Fight to preserve natural spaces is not yet won
Conservation of western Montreal Island’s wetlands, escarpment is essential, Patrick Barnard says.
For years, there has been an environmental struggle taking place on Montreal Island. It has not been obvious, because the drama has evolved inside sober courtrooms, at city hall question periods and during meetings of citizen groups.
The fight is over the few remaining natural spaces in the western part of Montreal. And the organizations involved are independent, with various names and coming from different areas: Sauvons l’Anse à l’Orme (Pierrefonds), Les amis du parc Meadowbrook (Lachine, Montreal West and Côte-St-Luc), Sauvons la F ala ise (N.D.G .), Techno par cO is eaux(Sa int Laurent ). They call themselves“the 87 percent movement,” after the overwhelming number of people who opposed a Pierrefonds megaproject at public hearings.
Standing with these groups have been Sierra Club Quebec and the non-partisan Green Coalition.
These very place names indicate that there is an arc of environmental protest extending from the wet meadows of western Pierrefonds all the way to the St-Jacques escarpment adjoining the Turcot construction.
Activists have already raised more than $100,000 to defend nature in these sectors through a foundation called the Legacy Fund, started by lawyer and environmentalist Campbell Stuart.
Five court actions are now underway on the island, all involving fundamental principles of environmental justice articulated in Article 46.1 of Quebec’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms: “Every person has a right to live in a healthful environment in which biodiversity is preserved, to the extent and according to the standards provided by law.”
The right to biodiversity makes conservation of natural spaces imperative, especially since Canada has lost much of its urban wetlands in the last generation — and all the remaining natural areas here on the island are in western Montreal.
In 2015, environmentalists persuaded the City of Montreal to increase its conservation target from six per cent to 10 per cent of the island’s territory. The new goal means that the city needs 2,000 more hectares of preserved natural spaces.
It is no accident that the fight for green spaces is focused, for now, in the western suburbs. For the last 25 years, urban sprawl has increased exponentially in Montreal, according to Concordia University professor Jochen A.G. Jaeger. Single-family, detached houses with green lawns and cars in the garage mean that each individual occupies a large amount of land area — so, inexorably, the remaining natural spaces disappear. Habitats dwindle as well, along with their valuable ecosystem services.
But at the same time, people living the suburban life want their access to nature preserved. In fact, one of the many reasons that Denis Coderre was defeated in the last municipal election was his administration’s very poor record on the environment.
Three days before the recent Montreal election, Campbell Stuart held a press conference. The city’s political parties had been asked to respond to a set of questions about the environment.
Équipe Coderre did not bother to reply. Projet Montréal, on the other hand, pledged to preserve and enhance biodiversity all the way from Pierrefonds to the Falaise StJacques. Its responses included a firm commitment to a new regional park in Pierrefonds West.
Projet Montréal shows every sign of wanting to make a Green Belt a true reality, just as promised in so many past city documents. And on Monday, Projet’s executive committee member responsible for large parks and major projects, Luc Ferrandez, confirmed this pledge to the Montreal Gazette: “We reiterate our commitment to create a national park in Pierrefonds.”
However, within the municipal bureaucracy, there are bureaucrats inherited from the Tremblay and Coderre eras whose evident anti-conservation bias is felt at every level of municipal planning.
So, the struggle for nature in Montreal continues — in the courts, inside bureaucracies, and in our neighbourhoods and streets.