The century of the automobile allowed us to taste the freedom to go from the city to the countryside and offered us the suburbs to reside in between. It gave us access to a larger pool of jobs and businesses where many of us will benefit from lower prices. We have “progressed”.
This new way of life has created an urban framework compartmentalized by single-use zoning requiring the car to go from residence to work, then to the grocery store, to the park, finally everywhere and anywhere. This progress is now synonymous with congestion: you can still go to the countryside, but you have to queue, the same goes for the suburbs. With the quantity of greenhouse gases emitted by our travels, this progress rhymes more and more with regret.
Today, scientists are proposing to transform the urban framework to face the perils of global warming. The mayors of many municipalities have added their respective voices to this proposal and are calling for densification.
The recipe is known: create a living environment with a sufficient number of residents to support a center of services and jobs and justify public transit. A recent study by Local Logic, conducted on behalf of the Urban Development Institute (IDU), determined that places in Canada that use less cars have in common a density of more than 8,000 people per square kilometre.
Upcoming action plan
In the wake of its National Policy on Architecture and Land Use Planning, the Government of Quebec will soon adopt an action plan aimed at reducing our travel by car, reducing urban sprawl and protecting our agricultural land and biodiversity. Municipal decision makers will increase general consultations to adopt development and urban plans accordingly. This is what Montreal is currently doing with its next urban planning and mobility plan.
If the past is a guarantor of the future, despite these consultations, it should not be surprising that, at the time of the authorization of the projects, the immediate neighbors of these will criticize them on the grounds that they will affect the aspect neighborhood. Conveniently, we will forget that previous consultations sought precisely to transform the urban setting. In the name of “not in my backyard”, citizens and elected officials will postpone the change indefinitely. The current positions concerning the Pointe-Claire Fairview and the Bridge-Bonaventure sector at the entrance to downtown are only the most recent illustrations.
Even if the major consultations concluded on the need to increase the supply of all types of housing units, obviously including social and affordable housing, and to densify the structuring transport corridors, the local consultations will easily contradict major directions.
Even if it is now necessary to plan living environments to reduce travel needs and this must necessarily change the appearance of our neighborhoods, there will be resistance.
This is not to deny the right of citizens to oppose. It is not a question of no longer consulting. It must be recognized that many projects have benefited from the consultations. On the contrary, in the name of consistency, we believe that all consultations should be valued, the last, more local, as much as the first, more regional.
The transformation of the urban framework required by the climate crisis will change the existing living environment, that’s normal, that’s the goal. Public decision-makers must be clear about their objectives and do everything possible to achieve them. To use the popular expression: their boots will have to follow their chops.
Avenues to consider
A first avenue would be to draft the national and regional objectives with enough precision to encourage compliance at the local level. Next, the mandate of the Commission municipale du Québec should be strengthened so that the compliance audit includes a consistency analysis obliging local authorities to act in the direction desired by higher orders.
Another option would be to legislate to make applicable throughout the territory the public consultation procedure that the cities obtained in 2017. After having requested it, they neglected to adopt it locally. This alternative to the referendum was intended to respond to what Régis Labeaume described as an “undemocratic process” which “only serves the interests of a minority of opponents”1.
Municipal authorities and Quebec can now together define the framework for public consultation likely to give a voice to a greater number.
Failing to choose this path, the referendum consultation would be maintained, but it would be necessary to improve its representativeness. Rather than consulting only the immediate neighbors of the projects, it would be more democratic to provide for consultation throughout the borough or neighborhood. What is more, since the referendum aims to cancel the will of the democratic authorities, it seems more legitimate to require a more substantial number of signatures for the registers and a vote of 50% of the electors registered during the referendum.
More simply, we could better support the consultations. For cities with organizations, such as the Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM), and for others, which limit themselves to organizing information evenings, we should impose the publication of expert and independent opinions to analyze local positions taken in the light of policies adopted on a larger scale.
The climate crisis is forcing us to change our living environments. We must ask our elected officials to seek ways to ensure this transformation. Perhaps the use of experts would allow them to find the right solution to convince us that, for this to change all around, it would have to start well in our own courses.