Montreal Mayor Fiddles While City Crumbles

Montreal's Mayor Tremblay

"the portrait of a blinking idiot"

Before my summer break, I wrote about the Montreal U2 concert that was a critical success but an economic failure.
At least the event didn't fail on all levels.
It was, to be sure, a rollicking good time and is a good example that if you're going to go off on an expensive bender that will guarantee a big bill and a hangover the next morning, you better have a helluva good time to make it worthwhile.

Unfortunately that is not usually the case in Montreal, where more and more city-backed events have proven to be utter failures on all counts.

In that same blog piece I wrote about Montreal's swimming fiasco hosting a 2005 World aquatic event which was not only an economic disaster but a critical failure as well, with fans staying away from the competition as if there were bedbugs in the seats.
A recent article has placed the losses related to the event at number even a higher than I quoted and when all is said and done, the city lost over 20 million dollars!

Off course the ever-ebullient mayor of Montreal, has perfected the fine art of explaining away every city blunder and disaster as a 'learning experience,' 'bad luck' or a 'one-off mistake', surely never to be repeated.
Unfortunately for we taxpayers suckers, this is not particularly true, as the same boondoggles are perpetrated on an exasperated public over and over again, ad naseum.

But even to my jaded and cynical eye, the mayor has recently risen to a new level of 'chutzpah'  in telling us that he has committed the city to a repeat performance of the very same aquatic disaster of 2005, by hosting the event in 2014.

Listening to the mayor make his pitch I am sadly reminded that I've heard this all before.
From Mayor Jean Drapeau who told Montrealers  arrogantly that; "The Olympics can no more lose money than a man can have a baby"  only to run up a billion dollar deficit, Montrealers have been on the losing end of unrealizable promises made by incompetent fools posing as mayor, for decades.

With unmitigated gall, Mayor Tremblay has taken a page out of the playbook of those famous Montreal telemarketers, who having once fleeced their victim, go back for a second bite by assuring the unfortunate mark, that given another chance, their lost investment will be recouped.

It's nothing new. the Mayor's spiel is as old as the hills and brings to mind the pitch that Bassinio makes to Shylock in Shakespeare's 'Merchant of Venice,' wherein the delinquent borrower beseeches the moneylender to advance more funds, with the hollow assurance that this time, the money will be well invested.
"In my school-days, when I had lost one shaft,
I shot his fellow of the self-same flight
The self-same way with more advised watch,
To find the other forth, and by adventuring both
I oft found both: I urge this childhood proof..." - Bassinio-Merchant of Venice

(To those with weak Shakespearean English, Bassinio begs for another loan by telling the moneylender that in his youth, when he shot an arrow which he subsequently lost, he'd shoot another in the same direction and watch more closely, sometimes recovering both arrows in the process.)

Shylock was not impressed with the story and so too we should be wary of another Tremblay misadventure.

To Montrealers who will foot the bill once more, all I can say is that we deserve it;
"Fool me once, shame on you; Fool me twice, shame on me"

Ten days ago, another chunk of the infamous Ville-Marie expressway came crashing down.  It wasn't a small piece, but rather a whole span of the roof of an underpass, with tons of concrete raining down onto the road. Luckily nobody was killed. Had the event happened during rush hour the death toll would likely have been between five and ten people.
This same road has already been reduced by one lane because of falling concrete.
Montrealers remain petrified driving on this critical artery and with good reason.
The last time a chunk of concrete separated and crashed down, engineers discovered that the reinforcing metal supporting rods (rebar) that was supposed to be buried within the concrete when poured, was not present.
Yup, contractors building the highway either cut corners or just plain forgot to install this critical element. How pronounced the problem is, nobody knows, but the highway may just be the most unsafe elevated highway in North America.

Montreal's newest road sign

With all this in mind, what is the mayor's priority?
Our idiot mayor assures us that while our bridges and underpasses collapse and our homes are flooded by backed up sewers, there's nothing to be worried about.
For him it's important to spend money on bike paths, Bixi and swimming meets. Hundreds of millions of dollars in feel-good projects, while the city infrastructure collapses.

Montrealers have been rocked by City Hall scandal after scandal, too numerous to enumerate. There is no doubt that Montreal ranks as the worst run major city in Canada and is right up there with New Orleans as the worst in North America.


Through all this  we are re-assured by our mayor, wearing the unnerving smile of the Cheshire cat that all is well and that citizens should maintain confidence.

Bah!
The government Montreal is so rotten, that trusteeship is the only way out. A clean sweep, starting with the mayor, all elected officials and senior civil servants is about the only thing that can right the sinking ship.
Maybe we could bring in Regis Lebeaume!

Readers may wonder, given the gross incompetence of the mayor, how on Earth he got re-elected.

Again, it comes down to language and politics. (Doesn't everything come down to that in Quebec?)

The opposition candidate in the last municipal election was an ex-Parti Quebecois minister, an avowed separatist who spoke no English.
Those thirty or forty percent of anglos and ethnics who vote, had no use for such a candidate and thus, holding their nose, chose what they believed was the lesser of the two evils, Gerald Tremblay.

But enough is enough.
I'm joining the ABT campaign (Anyone But Tremblay) and would even vote for a separatist before I'd vote for this buffoon.

Montrealers should be boiling mad at themselves and at the fool they elected as mayor. As I rage at the thought of our idiot Mayor dreaming up more vanity projects to feed his delusion of grandeur, as his city crumbles, I take solace in the immortal words of the Bard....

"Think therefore on revenge and cease to weep."
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Don't miss Friday's Post -
"Air Canada Deserved its Language Fine"

Editor'e Note.

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