This dance of billions has long started to raise the eyebrows of Montreal’s political analysts, who still see Quebec and its region as… let’s say it, a region.
Political opportunism is the term on everyone’s lips in the Metropolis, for a Coalition Avenir Québec which feels that things are heating up for its political future.
If one or other of the opposition parties takes power in two years, will they do like Jean Charest in 2003 with the municipal mergers and unravel all that to restore this chaos that we seem to cherish more than anything?
Yes, Quebec is not Montreal and it never will be. Montreal is an island in the middle of the river and its little sister Laval too. Between them, they concentrate the vast majority of what has been built in terms of bridges, public transport and highway links in Quebec, as if we were saying that ultimately only this place should be concentrated. social and economic activity in Quebec.
But Quebec exists outside of Montreal. This St. Lawrence River, it runs right through it, not just in Montreal, and Quebec, it’s the last place where we can cross it before it widens to infinity.
Quebec’s economy is developing on each side of this river which is becoming an ocean and the need for intra- and inter-river transits is not just a whim of commuters addicted to their cars, they are also an economic necessity for the movement of people and goods.
As for the means of transport, it does not matter whether they are individual, collective or goods, they are complementary, not in competition and mutually exclusive as we would like to convince ourselves.
Time will tell whether these billions will ultimately have been spent wisely. Let us not forget that the Quebec Bridge itself was seen as an unjustified expense at the beginning of the 20th century, that it was to save money that it was not initially designed to be strong enough and that it was was collapsed during construction! Great savings for a work that was supposed to last and serve more than 100 years, isn’t it?
André Verville, Lévis
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