In working-class Park Ex, fight over bike path exposes deep rifts

A group of residents in Montreal's Parc-Extension neighbourhood is fundraising in the hopes of launching legal action against the city to halt work that has already begun on a bike path removing 250 parking spaces. 

In the span of a week, the group, called Coalition for Democracy Park Extension, has raised $5,000, a 10th of its goal.

The bike path project has caused a fervour rarely seen in municipal politics, except perhaps for other initiatives to remove parking. Thumbtacks were found strewn across one of the completed bike lanes on Querbes and Ball avenues, and several police officers showed up after some residents sat in the lane with camping chairs and coffee.

But one expert on citizen involvement says the situation in Park Ex is different and tackles what she deems to be one of the toughest issues facing the 21st century: how to implement environmental sustainability without further harming working-class people. 

"Most people are not in favour of global warming," said Caroline Patsias, a political science professor at Université du Québec à Montréal. "But the ecological transition, in daily life, can have an extremely high cost for a certain category of population."

And Patsias said most of the people who live in Park Ex belong to that category of population: people who are part of immigrant families, make modest incomes doing jobs in service and manufacturing industries, often outside the city at odd hours; people whose highest-value possession is a car, not a home, and who do not have access to private driveways; those who are aging and have mobility issues.

Climate change disproportionately affects marginalized people everywhere, but at times well-intentioned environmental policies can end up adversely impacting poorer people's daily lives and privilege the already privileged, Patsias explained.

Sia Spanoudakis, 53, who grew up in Park Ex after her parents moved to Canada from Greece in the 1960s, helped launch the fundraiser after she found out her parents' disability parking spot would be moved to another street. Her father is 91.

"This is not a a neighbourhood where you have households with three or four luxury vehicles. This is a working-class, immigrant neighbourhood. People who have cars need them to get to work, need them to take care of their families. This is their livelihoods. They're not against the climate. They're not against bike paths. They just want to live and earn a living," Spanoudakis said. 

In June, the borough sent residents postcards notifying them about an information session on the bike lanes that would be implemented in September, but it did not hold a consultation session, which the Coalition for Democracy group says goes against Montreal's Charter of Rights and Responsibilities.

Tuesday evening, Catherine Dion Richard, a single mother of two young children, appeared at the borough council meeting for Villeray-St-Michel-Parc-Extension and attempted to lay out how difficult her life would become if she were to get rid of the car she uses to ferry her kids to their father's place in another neighbourhood, to their school and to get herself to work. 

For starters, she would need a shed installed outside her home to store a bike or several bikes, which she says she looked into and was not legal in her area. She said taking public transit alone with the two children would require carriers and would involve an amount of energy and time she struggles to picture herself mustering, especially in the winter. 

Borough Mayor Laurence Lavigne Lalonde, a member of Projet Montréal, who has faced a myriad of similar stories, replied that she was aware the parking spaces' removal would affect her constituents' lives but that the project aims to rectify an imbalance in bike safety and public space in the district.

Outside the borough office on Ogilvy Avenue, duelling protests totalling about 300 people raged on, with the larger, more culturally diverse crowd chanting, "We want parking!" in a loudspeaker and banging on drums and the other, smaller, whiter crowd yelling, "We want bike paths!"