The St. Lawrence should be the city’s greatest treasure. Montreal treats it like an open sewer. This is no geographic accident: it’s a decision.
There is one image that sums up the contradiction. An island-city, surrounded on all sides by fresh water —the St. Lawrence River, the rivière des Prairies, Lac Saint-Louis and Lac des Deux-Montagnes—, in the middle of July, in thirty-degree heat, and its residents with nowhere nearby to take a swim. To cool off in clean water, the average Montrealer has to get in a car and drive between thirty and ninety minutes to the far west end of the island. Whoever has no car does not swim. That simple, that unjust.