Tuesday, October 3, 2017

City Life Political (infrastructure, heavy machinery, and water?)

Let me say first of all that I am grateful to live and love in a city where I know that I am safe, I can get health care when I need it, I have enough to eat - and more - and I'm not in imminent danger of being murdered when I step outside.

I live in better conditions than millions if not billions of people. One of the things I live with is this concept we call democracy, and it means that we have the right to vote: our votes will be counted, and they will mean something.

So, here's my two cents worth:

The beginning, August 16, 2017
The city of Montreal has needed infrastructure repair for a very long time. They've decided to rip all the streets up now, and they're finally doing extensive work all over town. Great! I don't know the ins and outs of how much the federal push for infrastructure improvement has to do with it, or who is "pushing the envelope" to whom ... but I do know that while many of our citizens are driving around town gnashing their teether in frustration with roads closures and the like, some of us are actually living in a construction zone.



It's been touch and go with our water supply. You might notice those white pipes in the pictures? Our water comes through those. Every so often the taps don't run at all ... but we've learned that we can't have the washing machine on and try to have a shower at the same time. But we're used to water issues, we used to live on an isolated farm in rural Italy where I would walk down to the spring every day with my twenty liter jerry can ... a little different when we're all busy and it's Sunday night and we all want to do laundry and prepare for Monday morning but hey!



- is it legal for citizens to walk freely amongst moving heavy machinery? (no other way to get off our property)


- is it fine to have emergency service vehicle access severely limited? (meter long and meter wide ditch in front of our houses)











- is it ok not to have garbage or recycling pickup for over a month?


- more trivial quality of life concerns: the noise, the extra dust, the effects on our social life (people with small children or disabilities or both cannot access our house easily)













So, my question is, which municipal party would have managed this construction fiesta in a way that better served the interim needs of the population?

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