Paralyzed for six months due to a labor dispute, the Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery will once again be able to function normally. The Minister of Labor, Jean Boulet, congratulated the parties on Thursday for the agreement in principle accepted by 83%.
Mr. Boulet praised on Twitter “the commitment of the conciliators” of his ministry and said he believed that “the resumption of activities at the cemetery will make it possible to meet the needs of bereaved families”.
Michelle Setlakwe, Liberal MP for Mont-Royal–Outremont, said she was “relieved for the bereaved families”. “There is a lot of work to do,” she wrote on Twitter. The state of the cemetery is deplorable and hundreds of bodies are waiting to be buried. Finally, we are moving in the right direction. »
The deadlock finally resolved
About 100 maintenance and office workers had been on strike since mid-January. Since then, the cemetery has been closed to the public, with rare exceptions, notably on Mother’s Day.
The standoff between workers and management at the cemetery, the largest in Canada, has left more than 300 bodies unburied in recent months. As recently as Wednesday, the Minister of Labor had affirmed that the “human consequences linked to the strike” were “inadmissible”.
Last Sunday, bereaved families gathered outside the padlocked gates of the cemetery to demand that Quebec help break the deadlock. It’s now done.