Quebec Summer Festival, July 17, 2023. 5 p.m. 35°C under the sun. Me and my good friend Jérôme, in an electric wheelchair, are waiting for the opening of the Plains of Abraham site. Impossible to reserve a place in the area for reduced mobility; despite our repeated calls, the area is full. We need to get there early, otherwise the “reserved” line for wheelchairs and strollers—a chalk line on the pavement—becomes inaccessible because of the gathering crowd.
6 p.m. Opening of the site: As we no longer have the luxury of priority access to the site — as was the case in the past — we have to wait behind the line of strollers. Arrived at the entrance of the site, we are stripped of our precious bottles of water. A woman carefully rummages through the contents of our many bags. We finally scan our bracelets, then we head to the only place where Jérôme can see the show: avenue du Cap Diamant. The hill is very steep, spectators are unlikely to obstruct the view. For lack of a ramp, Jérôme is forced to stay on the road. The top of the hill is already quite crowded. We kindly ask two ladies in their fifties if they would agree to remain seated during the show so that Jerome could see. They refuse. We find a spot a little further, behind a family who understands that remaining seated during the show is the lesser evil facing a person who no longer has the use of either his legs or his arms.
I will spend the evening sitting in front of Jérôme to protect his fragile legs from passers-by trying to sneak past. Many will still have the audacity to step over us. It will take us almost an hour to go to the toilets (the only accessible toilets are located in the middle of the site). I let you imagine our exit at the end of the show, in a tide of half-drunk festival-goers, on a pavement strewn with empty cans.
Despite the complaints we made last year, the Festival d’été de Québec still refuses to reinstate priority access to the site for people with reduced mobility.
The height of insult: During the Imagine Dragons show, we were made to wait nearly 15 minutes after the venue opened to avoid the “runners” who pose an obvious risk to someone in a wheelchair. It’s called discrimination.
To see in video