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The emperor's >> In which the mayor goes for a sleep-over in a garbage-strewn neighbourhood, and twists some arms to get it a grant
COMMENTARY
Mayor Pierre Bourque was able to see how they really lived with his own eyes. It wasn't entirely the shining photo opportunity Bourque must have imagined when he accepted six-year-old Mohammed Shaeek's invitation to sleep over at his house two weeks ago. Bourque botched the morning's breakfast a bit: he opened a pepper container from the wrong end, avalanching the scrambled eggs. And some people berated him, including a shirtless barefoot man with a mohawk, who induced some fist-clenching nervousness in the mayor on his way to the dépanneur in the morning. And there was the all-too-evident garbage in the streets--Côte-des-Neiges has to be the most garbage-filled, fly-specked district in the city--and a violent swarming of the mayor's temporary stage by some drunken local gang members while he slept. On the day of the Bourque's town hall meeting with community residents, 14-year-old Kelvin Wright showed me an essay he wrote for school called "My Community Habitable?" in which he describes the garbage and decomposing buildings and hints at the racial hatred bubbling under the surface: "These buildings have been around for years and are decaying every year from rain, snow and even pigeon waste. It's becoming so dangerous that a few years back, a pregnant mother stepped out on her balcony for some fresh air and the balcony gave way and collapsed... Another problem is the landlords and janitors, many [of whom] from experience are mean and wasteful and have no consideration for themselves or the appearance of their building. A friend of mine has stated, and I quote, 'My janitor is very mean to us and is sometimes racist towards us and he wouldn't even let us play on the grass, yelling and saying we are killing it or telling us to go play in the park, which isn't fair, just to put a foot on his grass he screams and makes a fuss.'" After the meeting, I met a person who resembled the janitors and landlords in Wright's essay, an old lady who had lived in Côte-des-Neiges since 1954 and was visibly angered by the thousands of darker-skinned families who had moved into her neighbourhood over the decades. She related that just the other day she had told a seven-year-old girl to move three bikes from the sidewalk. The next day, the girl greeted her with the words, "Bonjour, vieille patate." Threatening to tell her parents, the old lady extracted an apology from the little girl. "I told her, 'You come from India, I'm French Canadian: excuse yourself.'" She gave me a knowing look. "Now, I have nothing against immigration--white, yellow, black. But they must learn to respect us French Canadians." But apart from a few glitches, on the day of Bourque's town hall Côte-des-Neiges seemed like the vibrant, culturally rich community organizers of the mayor's visit felt it had the potential to be. White, yellow and black children swarmed together all over an inflatable bouncing pad brought in for the occasion, and an eight-year-old Filipino girl in a floor-length, gold satin dress--part of the post-town hall entertainment program--charmed everyone with a couple of Céline-like pop songs. And, astonishingly, Bourque and the Côte-des-Neiges residents who showed up for his meeting genuinely seemed to like each other. Bourque genuinely appeared to care as he answered questions from residents about driveway tents being removed upon city orders, gangs who lionized basketball courts at the expense of smaller kids, and mouldy bread that was given out at the local food bank. As for the locals, they heaped Bourque with praise. "He's not plastic; he's real," one onlooker said after Bourque's performance. But the big question remains: will the mayor's sleep-over in this run-down neighbourhood change anything there? In fact, it already has. Saturday, the day after Bourque arrived, the Barclay-Goyer-Bedford Neighbourhood Association finally got its funding from the Anti-Poverty Fund after six different grant applications were refused in the past year. Bourque happened to be sitting next to the minister responsible, Louise Harel, at the Dragon Boat races last Saturday, and put a word on the association's behalf in her ear.
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It's a long-cherished dream for many of us: having whoever's in charge, the person who makes a lot of the decisions that affect your life, sleep over in your grungy apartment one night overlooking your garbage-filled backyard. Well, for a Bangladeshi family in Côte-des-Neiges last week, the impossible came true.