Levelling Laval

>> Cozy hilltop community to be sacrificed
for sprawling metro parking lot

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Photo by Jason Felker

You’d figure a guy who walked over the Viau bridge to take the metro to work daily for 30 years would be pretty happy to learn that a metro station was being built close to his home. And happy Raymond Lanouette was, until he learned that the Agence métropolitaine de transport would be demolishing his duplex in favour of a parking lot.
“We feel as if we’re getting kicked out,” says Lanouette, who must leave his home on Labelle before July 31. After initially refusing to sell, Lanouette gave in to the inevitable but remains unhappy with the terms. “They’ve told us we can’t take our kitchen cabinets, our pool or even our shrubs. Plus they’re making us pay $550 a month in rent until we leave. Having to pay rent on the house you’ve owned for years and planned to stay in for a long time is hard to accept,” he says. “It’s really hard to look for a new place to live when you never dreamed that you’d have to move.”

Lanouette is one of 35 homeowners who are being forced out of their homes on the north side of Labelle, east side of Major, south side of Cartier and west side of des Laurentides as the area will be demolished this autumn for the upcoming Cartier metro station. It’s part of a $380-million plan to extend the metro north by three stations from Henri Bourassa into Laval by January 2006. According to an AMT official, 70 per cent of the affected residents have already sold their homes.

Maurice Monier and Nicole Locas were shocked last year when they read in a local paper that their home for 15 years, a snazzily-decorated former dépanneur built in 1935, would be demolished and paved over. “I would rather somebody told me about this instead of finding it out from the papers,” says Monier.

Tenants, like Annette Paquin, who is being forced out of her $465-a-month apartment, will get considerably less compensation, mainly moving expenses. “It’s impossible to find an apartment at that price,” says the elderly tenant who is desperate for a new home. Next door Léa and Cynthia L’Heureux fume about being forced out of the cozy house on a hill they’ve called home for 32 years. “We were all friends on this street,” says Cynthia, remembering more bucolic days. “There was a swamp in the middle of the field where they’re putting that metro. We used to fish in it. It’s too bad we can’t stay because the metro will be spectacular.”

And Monique Lapierre was attracted to the soon-to-be-demolished area 15 years ago for reasons that must seem ironic now. “We moved here because of rumours of a metro coming to this area. We won’t be able to stay and enjoy it.” Around the corner, soon-to-be-turfed-tenant François Bouchard says the window of opportunity to stop the demolitions was nailed shut from the start. “My roommate spoke out at the AMT consultations a couple of months back. He said the metro plan takes up too much space, but they weren’t listening.”
Former mayoral candidate Raymond Garceau says city hall goofed by neglecting to keep the community abreast of their sad fate. “It’s the custom in Laval for those affected to be the last to find out,” he says. :