It’s like asking a restaurant owner to not emit any cooking smells or the management of an elementary school to shut all the students’ mouths during recess.
Mission impossible.
The Quebec Court of Appeal did exactly the same thing this week with the cabaret La Tulipe. The legendary performance hall, located for a century in the heart of the Plateau Mont-Royal, will no longer be able to generate any noise perceptible outside its walls, the court ruled.
Not even 50 or 10 decibels. Zero.
This decision, which invalidates a judgment rendered in 2023 in the long legal saga opposing La Tulipe to a neighbor angry about the noise, had an immediate effect.
Suddenly, the concert hall has lost its reason for being. It will no longer be able to use its “sound equipment” – the bureaucratic term for loudspeakers and amplifiers – under any circumstances. It announced its closure on Tuesday.
Another blow to the nightlife Montrealer.
Perhaps even the final blow, fear important players in the cultural industry.
Bars and concert halls have been the subject of noise complaints in Montreal for years. Several have already fallen in battle over this.
There was the Divan Orange, the Diving Bell Social Club, Les Bobards, l’Inspecteur Épingle… Most of them are located in the Plateau Mont-Royal, a bourgeois neighborhood where bike paths and parks have taken precedence over drinking establishments.
Other institutions are not dead, but they are not strong.
They are overwhelmed by fines and have had to invest tens of thousands of dollars in soundproofing, like the Société des arts technologiques (SAT) or La Grenade1.
A bar in the Village, the District Video Lounge, which I told you about last week because of the visit of an inspector who came to measure its green plants, even had to spend almost $200,000 on windows and lawyers’ fees!
All because of ONE neighbor who repeatedly complained about the noise.
If a single person can have so much power over the survival of a business, it is because Montreal’s noise regulations are tilted in favour of the plaintiffs.
Very, very clearly.
Under a controversial article applied in several districts, “noise produced by means of sound devices, whether located inside a building or installed or used outside” is strictly prohibited.
Virtuous on paper, impractical in reality.
It was precisely this article that the magistrates of the Court of Appeal invoked to rule in favor of the whining neighbor of La Tulipe. The judgment that they invalidated was too lenient in allowing the cabaret to reduce its noise level with attenuation measures.
It does not matter whether the noise is “barely” or “a little bit perceptible,” they write, since all sounds are “prohibited.” The regulation must be applied to the letter, they rule.
Emmanuelle Hébert, general director of the organization Culture Montréal, fears the repercussions that this judgment could have.
“To the extent that it sets a precedent, it increases the pressure on performance venues, particularly small venues, which are facing significant survival challenges,” she told me. “This needs to be rectified as quickly as possible.”
The cultural community has been calling for years for the City of Montreal to modify its “anachronistic and unrealistic” noise regulations, she adds, without success so far.
The requests for modernization go back about fifteen years, Martin Chartrand, general director of the organization MTL 24/7, dedicated to Montreal nightlife, told me in an interview. “These regulations are completely outdated, that’s more than obvious.”
Since 2017, Valérie Plante’s administration has been promising a “nightlife policy,” the broad outlines of which were unveiled last January. Her project has been the subject of public consultations in recent months.
Among its objectives, the City wants to “identify areas of nocturnal vitality in suitable sectors”, ensure “harmonious cohabitation of populations and respect for living environments” and “adapt the regulations surrounding nocturnal activities”.
It will have a very wide reach and will come very late, after several cultural establishments have already fallen in combat.
Several in the middle of the nightlife believe the city could have acted in two stages: first by changing its most restrictive noise regulations, then by adopting its broader policy on nightlife.
“Perhaps by dint of waiting, the best has become the enemy of the good,” Emmanuelle Hébert told me.
Unless there is a rapid change of direction, Montreal’s reputation as an international cultural mecca seems to me to be under threat.
Its reputation as an over-governed city, hemmed in by stifling regulations, will, however, remain intact.
1. Read “Montreal’s soul threatened by the war on noise”