Downtown Montreal | “We lost control”

Piles of trash thrown everywhere. Dead rats. Dirty syringes. The corpse of a homeless woman. Orange cones abandoned to their fate.

Since June, a downtown city councilor, Serge Sasseville, has been inviting citizens to send him photos of unacceptable situations observed in the central districts of Montreal.

He was inundated with distressing images.

He methodically relays them on his Instagram and Facebook accounts. His sad digital story could be called “the dark side of the metropolis.”

“It allows me to measure even more how serious the problem is,” he told me in an interview. “We have lost control.”

Serge Sasseville, a former senior executive at Quebecor, is in a privileged position to sound the alarm about the state of the city centre.

He was elected in 2021 in the Peter-McGill district, in the heart of the Ville-Marie borough, under the banner of the Coderre team. He slammed the door on the party the following year to sit as an independent.

As such, he has no obligation to respect the lines of the party in power – Projet Montréal – nor those of the opposition. A true free electron.

What adds weight to his approach: he lives in the city center, unlike other elected officials in this district. He is a pure urbanite, who has lived, worked and gone out every day in the neighborhood for decades.

What he sees there worries him more and more.

“The day before yesterday, I was walking on Sherbrooke Street,” he told me on Thursday. “It was completely congested at the corner of Guy Street, where there is a big construction site. There were ripped open drains, it smelled bad.”

Random waste management is one of the most frequently mentioned irritants. Serge Sasseville notes a lack of civic-mindedness among some citizens and business owners, who dump their trash anywhere. A scourge in Montreal, it’s true.

But he is especially concerned about the street trash cans, which are always overflowing.

“I know that we have given a lot of budget to the downtown cleanliness brigade, but it is not enough,” he says. “I don’t know if they do 9 to 5 or what.”

Human distress also comes up frequently in the dozens of photos he receives. One photo has troubled him more than all the others: that of a homeless woman dead in a park in Chinatown.

The scene – inert body, attempted resuscitation by paramedics – was captured on the spot by a neighbor, who saw it all from the terrace of her condo. “We’ve reached that point. You see people dying in the street.”

His frequent publications are disturbing at city hall. Serge Sasseville knows this. He doesn’t care. He will not run again in the next elections.

“I know people don’t like it,” he acknowledged. “Yesterday, at Tourisme Montréal, they criticized me for being negative, they told me I should be more positive in my posts.”

“We need to stop wearing rose-colored glasses and saying ‘Montreal is wonderful, it’s beautiful,’ when people are dying in the streets, it’s dirty, there are rat infestations, ripped open garbage bags… It’s all connected.”

But he is not fooling himself: he doubts that his social media posts will change anything in the situation. He intends to continue to share them anyway to show how “the administration in the broad sense has lost control.”

“This can’t go on like this. We have to fix this.”

This campaign led by the independent advisor is important, even on its very small scale. It offers a form of counterbalance to the digital omnipresence of the Plante administration, which highlights its successes several times a week with social media posts.

And yes, it must be said: not everything is bad in Montreal, quite the contrary. Despite the housing crisis, despite rampant homelessness, despite the rise in crime, despite all these problems that other large cities are also experiencing, the metropolis remains a vibrant place. The number of tourists jumped 4.3% this summer, foreign students are numerous, our festivals are shining.

But we must not bury our heads in the sand either.

Naming – and showing – what is wrong, as Serge Sasseville does, is essential to the city’s recovery.