>> The ABCs of the Lachine Canal renovation project

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Photos by Jason Felker

As far as symbols for Montreal’s long slide into economic lethargy go, the Lachine Canal was a pretty good one. Once a humming artery of shipping and industry, the canal fell into increasing irrelevance with the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in the late 1950s. Too dirty for recreation, too obsolete for major shipping and too marginalized for industry, the canal became a toxic, open-air ditch, stretching the 14.5-kilometres from the eastern tip of Lac St. Louis to the Old Port. It finally closed for good in 1970.
But that’s about to change. As of May 14, the canal will be reopened to pleasure boating, thanks to a five-year, $85-million project funded by the federal government, which has run it under Parks Canada since 1978, the province and the city. The walls have been reinforced, the five locks have been upgraded, new bridges built and a new marina basin has been excavated at the base of Peel, opening a waterway to the Old Port. An estimated 4,000 to 10,000 pleasure boaters will take to the water this summer.

All, however, is not well. While the three levels of government are happily thumping themselves on the back for a job well done, some significant questions surrounding the project remain.

The first one long-time Plateau residents are familiar with. While the canal project was designed as an integral part of the revitalization of the city’s South-west, the influx of new, young wealth threatens to change the face of a traditionally working-class neighbourhood. Abandoned factories and warehouses, including the landmark Redpath sugar refinery, are going condo, and a building boom along the canal banks has seen condominium apartments sprout up over once-empty lots. And while most people see economic development as an unqualified good, a lot of people aren’t very happy about it.

Consultation? What consultation?

When the Bourque administration announced the revitalization project in 1997, alarms were already going off in the heads of residents and community groups. Marie-Josée Corriveau, the coordinator of Regroupement info-logement, a housing group in Pointe St-Charles, says the previous city administration went about the project pell-mell, with little public consultation and a heavy pro-development bias.
“Bourque created a speculative real estate market,” she says. “There has been a dramatic drop in vacancy rates here and the St-Henri condominiums have created tensions with the constant truck traffic. The development has also affected taxes and rent.” Which matters in a neighbourhood with far more tenants than owners. According to 1996 census data—the last available figures—just over 75 per cent of the Montreal South-west borough residents are tenants.

Corriveau charges that the previous administration ignored recommendations put forward in a report tabled in the early ’90s on relaunching the economically depressed communities in the South-west. “According to the initial directive planning,” she says, “there were plans for financial measures that would support the area’s development, which would allow people to take advantage of it. Any development, we believe, must be well managed. We have to guarantee that residents can stay where they are. That means continuing access to low-income housing, guaranteeing that existing jobs will be maintained and grow, and guarantee access to new jobs and training.”

Jobs and job training are big issues. The average annual income of borough residents is $18,226; the average household income is $29,738. Both are well below the city’s average. And while employment did grow by 24 per cent between 1996 and 2000, the manufacturing sector still provides a quarter of all jobs. Unemployment is also above city average.

Rich ghetto, poor ghetto

The question of jobs is one that Pierre Morrissette, the director of community development and social economy at the Regroupement pour la relance économique et sociale du sud-ouest (RÉSO), is concerned with directly. RÉSO is a community development corporation that has been working at revitalizing the neighbourhood and has been intimately involved in the Lachine Canal project. While Morrissette likes the idea of a renovated canal, he, like Corriveau, remains wary of what benefits it will bring to the people who have lived around it for years.

“Our biggest preoccupation is to ensure that the project benefits the population. It’s an opportunity to improve the quality of life of the citizens of the South-west, not only residents but businesses as well. But it’s important that development not stretch the social fabric too far.”

The social fabric is already showing signs of strain. Morrissette knows that the influx of condo-dwellers has created some tensions among their lower-income neighbours, especially because of increased property values and the resultant shortage in affordable housing.

“The development of condominiums has people fearing that there is an expropriation by the privileged class, and it’s creating two distinct ghettos: one poor, the other rich,” he says. “We have to create some sort of interface between the communities that will encourage penetration into the historic parts of the neighbourhood.”

The $85-million facelift

Nevertheless, officials from all three levels of government are proud of what they’ve achieved. Not only has the project been completed on time, says Daniel Groulx, the section chief of parks and structural projects at the city’s Department of Parks, Gardens and Greenspaces, but planning on the second phase of investment is proceeding apace. The much-anticipated Montreal Summit, to be held in early June, will help determine where and how the next as-yet-undetermined sum of money will be spent.
Revitalization has also given much of the canal banks a much-needed facelift. Near the now-trendy Atwater market, three parks have been created, a public square is being built and an information centre will be installed in the spring. There will also be a quay for boaters.
The extension of Peel south, Groulx believes, will also open southern downtown to easier traffic circulation. “This will get the clientele from the Old Port and bring them west, which brings value to the Peel basin,” he says. The 270,000 cubic metres of earth moved for the project will “open up the circulation in the city. It will bring a lot of urban life to the area.”

Most of the earth moved was landfill, leftovers from the 1960s metro digs. And while that earth wasn’t too dirty to dig up, the rest of the canal’s soil is. A 1996 federal-and-provincial report recommended that the sediment in the canal not be disturbed—moving it would do more harm than good.

“Basically, the report said that if there was a risk, we should react. If there wasn’t a risk, there’s no point in getting rid of the dirty soil,” says François Granger, Parks Canada’s environmental director for the project. He says that his department, in partnership with Environment Canada, conducted numerous studies on the project and will continue to do so over the summer. He says that so far, studies show that pleasure boating does not pose a risk to stirring up the canal’s toxic stew. But as a precaution, Parks Canada has covered the soil with large geo-membranes around two of the five locks and covered them with a foot of rocks to prevent any disturbance of toxic sediments.

Seeping sludge

But the feds have not done nearly enough to secure the canal’s toxic sludge, some environmentalists charge. Daniel Green, the executive director of the Montreal-based Société pour vaincre la pollution (SVP), calls the reopening of the canal “an accident waiting to happen.”

He charges that the federal government duped the public. The study found that there is no danger of stirring up toxic sediments, which Green says include arsenic, cyanide, PCBs, lead, mercury, cadmium and other industrial muck spewed into the canal long ago, is not pertinent to the pleasure boat plan. “The study was on the effects of canoes and pedal craft, not of big yachts,” Green says. The yachts’ keels, he fears, could rip open the membranes when water levels are low. Any mistake by the locks could also prove environmentally disastrous. As for the government’s assurances that pleasure boating will not disturb the sediments, he remains “very skeptical. [Their assertion is] too good to be true.”

Disturbing the sludge, he says, would mean really bad news for the St. Lawrence River. The rush of filth into the river will contaminate the river even more, including the McGill basin, long used for boating sports and pleasure cruisers. Fish and beluga whales will die off from pollution even faster than they are now, he warns.

For the canal to be completely safe for pleasure boating, he says the soil would have to be dredged, decontaminated and put back into the banks. He puts the price tag between $30- and 50-million.

Neighbourhood contaminants

Furthermore, pollutants are not strictly limited to the soil underneath the water. For over a century, the canal’s banks were the site of the country’s largest industrial park. That means the land on which new buildings are being constructed is dirty too.

“Every time you move a rock [by the canal], you find contaminants,” says Regroupement info-logement’s Corriveau. “And we know developers don’t decontaminate the soil. They find all kinds of ways to avoid doing that. As for buyers, they don’t ask too many questions about decontamination. We’d like there to be much more rigorous analyses.”

Daniel Green shares the sentiment. “We’ve identified several toxic hot spots, and even some hazardous waste sites” by the canal, he says. “It’s buyer beware. Anyone who is buying property there should demand to see core sample testings on the property and the property next to it. There needs to be full disclosure on contamination.”

As if digging up dirty soil isn’t bad enough, some of the buildings being built are said to be pretty ugly. Notorious Plateau-stilts-condo developer David Owen has some building projects on the go, and the hodge-podge of buildings has heritage groups worried.

“There is a general agreement that heritage is at risk all around the canal,” says Heritage Montreal’s Dinu Bumbaru. “There seems to be a lack of common vision.”

Perhaps most appalling to him is the development project across the street from the Atwater market: standing above a once-empty lot will soon loom an eight-story condo building and a Super C supermarket.
“The market tower is like the cross on the mountain,” Bumbaru says. “The point is to have it visible. This great monument will be strongly diminished as a landmark on the canal.” Bumbaru says that the present project will irrevocably change the canal’s communities. While there are advantages, he urges caution. “Prosperity can disturb fragile neighbourhoods,” he says. :

Digging deep

>> The Lachine Canal through history

Although the idea for the Lachine Canal dates back to the earliest days of the ancien régime in New France, getting the project going was a real stumper. Below is a quick history of many men, many plans and one canal.

1680: The Sulpician Fathers propose to build a trench through the island’s southwest, then being colonised. The project comes to naught.

1689: The Sulpicians try again, but 1,500 Iroquois warriors, allied with the British, raze the Lachine village, kill 24 and capture 70 (many of whom were said to have been later burned or eaten). And that puts an end to that.

1700: Again, the Sulpicians try to build a canal, this time using a private engineer and royal surveyor. The next year, the Sulpician superior dies, the engineer goes broke and the project stalls.

1819: Montreal merchants, worried that the newly-opened Erie Canal will sap business to New York, decide to build a canal of their own come hell or high water.

1824: The first canal is opened, running 13.4-kilometres and boasting seven locks.

1843-48: The British Colonial Office, in an effort to quash festering popular ill-will brought about by various economic and political crises, begin a series of public work programs, including enlarging the canal to accommodate steam ships. The width is doubled and the number of locks brought down to five.

1843: Disgruntled immigrant Irish and French canal workers stage one of the first workers’ strikes in Canada.

1850: Various kinds of industries begin setting up shop along the canal and capitalize on its hydraulic energy, creating Montreal’s first industrial park. By 1867, workers’ dwellings are the foundation to many of today’s existing neighbourhoods.

1875-1900: More work on the canal. Locks are improved and electrified, banks are expanded and the width is enlarged in parts. The canal reigns supreme as an industrial and maritime artery.

1900-1950: While the canal remains the home of many industries, it begins to slide into obsolescence as a shipping lane.

1927: The canal is deemed an historic national site by the federal government.

1959: The brand spanking new St. Lawrence Seaway opens to accommodate increasingly heavier shipping, rendering the canal irrelevant.

1970: The canal is closed to shipping permanently.

1974-77: Bike paths appear along the canal’s banks.

1978: The canal’s administration is taken over by Parks Canada.

1997: Various municipal governments, in partnership with the federal government, announce their ambitious, five-year revitalization project.

2002: The canal opens to pleasure boating. : —Patrick Lejtenyi