The 'City of West Island Montreal' has a nice ring to it.
The unfairly balanced ag(ogre)lomeration tax foisted by Big Sister Montreal upon crabby “independent” West Island municipalities (WIM) is a soap opera that promises to outrun Day of Our Lives (or should I have mentioned CBC’s favourite “Canadian” fare Coronation Street?)
Certainly, like buying a hot dog at a Habs’ game, WIM satellites ain’t getting their money’s worth; it’s blatant legislative opportunism on the part of Hotel-de -Ville, almost like a punishment for voting to separate. Someone has to pay for the fancy downtown washrooms, why not bitch-slap the disloyal? (So Beaconsfield is suing. Yaaaay!)
I don’t know why the Liberal party encrusted West Island fractions don’t draw out a plan and stage a referendum (“I can’t believe it! Did that hack Schukov just use the R word?”) and move towards becoming a separate city — WIM. To be exact, I don’t know why because that would require extensive research into the machinations of municipal merger superimposed by provincial control by a nationalist party that would fall over backwards laughing at the odds of that being allowed. (I am pausing to take a breath . . . Okay we’re back.)
But if a whole country can leave a union of Godzillian proportions — Britain out of Europe as Brexit — why can’t a sizable, federalist leaning patch exit Montreal? Why not hitch that poser to the Liberal party’s chuck wagon and mosey it to Ottawa? Let’s call it Wexit. It certainly would make a nice get-off-your-couch project for the virtually acclaimed and reclining West Island Liberal MPs.
If Quebec is distinct within Canada, isn’t the West Island distinct within the province? (Did I say that correctly? You know what I mean, anyway.) Trolls may dump a “constitutional” all over this idea, but far greater jokes have been realized in the Gulliver’s Travels environment that is Quebec:
Bill 101 that comes with a measuring stick for English letters.
Bill 21, which addresses fashion dress codes/statements.
And the inevitable Bill 911 whereupon we will be required to carry papers that certify we are historic English Quebecers.
(I digress not because it’s all one inter-related dog’s breakfast.)
Recently, the Lester B. Pearson School Board chairman pointed at the elephant in the room by saying Bill 101 has decimated his… uh…school board. (What a coincidence, one week after I wrote the same thing in my West Island Gazette column.) Where are the federal constitutional challenges to these Bills? Self-consumed provincial court judgements don’t count. Quebec is not a country — elephant No. 2 in the room. (Where was I? I should carry a program.)
Oh, yeah. A separate City of West Island Montreal makes perfect sense, a good place to start in the long and bumpy road to restoring equity to the left half of the island. I vote Pointe Claire as home base for the new City Hall, but in a real democracy that detail can be worked out later. And with the money WIM saves, it can form its own police and fire departments.
Got a nice ring to it — the City of West Island Montreal. As Star Trek’s Captain Picard used to say, “Make it so.”