In the not-so-distant past, tourists were offered the opportunity to discover Montreal through the charm of its neighborhoods.
The Latin Quarter with its theaters and cafes.
The gay district (or Gay Village) with its restaurants, bars and nightlife.
The Chinese quarter with its arch, its dragons and its dim sum.
Further west, Little Burgundy and Saint-Henri, formerly working-class neighborhoods that have become emblems of Montreal’s renewal.
What has happened in recent years in terms of the deterioration of the social fabric is incredibly sad.
Depressing portrait
The Gay Village has become the neighborhood of poverty. Restaurant owners fear for their customers on the terraces. What do they fear? Whether they are bothered by intoxicated people or have their food stolen from their plate by hungry people. It happened.
Heavily intoxicated people are omnipresent. Zombies, empty eyes, lost people. Even if they cause a lot of trouble, it’s hard to blame them since in this state, there’s not much left of their true personality.
The Latin Quarter is supposed to be a center of intellectual life. Unfortunately, the police and pushers seem busier than the booksellers.
In Chinatown, the CPE Le Petit Palais requires the presence of police officers to escort children when they want to take a walk. Homeless people and drug addicts worry educators too much. It must be said that they found a bag of drugs in the yard last week.
In the same area, we remember the disgraceful gesture of a shopkeeper who poured a jar of ice water over the head of a homeless man who was sleeping in his driveway. His dehumanizing act nevertheless highlighted the extent to which in the neighborhood, we no longer know what to do, how to act. Especially since the police no longer come for this.
Public injection
All week, we observed the waste of the establishment of a supervised injection center on the land next to a school in Saint-Henri. The parents had feared cohabitation problems. The City lied to them, looked down on them, treated them as intolerant.
Ultimately, what happens is even much worse than the worst scenarios parents imagined. Unsanitary conditions, gross indecency, risk of violence, the impact on children is not acceptable.
Hard drugs
Crime, homelessness, mental health, when I try to connect Montreal’s problems of decline, I find a common thread: hard drugs.
This is the scourge of scourges, the destructive element. Drugs have never been so available, at such low prices on our streets… Shit.
Several cities in Canada have become laboratories for the most radically left-wing public policies. Montreal is part of it with the Plante administration. The failure is obvious, the damage unspeakable. As Vancouver begins to retreat, Valérie Plante must light up.
