In its 2017 election campaign, Projet Montréal captured the hearts of many Montrealers with its promise to build a new metro line, creatively labelled the “pink line.” The promise expressed the party’s longstanding emphasis on public transportation, as well as the turn toward social justice issues under its new leader, Valérie Plante. Accordingly, the new metro line would not simply encourage more Montrealers to switch from automobile to public transportation, but also address the social marginalization of neighbourhoods like Montréal-Nord, the endpoint of the proposed line. As Plante explained, «C'est un projet qui va désenclaver des quartiers repliés sur eux-mêmes … ça va ouvrir des quartiers, des commerces» ["It's a project that will open up inward-looking neighborhoods... it'll open up neighborhoods and businesses"].

Today, the pink line seems like an artifact from a different time and a different Projet Montréal. The change is more significant than it might seem. The party has abandoned the pink line, yes, but it has also de-emphasized public transportation and seemingly forgotten its brief flirtation with social justice concerns. Worse still, the political space given over to these commitments has come to be occupied by the police and an ever-expanding array of public security initiatives. Once the party of the pink line, Projet Montréal’s has become the party of the thin blue line.

This shift in priorities can be traced to 2020 and the overlapping crises that emerged that year. The public health measures implemented to combat COVID-19 from March 2020 onward decimated public transit usage. Ridership declined 54% between 2019 and 2020 in Montreal and 56% at the metropolitan scale. The Autorité régionale de transport métropolitain (ARTM) finished 2020 with a $477.7 million shortfall in transit fares, the cumulative result of shortfalls across the four transit agencies under its umbrella, including the Société de transport de Montréal (STM). A one-time cash infusion from the government of Quebec covered the deficit, but no long-term support was promised at the time.

In the same year, a series of high-profile police killings in the United States and Canada ignited the second wave of the Black Lives Matter movement. Montreal saw two demonstrations of unprecedented scale against police racism and violence in its history in the summer of 2020 and the movement’s demand to defund the police won majority support in Montreal (74%) and the province of Quebec (54%). While the public support suggested the possibility of a new approach to public safety in the city, it also registered as a crisis of legitimacy for the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM), which predictably opposed any reallocation of its funding.

As the fall arrived and discussions of the 2021 budget began, Projet Montréal had a chance to reaffirm its commitment to public transportation in a time of crisis – and perhaps social justice as well. In the end, it did precisely the opposite. The party’s 2021 budget defied public opinion by boosting SPVM funding by $14 million (2.1%), while cutting spending on public transportation by $36 million (5.5%). The City effectively funds public transit through contributions to the ARTM, which distributes the revenues it receives from governments and transit fares to the STM and three other transit organizations. The contrast between the budget increases and decreases in 2021 was hard to ignore. Projet Montréal was effectively defunding public transportation to finance the police.

The priorities expressed in the 2021 budget have become a repeating pattern. Between 2020 and 2024, Projet Montréal has increased budgeted spending on policing by $156 million (23%) while adding just $47 million (7%) to budgeted spending on public transportation, well below the rate of inflation. And that is just budgeted spending. On Projet Montréal’s watch, the SPVM has developed the habit of spending whatever it feels like. Since 2020, the SPVM has exceeded its budget by an average of $35.7 million per year, a self-allocated budget that Projet Montréal simply covers each year without protest. In contrast, the ARTM and local transit authorities are expected to respect their budgets, even as ridership was reduced by the pandemic and has been slow to rebound. To balance its budget, the STM has reduced its workforce by 245 people (3%) since 2020 and implemented various service cuts.

Perhaps the most glaring of expression of Projet Montréal’s new priorities, however, is visible within the STM workforce and metro stations. While the STM had cut its overall workforce since 2020, it has increases the number of security agents from 180 to 212 (an 18% increase). In the same period, the status of the agents has been upgraded from “inspecteur” to “constable spécial,” a status that comes with a higher salary and the power to make arrests. What's more, last January, it created a unit of "security ambassadors," which is expected to grow from 6 to 20 members this summer. 

This bloated security apparatus does not replace but operates alongside an equally bloated police contigent. Since the end of 2021, the SPVM has been forwarding most 911 calls from metro stations to its neighborhood stations, allowing the 100 or so patrol officers in the metro section to concentrate on criminal investigations within the network.

Finally, a new mixed squad, the Équipe métro d'intervention et de concertation (EMIC), was introduced in November 2020, and 8 psychosocial workers from the civilian squad, the Équipe mobile de médiation et d'intervention sociale (EMMIS), were deployed in metro stations last December.

Both Projet Montréal’s broad budget priorities and the allocation of funding with the STM point to an increasingly carceral and dystopian form of city-making. Money that could be spent on creating new transit lines, increasing the frequency of service on existing lines, or reducing transit fares is channeled into the security apparatus across the city and within the transit system. Money that could be spent addressing social problems, including homelessness and the marginalization of neighbourhoods like Montréal-Nord, is spent on attacking their symptoms – which is to say, attacking unhoused and marginalized people.

None of this, of course, makes the symptoms of social problems disappear. None of this makes anyone safer. On the contrary, the application of police methods to symptoms becomes a process that has to be repeated over and over again. Every year, social services are starved even more to feed the police, the distinction between problems and symptoms is discussed less and less, and a political party that has already won the hearts of many Montrealers becomes the SPVM's fundraising and propaganda arm. In the necessarily long and difficult struggle for social and climate justice, it's useful to recognize that Montrealers want a fairer, greener city than Projet Montréal and its prison program. 

 

Why are the police so present in the metro?

The impact of police operations is evident in the composition of the prison population: 32.4% of prisoners are employed, while the unemployment rate rarely exceeds 6% (Chéné, 2019). Similarly, racialized and Indigenous people are disproportionately represented in prisons, with Indigenous individuals alone accounting for one-third of prison admissions, despite making up only 5% of the population (Statistics Canada, 2022). This suggests that crime often stems from people struggling to maintain steady employment or support themselves, who feel compelled to adopt survival strategies deemed illegal, such as sleeping in the subway, begging, or selling drugs.

Statistical data further highlights this, showing a growing number of Indigenous people in prisons, and in some years, as many as 40% of tickets issued were to people experiencing homelessness (Bellot et al., 2021). Public transportation, as one of the last accessible public spaces, has become a zone of predation for the police. With STM fare revenues at only $466 million, it’s evident that the resources spent on policing the poor—through ticket booths, inspectors, and kiosks—could instead be used to provide free transportation.

 

References

Bellot, C., Sylvestre, M.-È., Poisson, J., Lesage-Mann, É. et Fortin, V. (2021, janvier). Judiciarisation de l’itinérance à Montréal. From http://rapsim.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/VF2_Judiciarisation-de-liti...

Chéné, B. (2019). Profil de la population correctionnelle 2015-2016. Ministère de la sécurité publique. From https://cdn-contenu.quebec.ca/cdn-contenu/adm/min/securite-publique/publ...

Statistique Canada. (2022, 20 avril). Adult and youth correctional statistics, 2020/2021. The Daily. From https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/daily-quotidien/220420/dq220420c-eng.pdf

 

 

Notes

The thin blue line is a badge worn by many SPVM police officers. This logo first appeared in 2014 in the United States, during confrontations surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, where police countered with the "Blue Lives Matter" slogan. These two movements are in no way comparable. In both the U.S. and Canada, Black people are disproportionately targeted and killed by police officers, who frequently display racist behavior. The Blue Lives Matter movement arose in reaction to the defense of racialized people’s rights. Consequently, this logo is associated with white supremacy, yet it was openly worn by Montreal police officers, notably during demonstrations against COP15.