Inuit residence in Montreal scrapped amid racist charges

TwitterLinkedInDiggBuzzEmail.Graeme Hamilton, National Post


MONTREAL — The not-in-my-backyard syndrome has got the better of proposed garbage landfills and wind farms, homeless shelters and halfway houses. In Montreal it has just claimed a residence for people requiring care for heart ailments, spinal injuries and high-risk pregnancies. The reason: the patients would have been Inuit from northern Quebec.

Four months after racist tracts circulated warning that the proposed residence would increase crime in the north-central district of Villeray and the borough mayor worried aloud about 125 Inuit hitting the city to party, the health board behind the project pulled the plug on Thursday.

The Nunavik Regional Board of Health and Social Services said vocal opposition to the project led administrators to conclude “the Inuit clientele would not be accepted in the Villeray borough, even though we received some support for the project.”

The plan would have seen the abandoned Chinese Hospital, vacant for a decade, renovated at a cost of $12-million to provide temporary residence for Inuit requiring a range of medical treatments unavailable in northern Quebec. Currently, these patients are housed in seven different locations around the city. In a June presentation about the project, health officials called the current conditions “unacceptable” and said there was an urgent need to provide better housing.

Alasie Arngak, the regional health board’s chairwoman, called the situation that led to the scrapping of the project hurtful. “The organizations of the Nunavik network firmly believe that the injury inflicted is too deep to pursue the relocation project to the former Chinese Hospital,” she said in a statement. The board said it will now look for another site.

Signs that the seemingly innocuous project could be headed for trouble first surfaced in May. Anie Samson, Mayor of the borough that includes Villeray, told the Nunatsiaq online news site she was concerned the patients and their companions would disrupt the peaceful neighbourhood.

“People come from far away, they come into the city where everything’s new, there’s action. It’s as if they were coming to Las Vegas,” she said.

Ms. Samson repeated her concerns in an interview with Radio-Canada: “When you bring 125 people who are uprooted, it’s new, it’s the big city, it’s a party. For sure there will be things that happen. It would be a lie to say there will be no incivility.”

The borough council voted to freeze any development on the hospital site until it received more information from health authorities.

At around the same time, anonymous flyers began appearing in neighbourhood mailboxes warning of the “imminent danger” presented by the proposed residence. Property values would plunge, drug addicts and prostitutes would overrun the streets, the flyers said: “Your quiet, your families and your children are in danger.”

The initial reaction was fuelled in part by the mistaken view that the residence would be a detox centre. Other Villeray residents pleaded for tolerance, starting a Facebook group decrying the “racism” that had greeted the project.

In an interview last month before the project was cancelled, Edward Saluarsiak, a 28-year-old Inuk from Aupaluk on Ungava Bay, said he was mystified by the negative reaction. He has been in a wheelchair since a boat accident nine years ago and travels to Montreal regularly for spinal cord treatments.

“They should welcome us because we’re native,” he said of the people of Villeray. “We were here before the Halunaks came.” (Halunak is an Inuktitut word for a white person.)

André Trépanier, a Villeray resident who started a committee in favour of the Inuit project, said he was saddened to see that it had fallen victim to the not-in-my-backyard syndrome. In a statement on behalf of his committee he expressed “shame at the bad reception” given to the project and “anger” at the way elected officials handled the controversy. “In the name of the residents of Villeray, the committee apologizes,” he wrote.

National Post (Toronto)


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