More homes, Mr. Mayor

Hot off Gérald Tremblay’s third mayoralty victory on Sunday, François Saillant of social housing pressure group FRAPRU is urging him to keep his promise to build new social housing units in his next mandate. And while Saillant believes that Tremblay’s promise of at least 5,000 new units is a good step, he’s also hoping that the mayor will go above and beyond his commitments and push for provincial and federal money to build more.

“When we met Tremblay at the beginning of October, he was not proposing anything more, anything above the 5,000,” says Saillant. “We would like him to be a bit more combative” while chasing housing subsidies from Quebec City and Ottawa.

Saillant also believes the mayor hasn’t gone far enough with dealing with decrepit housing units. Apartments that are in disrepair or unsanitary need to be expropriated from their owners, says Saillant.

What is also lacking—and what FRAPRU has repeatedly asked for—is a series of public consultations on the future of the city’s vision for the downtown core in its entirety, and not piecemeal districts and issues.

“What kind of city does the city envisage, and for whom?” Saillant asks.

PATRICK LEJTENYI

No to new Turcot

While few would argue the Turcot interchange isn’t in desperate need of repair, not everyone is excited about the present plans for its restoration.

“We feel strongly that the proposed lower structure will have a negative impact on public health, on our environment and on the socio-economic development of the Southwest,” says Genevieve Locas, spokesperson for the Mobilization Turcot coalition.

“Right now, the government is planning to increase the number of cars using the interchange which will obviously have a significant impact on not just the neighbourhoods around the interchange itself, but along the entire highway. The proposed plan involves demolishing 166 nearby housing units, and because they don’t want to elevate the structure, they’ll be splitting up and isolating neighbourhoods. Not only does this project lack vision, it endangers Montrealers’ health and well-being.”

In the meantime, the coalition is organizing a march leaving Sunday, Nov. 8, at 1:30 p.m. from the Lionel-Groulx metro station, which Locas says “will inform the public that le Conseils des Ministres will be making their decision about the project soon and that we need to keep fighting for a better solution.”

For more information, go to mobilisation-turcot.info.

CHRIS BARRY

Art properties

Few people who scrawl their nicknames on buildings likely worry about what would happen to their street cred if they got famous. One exception might be Roadsworth, aka Montrealer Peter Gibson, whose decorative additions to street signage got him slapped with potential fines of $250,000 by the city in 2004. A sympathetic following of pedestrian art connoisseurs came to his defence and this gave him a foot up to get commissions for his work from cities from Berlin to Baie-St-Paul.

All this has Robert Vitulano of Rethinking Intellectual Property Policy wondering about the contradictions of street art, the subject of the McGill club’s upcoming conference Arting in the Streets: Graffiti’s Challenge to Intellectual Property.

“IP [Intellectual property] is about how an idea can be property. Graffiti challenges that because you take something that’s illegal into the streets and make it public. But unlike IP, it’s not for monetary gain,” says Vitulano. “Now Roadsworth is getting paid by cities to do his pieces. Is it still a challenge to IP or has street art been co-opted into the legal framework?”

Arting takes place Monday, Nov. 9 at 5:30 p.m. in room 100 of the McGill Faculty of Law (3644 Peel). Details at: ripp.mcgill.ca

MATT JONES

Alley fights

As plans are being made to transform Milton Park’s tiny Parc Oxygène into yet another mini-condo project, local residents, who actually transformed the former alleyway on Hutchison near Prince Arthur into the green space it is today through private donations and volunteer labour, are vowing no such thing will happen without a major fight.

“We were told repeatedly by the city that we needn’t concern ourselves with this because the way the property was zoned meant it would never realistically be developed,” says Norman Nawrocki, whose La Petite Hutchison Co-op is located next door to the disputed turf. “The community has nurtured this property for years, investing in it both financially and through our labour. Yet now the city has re-zoned it without even consulting us and are preparing to develop it.”

Nawrocki would like to see the city purchase the property at a fair price from its current owner, Maurice Fattal, and finally recognize Parc Oxygène as an official public space. To date, the city has been resisting out of concern other neighbourhoods might start making similar demands—which could get expensive.

“That’s their concern, but this would be setting a positive precedent,” insists Nawrocki. “Every city block should have—and needs—a Parc Oxygène.”

To sign their petition, go to miltonparc.org.

CHRIS BARRY

Rear-view mirror

15 YEARS AGO - NOV. 3–10, 1994

On the cover: Jean Doré, just before a municipal election. Kristian Gravenor interviews three candidates for mayor. Doré, “red faced,” he writes, “is talking faster than he’s breathing.” Pierre Bourque is “an enigma paper-clipped to a paradox. A career manager who wants to cut management.... A tireless worker who’s in bed at 10 every night.” As for former Outremont mayor Jérôme Choquette, “sucking a DuMaurier to its filter,” only surtaxes inspire him “to speak in florid metaphors.”
• The Mirror grudgingly endorses Doré in an editorial.
• “We believe in raising shit as much as we can. That’s why we call ourselves Public Enema,” says guitarist/vocalist Mark Robertson.
• Tom Jones’s The Lead and How to Swing It is Disc of the Week.
• During a rare presser for Bullets Over Broadway, Woody Allen says he has not seen his adopted daughter Dylan in “over 25 months. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be seeing her.”
• The Love Boat’s Gavin MacLeod will appear in Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig at the Saydie.

Angel >> L’Anse à l’Orme’s reprieve Lost in the white noise of big city election news this week was a dramatic reversal of fortunes of a former mayor of a sleepy West Island suburb. Bill Tierney, the longtime boss of Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, was turfed out of office on Sunday, in no small part because of his insistence on salivating over l’Anse à l’Orme’s development potential. Tierney had long eyed the 74-hectare woodland on the island’s western tip as a potential moneymaking source, and his administration was gung-ho to build on at least 19 hectares. Ste-Anne’s new mayor kyboshed the bid, and has vowed to protect one of the island’s last remaining bits of nature.

Insect >> Maclean’s Last week’s pre-election cover story was sold as a salacious, double-barrel exposé of the sleaze infesting Montreal’s politics. The city, the magazine’s cover blared, is “a corrupt, crumbling, mob-ridden disgrace” and a “disaster.” Easy there, unimportant Canadian magazine—things aren’t quite that bad. Hysterical, FOX News-like sensationalism is unlikely to improve your lagging readership and dwindling reputation. This is the same magazine that played up Guy Laliberté’s debauched parties with excerpts from Ian Halperin’s otherwise tame biography and painted Montreal as a hotbed for pedophilia. Given its lame conservative leanings, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Maclean’s doesn’t understand or like Montreal very much. épais!