A lot of trust still to rebuild: new chief
Montrealers could head south using money saved from snow-clearing and heating bills
We’ve just learned that our construction woes won’t end in 2021 as promised, or even in 2023, or 2025.
A confidential two-year-old city report obtained by the Gazette predicts that major construction work in Montreal will continue until 2040! And probably much longer, when many of us are in walkers, wheelchairs or graves.
The reconstruction of Berlin after the Second World War was a quick patchup job compared to us.
Imagine another 20-plus years of driving chaos, congestion, rerouted streets and a billion orange cones — though by 2035, they’ll probably be flying orange drones.
It’s impossible to even contemplate, so instead, let me put forth a radical and daring solution.
There’s simply too much work to get done in Montreal with two million of us living here, trying to get around, and it’s wearing us all out.
It’s time to close the island of Montreal for the six months of winter, and evacuate the population south, while the work gets done.
Impossible? No! Here is my modest proposal:
The The The plan: plan: plan: When you do a massive home renovation, you don’t hang around amid the noise, dust and debris. You move out.
The reason Montreal’s reconstruction is going so slowly is that we Montrealers are getting in the way. City workers waste most of their time rerouting traffic, re-coning lanes and creating new detours to accommodate motorists who just shouldn’t be here.
Evacuating Montreal would let the workers focus full-time on their real job: rebuilding our city from scratch.
The The The cost: cost: cost: My plan may sound outrageous, but I’ve studied the city’s new 2019 budget and it makes perfect dollars and sense. For instance:
We’ll spend $166 million next year on snow-clearing contracts and countless more on heavy equipment. What a waste, when recent scientific evidence shows the snow would melt on its own, even if we weren’t here to see it.
We’ll spend another $600 million on public transport, which we wouldn’t need if there was no one here to transport. Hundreds of millions more will go to winter recreation, an obvious oxymoron. We shovel out skating rinks, heat hockey arenas, gymnasiums, museums and libraries, in a futile effort to amuse ourselves as we hide indoors.
The heating bill for my home alone is $2,000. Multiply that by the island’s 750,000 households and you’ve got more than a billion dollars, needlessly vanishing into thin air.
We could save a billion more by reducing police to a skeleton squad. Their union would protest but not their members, since they’d get to go south, too, along with our criminals.
I believe we could save much of next year’s $5.7-billion budget with my plan. That’s about $2,750 per person, or $11,000 per family of four. I’m sure we could get matching federal and Quebec grants for every “roadwork refugee,” boosting the payments to $33,000 per family.
That’s plenty for travel costs and some spending money, too.
Where would we flee? With group travel discounts for our two million customers we’d get spectacular rates on planes and hotels. Imagine how many Caribbean beach cabanas we could afford to rent!
We could buy a beach, an island, even a small country. Quebecers practically run Florida already. How much more would it cost to buy a chunk of it on a time-sharing plan from next November through May?
There’d probably be enough money left to pay everyone a decent allowance.
You can’t afford to take time off work, you say? The fact is you already do. You spend winter shovelling your walk, scraping your windshield, lacing your boots and buttoning your coat so you can unbutton it later.
Whatever you earn working, you spend on winter tune-ups, winter clothes, winter heating and treating your winter flu. The truth is you can’t afford not to leave.
What happens to Montreal when everyone’s gone? When you close a cottage for winter, you drain the pipes, lock the door and forget it till spring.
The same goes for cities. We’d drain the Lachine Canal, put antifreeze in the Seaway and shut the lights and electricity, saving a fortune in Hydro bills.
Then, our construction workers could have Montreal to themselves until the snow melts.
Frankly, the city itself needs a break, too. There’d be no new wear-and-tear on the roads because there’d be no traffic, no crumbling sidewalks because there’d be no salt or sand.
When the snow melted, there’d be no rotting apple cores, chocolate wrappers, soda cans or dog poo — because there’d be no dogs. Just a well-rested city ready for a well-rested population arriving home.
It’s too late to evacuate this winter, but let’s start preparing to move out next year. Once we leave, we just need to seal off our island’s bridges and tunnels, then put up large signs that say: “VILLE BARRÉE.”
I admit we might not finish all the construction in one winter, but I have a Plan B. We do exactly the same thing every year, until the work is over.
With group travel discounts for our two million customers we’d get spectacular rates on planes and hotels. Imagine how many Caribbean beach cabanas we could afford to rent!