Quote of the week

“I’ll give it a D.” —Cabbie George Papineau, on the city’s snow-clearing performance this winter. Mayor Gérald Tremblay awarded it a B on Monday.

Mountain talk

With the city currently holding public consultations on the future development (or lack of same) of Mount Royal, the Office de consultation publique de Montréal is blitzing the city to get as much feedback as possible.

For only the second time, an online questionnaire has been made available to gauge the public’s mood about what they’d like to see happen to the mountain.

Since the questionnaire went online last month, over 1,200 people have filled it out. The first time the city used an online survey, last autumn, about the mountain’s Peel entrance and the Beaver Lake lawn, less than 200 people answered, says the Office’s secretary general Luc Doré.

“Generally, when we have public consultations on big real estate projects, you get a big turnout because it affects the neighbours,” he says. “But when you have a more general project, which affects the entire city,

it involves everyone and no one, so we have to try to reach out to people.”

You can fill out the questionnaire, available at www2.ville.montreal.qc.ca/ldvdm/jsp/ocpm/ocpm.jsp, until April 20. The office will then compile the results and present their recommendations to the city’s municipal council in August.

Noise for Notre-Dame

Inhabitants of Montreal’s East-End suburb, Hochelaga, have tried the quiet approach: listening, lobbying, letter-writing. It hasn’t worked. Now they’ve decided it’s time to make some noise.

This Sunday will see residents banging on tam-tams, castanets and pots and pans in a “grand tintamarre” to protest Mayor Tremblay’s plan to convert the east of Notre-Dame into an eight-lane expressway.

The city’s plans call it an “urban boulevard,” but critics say the highway could bring as many as 100,000 cars through the area per day, making it the East-End equivalent of the Decarie.

“When you think of an urban boulevard, you think of pedestrians strolling around, people shopping and riding their bikes,” says Matt Leus of La coalition pour humaniser la rue Notre-Dame, which is organizing the demonstration. “But who wants to stroll by the Decarie?”

The coalition says the plan would cut their neighbourhood off from the St. Lawrence, eliminating some potentially impressive waterfront real estate.

Demonstrators are encouraged to dress in green to symbolize sustainability and blue to symbolize reuniting the area with the St. Lawrence.

The Grand Tintamarre takes place Sunday April 13, starting at 1:30 p.m. at Papineau metro. For more information, see rue-notre-dame.org

by MATT JONES

Scientology slagged

Any cult/church/organization that’s good enough for Tom Cruise and Kirstie Alley is good enough for you, you say? Well, hang on a second. Not everyone agrees that the Church of Scientology is quite as wonderful as those glittery Hollywood cool cats assure us all it is. In fact, many will argue Scientology is right up there with the Illuminati so far as being nefarious is concerned.

Among them is a group called Anonymous, who will be meeting Saturday, April 12 at 11:30 a.m. on the corner of Rachel and Papineau for a noon march right on up the street to the local Scientology headquarters to let them know as much.

Anonymous spokesperson Anonbear says this march will focus on the alleged role the church plays in family separations. “Right now our goal is to inform people what Scientology is really about and hopefully get people out of this despicable organization. But our ultimate goal is to see the church of Scientology completely dismantled.”

Given Scientology’s reputation for seeking vengeance upon its critics, Anonbear is recommending that, “protesters wear masks or scarves to protect their identities” come the big day.

For more information, go to partyvanmontreal.blogspot.com.

by CHRIS BARRY

Old cell be gone

Matthew Isganaitis knows how quickly we go through cell phones, and how nasty landfill and leaking chemicals can be. He also knows Sun Youth, the Plateau-based community organization, always needs money. The 26-year-old owner of 1optimum, a local recycler of high-tech equipment, wants to target a bunch of problems with one campaign by, you guessed it, recycling cell phones for charity. The project is called, straightforwardly enough, Recycle Your Cell Phone for Sun Youth, and—well, you get the idea.

Until May 1, Montrealers are invited to drop off their phones at any one of dozens of locations around the city. Each phone will be recycled, meaning some will be fixed and resold, or else gutted for valuable parts and turned into something new. Sponsors pledge a maximum 25 cents per phone dropped off on a maximum 2,000 phones—meaning a maximum donation of $500. All proceeds on the first 2,000 phones go directly to Sun Youth.

“We can reuse almost 100 per cent of a phone’s precious metals,” he says, including coltan, a rare mineral used in all wireless devices found almost exclusively in war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo.

For more info and a list of drop-off spots, see www.1optimum.com.

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Rear-view mirror

14 YEARS AGO - APRIL. 7–14, 1994

On the cover: A baseball leaking the Expos’ red, white and blue, as Al South examines the lamentable state of the sport in Montreal. Despite fielding an excellent team, lack of fan interest, inept management and the looming players’ strike will doom the team, the article predicts.
•Discs of the week: The Charlatans U.K.’s Up to Our Hips and Inspiral Carpets’ Devil Hopping. “These two Manchester standbys [are] getting back to r ’n’ r basics, ditching heavy production and clambering up the slag heap of rock mythology whence their forebears came.”
•Douglas Coupland has “perfected a kind of suburban literature of exhaustion,” writes Bill Dodge about Life After God. “His writing excels in a banal, anti-literary, dead-language zone, a place where authors can take pleasure in exposing themselves as outdated commodities!”
•Best of Montreal invites readers to submit “Your Montreal slogan.”
•Letters address the following: an “incomprehensible” article about racism against natives; “lapdog” music journalists; nakedness on Mirror covers; Raëlians and media hysteria; and bouncers at Foufounes.

Angel >> Protesting the Olympics China has got away with its human rights abuses in Tibet—to say nothing of its supporting loathsome regimes in Sudan, Myanmar and elsewhere—for decades, so seeing the ordinary people of the world speak out against them in London, Paris and San Francisco this week was refreshingly welcome. Awarding the Games to a dictatorship was a bad idea in the first place, but it doesn’t help that the torch is being aggressively escorted by 30 blue-clad Chinese paramilitaries whom Lord Coe, an Olympian and organizer of the 2012 Games, described as thugs. Most governments are happy enough not to offend China, making the protesters’ actions, while occasionally over the top, justifiable and necessary.

Insect >> More construction on the Main Here we go again. Just as St-Laurent was beginning to get its mojo back after endless months of digging, hewing, pouring, drilling and paving, Gaz Métropolitain belatedly decided it needed, for “security reasons,” to revamp its infrastructure too. That means 40 new holes will be scooped out of the new sidewalks, spouting more dust into the air and snarling traffic yet again. Plateau borough mayor Helen Fotopulos was reportedly furious at the utility and is inviting residents and merchants to mail their thoughts to Gaz Métro’s president.