalize it. We want to start by educating people about conflict, and then establish a mediation service. It will be one of the tools to settle disputes.”