Our cities are not always pleasant places in the summer. It is getting hotter and hotter and heatwaves follow one after the other. This is why many are pleading for a more resilient city, better adapted to the changes to come. In Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve (MHM) we do just the opposite. We are building heat islands. We are building new roads. We are destroying — or planning to do so — green spaces. And we call it all: Grande Prairie Industrial Ecopark.
The Ecoparc is the formula found by the City to oversee industrial activities in the Assomption-Sud sector, a quadrilateral formed by Viau, Hochelaga and Notre-Dame streets and Highway 25. It is the response of the administration in place for the Logistics City project. With the growth of trade, the transport industry needs ever more roads, storage sites and access to the port.
This growth is not without effect on the citizens who live near and inside the future industrial ecopark. Elected officials must therefore curb the desires of supporters of the freight transport industry to pave everything, while ensuring a better quality of life for residents. Which, in a sector devoted to the transport of cars and goods, is not an easy task.
The City of Montreal, in its desire to reduce the nuisances generated by industrial and transport activities, could have relied on vast spaces in the process of revegetation. In fact, abandoned land on the western edge of the future ecopark, such as that of the old Steinberg warehouse, the Canadian Steel foundry and the CN rail yard, vestiges of the industrialization of the last century, have become over time and their abandonment of veritable oases of greenery. In fact, they constitute, without having the status yet, a real park as we must conceive them today in 2022, at a time when the effects of the climate crisis are more and more apparent.
With the current intensification of economic activities, these lands are unfortunately back in the sights of all-out developers, to the great despair of the citizens who have been frequenting them in large numbers for years. And who wonders why, as the planet ignites in this summer of 2022, is it so difficult to preserve this beginning of renaturalization in a territory which, for the rest, is devoted to concrete and asphalt.
Part of the answer lies in the fact that the City does not own these lands and that it cannot acquire them, we are told, in the absence of any amendment to the current Expropriation Act, because of their cost too high. By not owning the land, the City no longer leads the way, it leaves this privilege, while trying to regulate it, to the players in the freight transport industry.
It is therefore a container transhipment company, Ray-Mont Logistiques, not to name it, which, through the gigantism of its activities, will shape the future of our neighborhoods, by paving 2.5 million square feet at the expense of what remains of greenery. It is also the Ministry of Transport that will raze a young wooded area for the extension of avenue Souligny and that of boulevard de l’Assomption. It is also the Canadian National (CN), closed to all discussions about the future of its land, although they have become flower meadows following the almost complete absence of rail activities for years.
We are actually witnessing a major event in the east end of Montreal: port activities, transhipment and container storage will cross Notre-Dame Street and will henceforth take place near the residences of Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. On our local scale, that means something: more trucks, more heat islands, more pollution, both noise and air. And, above all, the destruction of what could be the beginning of a real nature park in the east of Montreal.
Ultimately, this will weaken the situation of thousands of MHM citizens. And that is what the industrial ecopark project is now trying to hide.