Today, The Gazette is launching Fixing Montreal, a new series where our journalists will be looking for solutions to some of the major challenges facing our city.
Montreal has so many great things going for it — a beautiful location, distinct and charming neighbourhoods, generally reliable transit and transportation, lively nightlife and creative chefs, four universities, a great women’s hockey team and a Canadiens team that everyone hopes might just win the Stanley Cup this year.
But community leaders, politicians and residents are also coping with a number of crises: a growing homelessness emergency, decaying infrastructure — from roads to water pipes to arenas, a housing shortage and an affordability crisis, maintaining and expanding public transit, a worker shortage, a doctor shortage and increasingly frustrating wait times for medical care.
In this occasional series, Gazette journalists will dig into some of these issues, exploring how they could be fixed — hopefully permanently.
Our first story looks at an issue Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada promised to solve during her election campaign in 2025: reducing homelessness in the city.
Gazette city hall reporter Jesse Feith, who has been covering homelessness for several years, spoke with former Quebec premier Pauline Marois, who earlier this year used her political capital to try to get a discussion about tackling homelessness into the public conversation.
As Feith reports, fixing the homelessness crisis will require more money — and fundamental changes to the way we approach housing and health in Montreal.
A crisis left unaddressed quickly becomes the status quo. Through this continuing series, The Gazette newsroom is committed to solutions-driven reporting — asking the hard questions, challenging institutional inertia and looking for the answers to some of Montreal’s biggest problems.