Go green, they said.
Published at 5:00 a.m.
Sow flowers, shrubs and, why not, tomatoes in front of your home.
Help us beautify urban grayness.
Thousands of citizens have heard this call from the City of Montreal.
They followed it to the letter.
It’s fascinating to see the enthusiasm with which Montrealers have grabbed the shovel and pruning shears in recent years, in central neighborhoods.
From May to October, sidewalk edges are invaded by multi-colored flowers and other simpler plants, such as clover and lawns.
Budding gardeners carefully maintain their small “tree squares” and their flower beds. They pool together among neighbors to buy seedlings. Several districts even provide the raw materials and maintenance advice.
It works with the fire of God.
Except when winter comes. It seems to happen every year in our area.
Marie Hélène Harvey, a mother of two young children from Vieux-Rosemont, has been cultivating a strip of sidewalk in front of her duplex for years, with her elderly neighbors. Every year, they invest around a hundred dollars to plant clover and other perennials. For them, it’s more than a green plot: it’s a real place for intergenerational socialization.
The small group, like dozens of Rosemont residents in a vast quadrangle, was scandalized when leaving the house Friday morning.
What they saw threw them to the ground.
Even though the snow that fell earlier this week had mostly melted, the snowplows passed the scrape overnight. In the most literal sense of the word.
They scraped, or rather dug, everything they could find in the streets and sidewalks. That is to say a tiny crust of ice, and all the plants planted by the residents.
The result: large brownish streaks all over the sidewalks. Worse still: the annihilation of all the summer work of citizen gardeners.
A “post-war” landscape, denounces Mme Harvey.
“Every year, we always have to re-sow, add soil, we always have to contribute to redo our section,” she explains. But there, it really crossed the line last night. »
The young mother is not the type to complain to her district council. Nor to launch alerts everywhere in the media.
“But they did such a terrible job, it’s so dirty everywhere, that I couldn’t afford to do nothing,” she rages. I have young children who play. I denounce it so that they have a clean and pleasant space to play. »
PHOTO PATRICK SANFAÇON, THE PRESS
The damage is visible over several hundred meters, in the Rosemont district.
The most “mind-blowing” for Marie Hélène Harvey, who works in advertising, is the inconsistency of the municipal authorities in this matter.
“What insults me is to see the borough encourage us every year to take care of these spaces. They distribute plants, shrubs and seedlings, and then they trash them. »
“When we think about sustainable development and being greener, it’s not just about statement district, say: let’s green up our neighborhood in the spring, she continues. We must realize that there is winter and that we must take care of it all year round. »
The saga of the Rosemont flowerbeds illustrates a phenomenon that I have already spoken to you about in a series of columns entitled “This unpleasant feeling of not getting what you pay for”.
At the municipal, provincial or federal levels, citizens often have the impression of laxity (or disinterest?) on the part of the authorities in the sound management of public funds. In close monitoring of daily operations.
In quality control, in short.
The classic example: potholes hastily filled by municipal workers (or subcontractors) who seem to have no incentive to repair belle job.
These employees never seem to face any consequences for their shoddy work.
As if the thousands of managers, foremen and other supervisors paid from our taxes could not, or did not want to, fully fulfill their managerial role. And enforce disciplinary measures if necessary.
Residents of Rosemont–La-Petite-Patrie can, however, be reassured: the borough confirms to me that it has made “the necessary reminders regarding the protection of citizen developments” after Friday’s snow removal fiasco.
There is hope. Or not.
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