When Montreal hunts hunters | Press

The large parks of Montreal welcome walkers, picnickers, but also… hunters. Let the City hunt without care.

Philippe Teisceira-Lessard
Press

Almost a year after failing to convince Quebec to ban hunting on the entire island of Montreal, the City is redoubling its efforts to at least enforce its own regulations by expelling shooters and trappers from its parks.

Teams of police and blue collar workers are regularly deployed to dismantle the facilities of these urban poachers, who do not hesitate to fix cameras and build caches to better track their prey as they would in the countryside. About ten of them are reported to the City each year.

Frédéric Millard works for the Department of large parks of the City of Montreal. One morning at the end of November, it is in the nature park of Anse-à-l’Orme that he leads the small troop (three workers and two police officers) responsible for hunting hunters. The bright orange of their two small Kubota tractors clashes in the snow.

A few days earlier, patrollers spotted a hiding place high up in a small grove of trees. The time has come to dismantle it.

“This one is easy to access,” explains the young man. Elsewhere, it sometimes has to go for a long time in the woods or through swamps to reach its destination. While the workers are busy cutting the straps that connect the raised metal seat to a tree, Frédéric Millard begins to remove a hunting camera installed nearby.

Where it was, he put up a laminated poster: “We have noticed the presence of installations that contravene the by-law”, indicates the notice.

Since the spring, he and his team have dismantled “three or four” active caches in the large parks of western Montreal, in addition to long-abandoned facilities. “Often, these are old cabins,” he explains.

Two police officers from the local neighborhood station accompany the workers, in case a frustrated hunter is still there. “This is not the first time that I have heard of a cache in the woods, but it is the first time that I have witnessed the dismantling of a cache”, explained agent Jean-Pierre Lévis. .

“We must not wait for the irreparable”

In early 2021, the mayors of the Montreal Metropolitan Community (CMM) had asked Quebec to modify its legislation to outright ban hunting on the island of Montreal. Currently, provincial laws allow it, but municipal by-laws make it virtually impossible: in particular, they prohibit any shooting within the limits of the City of Montreal, in nature parks and within 500 meters of a residence.

It is Paola Hawa, the mayor of Saint-Anne-de-Bellevue, who is leading this fight.

“It’s a matter of safety, it’s that simple. Hunting on Mount Royal doesn’t make sense. It’s the same for the West Island, ”she explained to Press in an interview. She indicated that residents of the north of her municipality – located on the western tip of the island of Montreal – live with the constant presence of gunfire.

The Minister of Forests, Wildlife and Parks, Pierre Dufour, opposed an end of inadmissibility to the initiative of the CMM. “All municipalities already have the regulatory levers necessary to limit hunting on their territory,” said his cabinet at the time. We do not intend to reopen the law. ”

This is also the opinion of the Quebec Federation of Hunters and Fishermen. In an interview, spokesperson Stéphanie Vadnais argued that the organization encouraged its members to respect all the rules in place, but in return, it was trying to convince municipalities to make room for hunters on their territory.

“We do a lot of awareness raising with municipalities to enable them to better understand the role of hunting in game management in Quebec,” she said, referring to the overpopulation of deer in Longueuil. “Hunting can be super effective at preventing problematic situations like this. ”

At the beginning of December, M^me Hawa told Press that the file was at a standstill. The mayor would like it to be the provincial wildlife officers who enforce a possible hunting ban on the island rather than the SPVM, which is poorly equipped to supervise hunters.

“I am absolutely against that”

Back in Anse-à-l’Orme park, Frédéric Millard’s team threw the dismantled hunting cover behind one of its tractors. This one – a simple metal seat with an access ladder – is particularly modest. “Sometimes it can be almost a watchtower,” explains Mr. Millard.

It is often the poorly developed areas of parks or agricultural wasteland recently incorporated into parks that are used by hunters. The danger of meeting a hunter near a path in the Cap-Saint-Jacques or Bois-de-Liesse nature park is low, says Mr. Millard.

But the impact on citizens is still very concrete. In this extremely quiet area, you can often hear the hunters in action.

“The shots, it’s been about fifteen years” that we hear them, said Gilles de Grandpré, a regular at the nature park who was about to take a walk. ” It’s so beautiful. It’s a beautiful place and we want to keep it that way. ”

Jean-Guy Pilon has lived at the corner of Boulevard Gouin and the street that bears his family’s name since his birth 87 years ago. “Here, before, there were horses, cows. My father was a farmer, ”he confided in an interview. “There was a big barn here. There, now, they are blocks. ”

People who hunt in the park, “I’m absolutely against that,” said Mr. Pilon. “In Anse-à-l’Orme, it’s full of people hunting everywhere. The police let them do it. In addition to the deer hunters, the octogenarian also hears the duck hunters on the banks of the Rivière des Prairies.

Mr. Pilon knew the time when this corner of Montreal was rural, but does not accept that hunters use his neighborhood as a shooting range. “Me, I liked better before, to see the horses. But I understand that we have to change too. You can’t always stay as before, ”he said.

Hunters welcome at Boisé du Tremblay in Longueuil

While Montreal prohibits hunting within the limits of its territory, suburban towns allow it within a very specific framework. Thus, in the agglomeration of Longueuil, certain rural areas are open to hunters, in particular a part of the wooded Du Tremblay where the deer are too numerous. Hunters must maintain a distance of at least 200 meters from any street or dwelling.