When I covered Côte Saint-Luc City Council meetings back in the day as a reporter for The Suburban and The Monitor, the topic of extending Cavendish Boulevard came up often. Then Mayor Bernard Lang would repeatedly tell anyone listening: “We don’t need it, we don’t want it, we can’t afford it!”
Mayor Lang, may he rest in peace, would probably not be happy if he were still with us to see our council now pushing hard for such an extension. In my 19 years as a city councillor, different scenarios have been discussed. In 2017 the Quebec government sold the former Blue Bonnets Raceway land to the City of Montreal, worth $50 million, for $1. Seven years later, Projet Montréal and the Mayor Valerie Plante administration have still done nothing with the property. With word that they plan to proceed with some kind of housing development, it seems that Mayor Plante has complete amnesia. The government gave the city this huge gift on the condition they extend Cavendish. Now, she is reneging on that deal.
Traffic expert Rick Leckner, who is now a Côte Saint-Luc resident, attended our public city council meeting on August 12 to support a petition spearheaded by D’Arcy McGee Liberal MNA Elisabeth Prass to call upon the provincial and federal governments to block any funding for this project unless the Cavendish extension is included. In Côte Saint-Luc, Councillor Dida Berku has been leading the way on this dossier.
“What has been going on at Montreal City Hall is shameful,” said Leckner. “It is time to get the public involved. This is affecting all of us. You can’t get out of Côte Saint-Luc.”
Leckner is part of a group called the Business Alliance for Cavendish Extension. This has the full backing of the mayors of Côte Saint-Luc, TMR and St. Laurent,
Here is the petition and the link posted by MNA Prass.
Bonjour,
Au nom des résidents de D'Arcy-McGee, la députée Elisabeth Prass a marrainé une pétition sur le site de l'Assemblée nationale du Québec pour demander au gouvernement de la CAQ d'exiger que la ville de Montréal respecte l'accord de 2017 concernant la vente de Blue Bonnets, qui stipule que l'extension du boulevard Cavendish est nécessaire pour développer les terrains de Blue Bonnets.
Voici le lien de la pétition : Pétition : Respect du cheminement du projet de raccordement de la route Cavendish-Cavendish selon l’échéancier déposé devant le BAPE (assnat.qc.ca)
Veuillez signer et faire circuler.
Merci,
Arianne Leclerc au nom d’Elisabeth Prass
Hello,
On behalf of the residents of D'Arcy-McGee, MNA Elisabeth Prass has sponsored a petition on the Quebec National Assembly website to ask that the CAQ government require the city of Montreal to uphold the 2017 agreement upon the sale of Blue Bonnets, which stipulates that the extension of Cavendish boulevard is required to develop the Blue Bonnets lands.
Here is the petition link: Petition: Compliance with the Cavendish-Cavendish road connection project schedule submitted to the BAPE (assnat.qc.ca)
Please sign it and share with others.
Can we influence the CAQ government? I certainly hope we can get the support of Higher Education Minister Pascale Déry, who has lived in Côte Saint-Luc and Hampstead for many years. So she lives the same frustration we do.
Mayor Plante’s inaction and developing this unbelievably rich-in-potential site proves, even to lock-stepping supporters, that she doesn’t believe in progress and growth. She and her supporters are anti-growth. Their concerns are limited to their tiny square foot of Plateau Montreal and the rest of the city can go piss up a rope. Furthermore, the dirty secret about the lack of development in the former Bluebonnets site is that real estate developers and contractors, even though I was committed to creating affordable and social housing, refuse to turn over a foot of soil until the city begins to install the necessary infrastructure. Mayor Plante, as usual, and as she does for every project she does not like, is pleading poverty, insisting that the city does not have the financial wherewithal to begin infrastructure work on the site. This is of course bullshit. She can do with every other mayor in a large North American city can do; she can go to New York or any other financial centre and issue bonds and raise financing for the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary. But she will not do this or any other project that promotes growth, diversity, and attention away from her precious Plateau Mont Royal.
DONE
It is about time!