What's The Difference?

A couple of years ago the then mayor of Montréal came up with a new slogan for the city, "Une Île une Ville" which roughly means one island one city. What he wanted to do was merge all the municipalities into one huge city, which he would be the mayor of. Why would he do that? Well Montréal's finances were a mess, the city was deeply in debt and it was a simple way of making some cash by getting a nice cash cow in the West Island which would never have enough representation to do something about it. Now the PQ provincial government of the time was in a centralizing mode saying that bigger was better.
Needless to say that most of the citizens of the West Island municipalities did not take kindly to this and raised a mega stink. The provincial government being the highly democratic entity that it was, simply overruled everyone and merged the cities. After all they knew that nobody from the West Island would vote for them anyway being separatists, since there was a good percentage of Anglos and immigrants. To make a long story short, finally the Liberals were elected partly on the promise of being willing to demerge the already merged island. Came the big day and most of the West Island communities voted to demerge, but some of them didn't get the percentages to demerge so they stayed a part of Montréal. Now what difference does it make you ask? Well as they say a picture is worth a thousand words. These are pictures I took as I was walking to the pharmacy tonight.The first picture is of Pierrefond's sidewalks The second is a picture of the sidewalks of Kirkland which demerged and the third is a picture of the path through the neighbourhood park. I rest my case, bigger is not better it's just less efficient.









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