by PATRICK LEJTENYI

The city of Montreal is getting right back on that horse.

Last year, in an attempt to group the various parties put on by the city’s diverse Caribbean communities, the city decided to move almost all of them from their traditional stomping grounds in NDG and Côte-des-Neiges down to Parc Jean-Drapeau.

The two-month, weekend-only Montreal International Tropical Festival was a flop. Attendance was nowhere near what organizers had anticipated, as many potential festival-goers decided the park was too far, and parking too expensive, for them to bother. Another problem was that too many people just didn’t know the thing was going on.

This year, however, things will be different. Or so promises the mayor’s brother, NDG-Côte-des-Neiges city councillor Marcel Tremblay, the executive committee member in charge of intercultural relations. The Weekends du monde au Parc Jean-Drapeau will be bigger, better, more publicized and more diverse than ever before, he says. Beginning Saturday, July 8, and continuing through to Sunday, August 13, food, music, handicrafts, family activities and games will have the park humming Thursdays through Sundays. Tremblay says 55 countries will be represented, from the Middle East, Africa, Asia, South America and the Caribbean.

But one high-profile Montreal Caribbean says he and his organization will not participate in the post-Carifiesta festivities scheduled for Parc Jean-Drapeau on July 8.

From black to red

Noel Alexander, president of the Jamaica Association of Montreal, is still fuming over last year’s debacle. He says the city so botched the job last year that it’s poisoned relations between his group and the powers that be downtown. Plus, it cost him a bundle.

“I personally lost $32,000,” he says. While he acknowledged the city put up a fair amount of money for lighting, sound, security and a stage for Fab 5, a popular Jamaican group, he had to pay their appearance fee, their transportation and accommodation. A handful of people showed up for the show, and he was left deep in debt. “The city didn’t give us one penny” to recoup the losses, he says.

Alexander has a long list of complaints, and not all of them stem from financial considerations. One is a lack of respect he feels city officials show the black community, and another is an unwillingness to trust them with any money. He’s especially peeved at the city charging people a $5 entry fee this year. “You have to wonder how the city operates,” he says. “There’s something radically wrong there.”

He believes the problem stems in part from a lack of representation of people of colour at city hall. “It’s all white folks in the city council,” he says. “In a neighbourhood like Côte-des-Neiges, that’s 40 per cent ethnic, there’s no representation.” It’s true: all six councillors from NDG-Côte-des-Neiges are white, and five of them are male.

“I don’t want to call it racism, but they just do as they like,” he continues. “It’s damn ridiculous. They don’t take my calls, they don’t get back to me—I don’t know what the problem is, but something has to be done. There just seems to be one way of operating for some communities and another for others.”

He says problems grew on the community party front beginning in 2003, the last time the Jamaica Association used Van Horne Park as a venue. After a number of complaints, the annual party moved to Blue Bonnets in 2004. The following year, the city revoked their funding, leaving the Association responsible for footing the bill.

Unity problems

But Marcel Tremblay thinks the anglo Caribbean community is itself partly to blame, saying there are always problems getting the community to “unite.” But he did concede to throwing the Caribbean component of the festival the same day as the Carifiesta parade, which he helped keep downtown and which wraps up near Berri metro—a short hop away from Parc Jean-Drapeau. Shuttle buses from Jean-Drapeau metro station to the site, and improved signage, will make accessing the festival much easier, he says.

Last week, the city announced $300,000 in funding for ethnic community groups, on top of the $550,000 the city’s spending on the festival. Additional expenditures bring the total to over $1-million the city’s spending on promoting Montreal’s cultural communities. But the $5 entry fee to the festival will help the park, a para-municipal organization, turn a profit.

Plus, he says, the park will offer some much-needed greenspace access to immigrant communities who often don’t have much in the neighbourhoods they inhabit.