Dirty politics

>> Fining merchants and building
owners is the wrong way to clean up
the city, says a new coalition

THESE PEOPLE CAN COST YOU $500: City inspectors in uniform

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

They aren’t exactly the Gestapo, but Montreal’s new cleanliness cops have got more than a few people nervous and angry. When it was announced late last month that, as of June 1, city hall and the boroughs—especially downtown Ville-Marie—were going to get serious and crack down on the filth plaguing our sidewalks and storefronts, merchants across the city started wondering whether they’d be paying a hefty fine just because some slob dropped his hot dog on their front stoop.

The city is hiring 50 full-time inspectors, with an additional 13 slated for Ville-Marie. Their job is essentially to find filth and fine those responsible up to $500 for a first offence. The get-tough strategy is new and no-nonsense, says Marcel Tremblay, the executive committee member responsible for cleanliness, because past efforts of asking storeowners to keep their areas spick and span came to nothing. He says it’s aimed primarily at establishments like bars and restaurants that leave rotting garbage out overnight, but city officials admit that homeowners and individuals, especially smokers— now chased out of all bars and restaurants and polite company in general—can be targeted as well.

“I’ve seen people smoking and throw their butts on the sidewalk despite the fact that they’re standing right next to an ashtray,” says Jacques-Alain Lavallée, the communications rep for the Ville-Marie borough. “Like [borough mayor] Benoît Labonté said, recess is over.”

“We will be operating this by-law very strictly,” warns Tremblay.

“No more Mr. Nice Guy,” said his brother, Mayor Gérald Tremblay on Tuesday.

NEAT FREAK-OUT

“You can quote me on this: these politicians are up shit creek without a paddle,” says Chris Karidogiannis, the head of the Parc Avenue Merchants’Association and the man who led the charge against the artery’s renaming. Ever since the renaming was first proposed last year, he’s had little love for Gérald Tremblay’s administration. “If I get fined for having graffiti on my building, and I see someone spray-painting my building, what can I do? The cops won’t do anything about it. So we might have people taking justice into their own

hands with these graffiti artists.” He says he doesn’t condone vigilante justice, but can foresee merchants’ rage boiling over if they catch a graffiti artist on their own. But the cleanliness by-law is just one irritant of many facing the city’s small businesses. This week, Karidogiannis will join Peter Sergakis, the owner of the Sky nightclub complex and some strip clubs, and other merchants in a coalition to denounce what they consider the city’s control-freakishness. The cleanliness by-law, the rising price and extended hours of parking meters and the over-taxation of the Montreal business community are all making their lives miserable, they say.

“The problem is, there are no business people in city council,” says Karidogiannis. “They have no idea what it takes to run a business, how to run a business or how important business is to a city. They’re the most clued-out administration, they make me want to go back to the good old days of the Bourque administration.”

Strong words, given the previous administration’s penchant for control. But the Tremblay team may be showing signs of suffering from the same disease. Besides the cleanliness crackdown and the illadvised Parc Avenue affair, the city administration also recently announced it would be tightening the reigns on the city’s calèche drivers, especially their aesthetic quality, and cutting the number of tattoo and henna artists plying their trade in Place Jacques-Cartier this summer to eight, down from 16 last year. The expropriation of strip bars and porno shops along the St- Laurent tenderloin between Ste- Catherine and René-Lévesque, to make way for Espace culture Montréal, the Quartier du spectacles’ eight-storey glass office tower, is slated to go ahead.

PAYING THE PRICE

Add to that the city’s everincreasing taxes, and you have one unhappy electorate: A recent poll by Decima Research found the mayor’s approval rating hovering around 40 per cent, mostly due to taxation. The environment, transit and yes, garbage were also problem areas for the administration—the last one especially since January, when Tourism Montreal boss Charles Lapointe publicly criticized the city for its slovenliness.

But Peter Sergakis thinks that making merchants and building owners pay the price for the new, harsh focus on public cleanliness is misguided. “I don’t think it’s justified,” he says. “I don’t mind doing it on a voluntary basis, but this doesn’t make sense. We pay our taxes to clean up the sidewalks and the streets. The sidewalks aren’t ours, they belong to the city. I have no control over people walking in the street 24 hours a day. The city is, one by one, discharging themselves of their responsibilities.”