ANGRY CALL TO OUST PLANTE
Car restrictions irk Joe Beef’s Mcmillan
Fed up with traffic measures he says are strangling business, David Mcmillan, co-owner of the Joe Beef restaurant group, is asking Montrealers to turf out Mayor Valérie Plante in the next municipal election.
“This is authoritarian government,” he said in an interview Thursday, after posting a series of tweets calling on citizens to “take your city back in 2021.”
Mcmillan was reacting to the temporary reconfiguration of Notre-dame St. W. this week, which has eliminated eastbound traffic and removed parking from both sides of the street between Vinet and Workman streets.
The measures, to remain in place for the next eight weeks, are part of Montreal’s plan to create space for outdoor cafés, bike paths and pedestrian areas as a way of boosting local businesses during the COVID -19 pandemic.
But Mcmillan charged that rather than helping, they are driving customers away from the strip, home to popular eateries such as Joe Beef and the Burgundy Lion.
“You can’t tell a business what’s best for his business if you’re not a business,” said Mcmillan, who has been forced to lay off 100 of his 140 employees since the start of the coronavirus crisis.
While Mcmillan was slamming the measures, the Plante administration held a news conference at city hall to tout them as a resounding success across the city.
Mont-royal Ave. E. has been attracting 15,000 pedestrians a day since becoming pedestrian-only in June, with added space for outdoor cafés, while 13,000 walkers are flocking daily to Wellington St., said Éric Alan Caldwell, the executive committee member responsible for mobility and urban planning.
It’s unknown how many pedestrians used those streets before, but typically the number on commercial streets in the city is in the range of 4,000 to 8,000 a day, according to Eco-counter, a firm that specializes in measuring foot and bike traffic.
Some of the bike paths created during the pandemic are now among the city’s most popular, Caldwell said.
The measures are comparable to those being taken by other cities around the world, including Calgary and Paris, he said.
Plateau Mont-royal borough mayor Luc Rabouin brushed off
Mcmillan’s complaints, saying it’s impossible to please everybody.
“There will never be unanimity,” he said.
But Mcmillan slammed the claim that the measures are helping local businesses as “fake news.”
Car access is key to the survival of local restaurants, which have been depending on takeout orders to stay alive during the pandemic, he said.
The Plante administration’s “cavalier activism agenda is putting people’s jobs in peril and destroying small businesses all over the city,” he tweeted.
The attack was an about-face from three years ago, when Plante posted on Facebook that she was “very proud to be able to count on David Mcmillan’s support for my campaign.”
“Known for his very popular restaurants in the Sud-ouest ... David is making a concrete contribution to neighbourhood life and the relationship between merchants and citizens,” Plante posted on Nov. 1, 2017, under a smiling picture of herself with Mcmillan.
Mcmillan said he and other Notre-dame St. business owners would be happy to talk to city officials about how to help weather the crisis.
“I’m open. Call me. Text me. Let’s do a Zoom,” he said.
Eliminating car traffic might work on Mont-royal St. E., where there’s a large resident population that frequents local businesses, but it doesn’t make sense on Notre-dame, where businesses rely on customers from outside the neighbourhood, he said.
“I have a lot of senior citizens who come to Joe Beef — people of a certain age who don’t ride bicycles down Atwater,” he said.
Opposition city councillor Francesco Miele said the number of pedestrians on a street doesn’t necessarily mean businesses are thriving.
“I want to know if people are buying on a street,” he said.
Miele charged the administration has “decided to completely ignore all the frustrations and inconveniences caused to Montrealers.”