In Beloeil, the basketball hoops installed in 2019 have been removed. Neighbors were fuming. They joined forces to complain about the noise, the “noise nuisance”, the disorderly activity that this play space generates.
Some 35 signatures were added to a petition. The noise of the players, that of the balls, everything that came with it, especially the music, caused them harm, a “loss of enjoyment”. Approaches to the municipality, based on this petition, got the better of basketball. Here is the closed play area. Simple news item while summer is around the corner? It does not seem like.
This basketball court was brand new, with its clear lines painted on its smooth surface. It cost more than $100,000 in public funds. No matter: the land has been declared guilty. The mayor of Beloeil had the steel hoops hung ten feet away removed. This play space, now condemned, must in principle be reinstalled elsewhere. Citizens will just have to pay for a new one. Again.
According to the mayor’s public statements, the noise of the balloons was not the fundamental cause of this closure, but rather incivility.
Incivility: this word comes up all the time lately. Even the most glaring social misery, that of homelessness, is now swept aside when this keyword is used.
The foundations of what we call incivility — poverty, psychological distress, lack of social support, lack of access to basic services, the housing crisis, ghettoization, failures of the system education — on the other hand, there is very little talk about it.
In Rosemont, following the announcement of the upcoming conversion of a church into a shelter near elementary schools, residents are concerned about children living with homeless people. Certainly understandable fears. However, we are content to justify them behind the barricade of the word incivility. A polite way, very modern, of evoking what we once called savagery. Should we not question the first incivility, that of letting human beings languish in poverty?
Here’s another story. This also takes place at the beginning of June. This time we are in the Laurentians, at the Perséides school in Pointe-Calumet. Children’s games were closed. There too, there had been complaints from neighbors. The reason: the noise generated by pear balloons, this old game where kids hit a ball, attached to a pivot, in order to let off steam.
The school chose to restrict these games so that children could no longer have access to them outside certain hours. Large chains have been installed. They were secured with padlocks.
A mother, Geneviève Cayer, launched a petition so that children can once again access the games at any time, freely enjoying the facilities.
“Preventing children from having fun,” explains Geneviève Cayer in her petition launched on June 6, “is preventing our children from developing completely.” Signatories like her affirm that a child and even an adult have the right to play, to have fun, but above all to use a space that is public as they wish.
Isn’t that obvious? No, apparently.
Are we really having to argue that “a park, even a school park, is a public place” and that “everyone should be able to enjoy it as they wish”? Yes, it seems.
Several parents went there to protest the situation. The management of the Mille-Îles School Service Center (CSSMI) considered that it was better to reverse course and maintain free access to the school grounds, while recalling the rules of civility.
Another case, this time at the extreme limit of Rosemont, on the northern border of the popular district of Hochelaga, a stone’s throw from the Saint-Émile church, whose former presbytery houses the Assembly of Catholic Bishops. There is a primary school there, the Saint-Émile school, bordered by a large public park. The children benefit from it. On the left were, for decades, tennis courts used throughout the summer. The neighbors complained. The dull noise, that bang, bang, bang made by the balls hitting the racket screen, was unbearable for them. Maybe you didn’t know it, but tennis represents terrible incivility in society. The grounds were eventually closed. Oh, that was a few years ago. Since then, I have always wondered why the wise decision to close the entire park was not taken, in order to ensure total peace and quiet for local residents, in the name of civility.
In Outremont, last year, children under the age of five were singled out by neighbors who complained about the noise of these kids in the courtyard of a daycare. Do you remember this story? Toddlers who wriggle and babble, ba-be-bi-bo-bu, how can such a thing be tolerated in society? The incivility of toddlers, it is true, no longer needs to be demonstrated.
Basically, it’s a bit like babies on an airplane. Shouldn’t they be banned from international flights? Seeing so many big furrowed eyes and the sighs that always arouse when a baby starts screaming in the cabin, someone will eventually think about it. Can passengers finally be freed from such incivility? This would be a step forward for humanity, without a doubt. Why, after all, would we let parents travel with crying babies? They could, in a pinch, travel with babies who don’t cry. Will someone at least invent a baby suitcase that would muffle the noises of all these newborns who are so disturbing to our gentle humanity?
A Quebec crazy about its children, affirmed a famous report led by Camil Bouchard. Crazy yes. Really crazy. Sometimes.