The mayors of Longueuil and Montreal held a joint news conference on Tuesday to call on all party leaders to tackle infrastructure spending during the campaign. “We as cities are facing a major financial wall. We have to invest more than ever in our basic infrastructures,” said Longueuil Mayor Catherine Fournier. They said the current state of infrastructure is in a bad state, and cities urgently need more money to fix it. “It is not normal that the second largest city in Canada almost run out of water,” said Soraya Martinez Ferrada, referring to the major repair work on the major water main under Atwater Avenue. “All Montrealers know this year potholes were something and sewers do not have the capacity to deal with the water that we’re getting.” According to the Union of Municipalities (UMQ), municipalities will need 50 billion dollars just to maintain current infrastructure. Martinez Ferrada said fixing Montreal’s water network alone will take more than a billion dollars in additional investment. “At this moment we still have about 20 per cent of water that we lose just because the infrastructure of the water pipes is not well maintained,” she added. Both mayors said there is an imbalance in the responsibility municipalities carry for services, versus the funding they receive from Quebec. “The math doesn’t match. You know, we are responsible for 60% of our public infrastructure, and we only have eight per cent of the revenue,” said Fournier. They said it was disappointing that an issue that affects so many people isn’t getting attention during the campaign. “The metropolitan area has not been an issue for any party, really, during this campaign,” said Martinez Ferrada. “When you think about 55 per cent of our GDP in Quebec comes from the metropolitan area, 50 per cent of the jobs in Quebec are in the metropolitan area.”
