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Life returns to the canal >> St-Henri is being transformed and even critics admit it's an impressive sight
by JACQUIE CHARLTON
The expropriation and razing of what was once a small community in western St-Henri might symbolize what took place in the district as a whole in the past 40 years. As the industries on the canal closed one by one, St-Henri saw much of its shops and commercial bustle die and most of its young working population depart. As for the Lachine Canal, unused and junk-filled, it's become a symbol of the area's decline; at its best, on the green riverbanks, it's a rather beautiful example of how even a heavily industrialized place can turn nearly rural if nature is left alone to do its work. Everything might change--radically--when the Lachine Canal is opened for boating in 2002. Already parks are being laid on what was once scrubby industrial land, shops and cafés have opened up, and houses are selling here at a faster clip than anywhere else on the island.
Foggy project Amidst all the excitement, though, there are fears that the ordinary people of St-Henri and adjoining Pointe St-Charles won't reap the benefits of the canal project like the developers, boaters and home buyers moving in. "We're in a little bit of a fog on the project. It's as if the program developers are running the whole thing," says Pointe St-Charles independent councillor Marcel Sévigny. Sévigny recently held a public meeting on the project, where 150 Pointe St-Charles residents showed up to voice their concerns. Besides the perceived lack of public consultation, residents wondered aloud about motor boats stirring up old pollution, condos blocking access to the canal and condo developments driving up rents. Some also expressed a wish that the abandoned Redpath sugar plant on the Pointe St-Charles part of the canal be turned into a community and historical centre, and not more condos as other factories have been. Sévigny wants a more neighbourhood-inclusive canal project--spinoff jobs for the districts' underemployed residents. He also hopes that the newcomers to the canal's banks will mingle with the existing population, shop at their stores and respect the dynamic of the old districts--not remain in manicured yuppie enclaves as the condo residents in Little Burgundy ended up doing. And, adds Sévigny, "We don't want an Old Montreal glamour development on the Lachine Canal."
Developer's wet dream But even a guy like Sévigny will admit that the project is doing the neighbourhood good. Certainly, ex-St-Henri resident Bouchard, the city's man on the project, is glowing about it. With the help of architectural drawings, he shows the changes that will come in the next few years along its banks. He admits the improvements might drive up rents, but says the amount of available housing is still large enough to offset it. And the condos being built, he says, are not luxurious, but affordable for middle-class and even lower-middle-class families. Quibbling, of course, is inevitable for a project of this scope. Change can be scary. But when everything around you has been left for dead for so long, it can be pretty exhilarating as well. "The industries have all left for other countries," says Bouchard. "But life is going to come back to the canal."
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Pierre Bouchard, the City of Montreal's man in charge of the development of the Lachine Canal, grew up near its banks in the neighbourhood of St-Henri. As a boy he would go to the canal to watch ships go by, and though he never swam in it, his parents did in the days before the pollution got too bad. He lived in a house that was expropriated one day to make way for a vast old folks' complex. Developers even razed a church, the Église Ste-Clothilde, to make way for it, and left only its chapel intact, buried deep in the heart of the old folks' home for its residents to use.