Huge Momentum Shift For Turcot At BAPE

What a week! It started off quietly with not many people expressing a whole lot of optimism about the upcoming public hearings. But a funny thing happened on the way to the BAPE. The Mayor of Montreal and the two other candidates for mayor showed up asking that the Turcot project be rethought. Then the Parti Quebecois decided to turn up the heat on Jean Charest and all of a sudden we got ourselves a pretty serious movement! Add to that that the week was full of a rich diversity of groups from the South West and well beyond, all with very well organized and articulated briefs, and you have a powerful recipe for success. This has just been wonderful to witness, and I am very happy for all the people who have worked so hard and had the courage to keep going when things did not look too good.

The South West will be a stronger place no matter what happens now and it has been great to see some before now unlikely networking happening. There has been a lot of cross borough talk at the grassroots level, a lot of common ground covered so to speak. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Very conspicuous by their absence was the superhospital folks up on the Glen, but then again, there ain’t no hospital being built there yet!

One political veteran told me it was like the turning point in an election campaign where you can actually feel the momentum shift and that is exactly what happened here this week. Something changed. Stay tuned.

The Turcot edition of the BAPE concludes Friday afternoon.