Part One of this special series can be found HERE.

Part Two: The present

2024 seems, so far, to be one of the worst years for Canadian arts & culture in recent memory.

Back in February, Director and CEO of Canada Council for the Arts - a governmental entity which supports the arts and literary scene in Canada through grants, services, prizes and payments - issued a letter to the community in which it announced that the Council will be lowering its spending incrementally over three years, as part of the federal government’s Refocusing Government Spending initiative, for a grand total decrease of $9.88 million. In Quebec, Francois Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government presented a 2024 budget in March that not only drastically reduced the budget for the entire arts & culture sector, but also slashed the budget of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ), which provides funds to arts organizations provincially, by close to a million dollars, receiving just $160 million for 2024-2025. And in Montreal, we experienced the surreal cancellation of the 2024 Just for Laughs Festival, a juggernaut of the international comedy scene, after Groupe Juste pour rire inc. (JPR), the company who runs the fest, filed for bankruptcy back in March.

Naturally, this is a dark spot looming over a sector that has been aching to get back into full swing in the wake of confinement measures imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which shut down non-essential businesses like performance venues and made it harder for them to bounce back, thanks in part to low attendance and increased rents. Even now, as artists and arts sector workers are organizing and protesting in front of the office of Quebec’s culture ministry, things are trying to happen; festivals of all genres and sizes like PorchFest in NDG, Île Sonique, the Jazz Fest, and Osheaga are on the horizon, and there are a myriad bands announcing summer tours.

I think we can all say that the reintroduction of live music and performances into our lives is something worth celebrating, and Summer is arguably one of the best seasons for live music in Montreal. But it feels hollow and a little bittersweet to get excited about new developments in the scene when behind the curtain there’s a lot to be worried about, and any of these upcoming festivals or concerts could be next on the chopping block.

Of course, one of the parts of the arts & culture scene hit most hard by decreased funding and post-Covid blues are small independent venues. Even before the pandemic, Montreal’s indie arts scene was losing many of the venues that had made it; but this has only been exacerbated in recent years, with the closure of places like Katacombes and Diving Bell Social Club, waving the figurative red flag of an arts scene under attack. From firsthand experience, Forget the Box has profiled seven venues since we launched last February; of those seven, two of those venues are already closed.

It should come at no surprise that indie venues face the most danger of closing. Despite how large they may loom in our minds, most of our favourite venues are (very) small businesses experiencing the same issues your local mom and pop shop do. This danger is backed by evidence: according to a Key Small Business Statistics report from 2022 from Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, from 2015 to 2019, on average, 101,324 small and medium-sized enterprises were created every year and 90,151 disappeared, meaning 89% of them failed.

(I want to make a small note here: apparently, the appearance or disappearance of businesses over a given period is referred to as "creative destruction." I think that for an economic term, that’s surprisingly poetic- and pretty neat.)

And yet, small businesses are major contributors to the Canadian economy. In 2022, businesses with 1 to 99 employees comprised 98.0% of all employer businesses in Canada. So why aren’t they protected? Why don’t they make it? More specifically, aside from the seemingly relentless onslaught of the powers that be against the arts and culture scene, what are the realities facing arts venues today? The answers to these questions are complicated and manifold, and ultimately not happy ones. Too often the ever-unfolding events of the present and the situations that create it aren’t. But just as often, taking a hard look at the world around us, and engaging with those who are in it, can provide both clues and solutions.

Sitting in Turbo Haüs before it opens is like sitting in a temple or place of worship before service. The near constant sound of water moving through pipes and the low thrum of electricity permeate the space like the far-off practicing of choral hymns, and the half-light of low incandescent bulbs fills the space with an almost otherworldly sense of calm. Posters range the walls of the main entrance to the end of the room where the bar rests, punk aesthetics with flash-tattoo flair, and in the adjoining room, a dismantled drum kit, multiple sets of speakers and a soundboard denote the tell-tale markings of the place where the ‘congregation’ gathers and the magic happens.

Turbo Haüs and its co-owner, Sergio da Silva, are no strangers to the realities facing performance venues in this city today. In fact, Sergio has been incredibly outspoken about the difficulties faced by small businesses like his in recent years, being featured in several articles and on numerous podcasts. His frank and unpretentious manner, cool and eccentric fashion, and unflinching refusal to back down from this fight have made him a bit of a local celebrity, and champion of the cause for Montreal’s struggling cultural scene.

When I sit down with him and ask him how he’s doing, the words "I've been worse" are not what I’m expecting- but it makes sense for a man who’s been running an operation like Turbo Haüs for over 10 years and has faced his fair share of nonsense. “I think it was back in November where we got our first, like, actual noise complaint,” Sergio tells me when I ask about the issues facing places like Turbo Haüs. “And the problem with that is that the building that the complaint came from was a building full of foreign exchange students who were basically here for the semester, living in that building for the next six months, and they're fucking off back to Paris.” As far as shitty neighbours go, that takes the cake- and the impact of that entitlement creates more ripples than they may even realize. “[Noise complaints] make things worse by making it more difficult for venues to exist, and make it almost impossible for DIY spaces to exist… and if you’re the one putting in the noise complaints, you are actively dismantling the things that you say that you like about the city and you like about the culture.”

Thankfully, these noise complaints (and the fines associated with them) haven’t dealt the killing blow to Turbo Haüs. Far from it, in fact, as they’re booked five days a week from now until the end of June doing shows, open mics, and jams. But that’s both in spite of what it deals with, and because of the model of reciprocity that Turbo Haüs is based on. “We work with promoters in the city, and when we do co-prods we'll take care of the hospitality and make sure that everybody's taken care of, that everybody feels good,” Sergio relates. “In order to do that, you need to be able to work with these other people, like everybody's got to sort of pull in the same direction.”

At the end of the day, Sergio views the place as a community space - and that’s been the intention of Turbo Haüs from the start. “I mean, my mission, and the mission of the people who are working here, is to try to create like some sort of connection, like a sense of community,” he tells me, “where bands and people who are in bands can sort of come together, meet, make new bands, make new spaces, and, like, use it as a jumping off spot to just do all kinds of things.”

The principles that Turbo Haüs is founded on are absolutely based in Sergio’s past experience as a touring musician himself, and wanting to answer the needs he found musicians had. “Being on tour in Europe we would do almost exclusively like basement shows, or squats at converted old military spots, military bakeries, observatories - anywhere you could have a show, we had a show,” he recalls. “And we always thought, like, it would be nice to just be able to have our own space, to be able to run shows the way we wanted to.” For his part, Sergio makes sure the place delivers on that promise, offering bands they promote and invite to play services like a place to stay, something to eat, a safe place to park and a safe place to spend the night. “All bands all have the same basic needs. No matter who's in the band, no matter who's playing, no matter what the makeup of the band is,” he says. “Those are the things that you have to meet no matter what, (...) and when we do it, when we host shows, that's all taken care of.”

“Gone are the days where you can fucking work a bar job three days a week, have fucking $400.00 in cash in one pocket, 4 grams of blow in the other and you’re paying rent with three other dudes with a nickel and a fucking jig, dude. Like, that’s gone.”

— Sergio da Silva

When it gets down to brass tacks though, Sergio isn’t running a charity- he’s running a business. When asked about whether or not it’s hard to balance keeping the business going & keeping it affordable for up and coming bands/artists, Sergio doesn’t mince words: “The reality of the thing is that it's quite easy; the space needs to make this much money to exist. In order for it to make that much money, I've got to charge this much money. That's just what it is. And some people are like, ‘oh, you're fucking us, it's pay to play, what are you doing?’ But like, if I ask a band to play here, they're going to get paid, they're going to be taken care of. If you're asking me to rent the room and use my space? Then there's a cost to that. I didn't ask you to come here, you asked me to use it. So you're paying me for the resources that I have, it's a fair exchange.”

For a small business like Turbo Haüs, ‘fair exchange’ is more than just the name of the game - it’s how they survive. According to an analysis on small businesses in Canada, first quarter of 2023, small businesses are more likely than larger ones to experience obstacles like rising inflation, rising cost of inputs, and rising interest rates and debt, as well as a decrease in profitability and supply chain problems. But that’s not how everyone sees it. “People have, like, weird ideas around bar ownership and things like that,” Sergio says. “[Running Turbo Haüs] is my job, this is how I get paid. The same way you pay your bills, the same way you pay to eat. This is how I pay my bills, is how I pay to eat. I don't have a crazy amount of money. I drive a fucking 1999 Pathfinder I bought for $1000, OK? It's a weird thing to talk about because, like, I would never go to somebody's job and demand they do it for me for free.”

That essential commonality, that we’re all paying our bills and trying to get by in a world that seems to be out to grind us into dust, is something that Sergio’s acutely aware of - both from an artist perspective and a business perspective. “It's such a fragile thing,” he says. “It's such a fragile ecosystem, to make things work the way that they do, and now with like, increasing rents and unaffordability across the board, it’s even worse.”

Here we come to arguably the most important crisis facing artists and arts venues: the cost of living and housing crises. More than the issues with the city or the cops, more than fighting with shitty neighbours who move into the neighbourhood and don’t stay, even more than the noise complaints (and he’s dealt with his fair share), the feeling I get from Sergio is that this is the biggest issue facing today’s arts venues. As he put it, “Housing is as much a fucking problem [facing venues] as noise complaints. (...) Even more than the space not existing, the most important thing is that the people can't exist. It's one thing to have a space and the resources to allow people to do that, but this doesn't exist without the people who are going to do that, the people who make the art, the people who are actively creating.”

While it’s not a particularly glamorous or novel conclusion - people have been decrying the loss of affordable housing and rising costs of living for what feels like forever now - I think it’s important to really hold that in our minds. While it is more nebulous an issue than short-term renters ruining a venue with multiple noise complaints and fines for example, it is an issue that, because of its very ubiquity, is something that well and truly affects all of us; which means we all have a stake in trying to deal with it. It’s easy to compartmentalize and think of issues facing venues as, well, issues solely faced by venues- the classic ‘well if it doesn’t happen to me, it’s not my problem’ mentality. But that gets harder to do when you realize the things that make it so your groceries suddenly cost $400 a week are the same things killing your local performance venue.

It’s also a scathing condemnation of the way things are, versus how they were: “The days of Montreal between like 2005 and 2015, that's gone baby.” Sergio reminisces, “Gone are the days where you can fucking work a bar job three days a week, have fucking $400.00 in cash in one pocket, 4 grams of blow in the other and you're paying rent with three other dudes with a nickel and a fucking jig, dude. Like, that's gone.” Not only is that the funniest thing anyone’s ever said to me in an interview, but with this remark Sergio paints a picture that shows how creativity (and creative spaces) and affordability go hand in hand. “That's how all that creative ‘boom’ [happened here],” he relates, “it’s because [if you were an artist] you were able to be creative, stay creative and spend all your fucking time and energy doing that while working some bullshit job that you didn't have to think about. And now that doesn't exist: you have to work 2 fucking jobs just to be able to be in an apartment with four other people. It's not conducive to arts and culture.”

Meyer Billurcu - concert promoter, co-founder of Blue Skies Turn Black and co-owner of Bar Le Ritz PBD - knows all about the creative boom that made Montreal the place to be for indie shows. Having started booking shows and DIY events back in the year 2000 with a high school friend, that operation eventually snowballed thanks to growing interest, connections with other like-minded people in the industry like CGLO Radio, the team from Casa del Popolo and Alienate Records, and of course, indie bands like Fugazi, Leitsu, and the Deers.

“We were doing a few events here and there, maybe a couple a month, and before we knew it we were doing like, 10 or 15 a month,” he says. “And then it just kept growing and growing to where we are today, where we're booking, I want to say about 200-250 shows a year, sometimes more.” These days, BSTB is practically a household name for indie shows in Montreal; and Bar le Ritz has cemented itself in the public consciousness as a pillar of not only the arts, but community as well, hosting concerts, themed dance parties, book launches and movie nights.

For all the shows they organize, the team at BSTB isn’t very big. Meyer even refers to le Ritz as ‘a small venue’ with a 200 person cap. “The day-to-day is not that big,” Meyer admits. “Like it's me and David doing all the bookings, and then we have like a small team that helps with the administrative stuff and the marketing stuff. Then we have our, like, prod managers, who are the people that run the shows and the number of those really depends on how many shows we have. But I’d say we have 7 to 10 people on the regular.” Another example of a lynchpin of the arts and culture scene that’s really just another small business trying to get by while serving the community.

While originally Meyer wanted to start a record label rather than be a concert promoter, the goal from the start was to introduce Montrealers to acts that hadn’t had their time in the spotlight, and to create community around these events. “When we started, there was Gillett Entertainment Group (now Evenko) and Greenland Productions which were, like, the big dogs, and the way we looked at it, what we were doing wasn't stepping on anyone's toes,” he tells me. “We were looking to book bands that no one else had any interest in booking. We wanted to service the community; there were bands that we liked, that we knew other people liked, but that weren’t mainstream enough so no one was there for them, and either the show sucked or they just skipped Montreal - which is happening again, which is kind of funny. ” And overall, BSTB has stayed true to that mission throughout the years, even as they’ve evolved and changed hands a number of times. “I kind of like to think that the way we run shows now isn't that different than when we started - like it is in certain ways, but it's really not, you know - and we've just kind of maintained our identity by doing the same things for, like, almost 25 years now.”

As both a concert promoter AND venue manager, Meyer has seen the range of issues that can be faced in the industry. Pre-pandemic, le Ritz had its own issues with noise complaints and fines: “We were getting fines between 2016 right up until 2019,” he says, “and by the end of it, I think we had, I don't know, nine or ten tickets, the last few which were like $3600 each - the first one starts at like $300 and then it's just cumulative.” This came to a head during the pandemic, when Meyer had to go to court to dispute the fines, which thankfully got thrown out. While the outcome could have been much worse, the experience itself was harrowing. “I remember [thinking], I can't believe I have to deal with this during a pandemic,” he recounts. “That made it pretty tough to have a venue for a while.”

The issue of noise complaints is only compounded by shitty interactions with the police, which itself reveals a massive flaw in the system currently in place to deal with said complaints: the fact that the ‘law’ is flimsy at best, and arbitrary and cruel at its worst. “You know, I've talked to a lot of cops who've come into the Ritz and like, everything I thought was law, they throw in my face and say is not law,” Meyer tells me. “Like one of the things we would do is keep a decibel reader, [to monitor how loud it gets], and [when the cops would show], we'd be like ‘well we're under the amount that it says in the law’ and they were like, ‘well if you can hear it outside that doesn't matter.’ They told us the only thing acceptable for [noise that can be heard] outside is people talking on a patio at a restaurant. Like, that's the acceptable level of noise, and anything above that is considered in violation.” This legal unspecificity and arbitrary decision making by officers of the law is echoed by Sergio from Turbo Haüs: “Be more specific about what the laws actually are. Don't leave it in the hands of some fucking pig that shows up, or some inspector that shows up to be like ‘I've decided that this is bad.’”

And yet, noise complaints and close encounters with the law are far from the only thing that le Ritz has faced over the years- in fact, the complaints and fines are more consequences of a pre-existing issue than issues themselves, and one that few venue owners themselves are even made aware of: rezoning. “I’ve been [at the location] for a long time (since 2008), even when everything changed and it became the Ritz, and I can say we didn't have any problems up until about 2016-17,” Meyer recounts. That’s when the noise complaints started coming in in full force. “At first I was like, ‘what's going on?,’ but the neighborhood had changed a lot and a lot of condos went up, so my first guess was that it was just because of the condos. But then us, Breakglass Studios (a recording studio not far from Le Ritz) and a few other businesses around kind of realized that we were all getting problems that we never had before, so we actually banded together and went to the city office of our borough. What we learned was that the place where le Ritz is situated used to be a commercial zone, and you weren't allowed to have residential properties built there- but then they switched the law and they changed it to residential. This allowed a lot of condo developers to come and develop condos, and with that came the complaints.”

“It kind of goes like this: if you have what is known as a ‘salle de spectacle’ license, like a live music venue license, in the eyes of the law that is considered a space where you only open your doors when an artist books it, and you sell tickets in advance, and people are coming to see that specific artist. But if you’re a space like, say BarFly, where you’re open seven days a week, where you still have shows and sometimes people are selling tickets, [it’s not the same.]”

— Meyer Billucru

You may be wondering, as I did, ‘well, didn’t the city or borough reach out to let you know about the zoning change? Shouldn’t they have an obligation to tell businesses in an area set for rezoning that their designation has changed?’ The answer, unfortunately, isn’t very clear- both for business owners like Meyer and the community at large. Meyer told me he doesn’t know what the city’s obligation is in regards to declaring rezoning: ‘It never occurred to me to be like, ‘well why was there nothing here before?’ I just thought ‘oh, the neighborhood’s getting gentrified, that's all it is’. And then to find out that it was a little bit more than that, that there was an actual change in the zoning law, that's a whole different thing.”

Naturally, I did a little digging, and the answers I came up with are just as muddled and unfocused as laws around noise complaints. From what I could find, Montreal underwent a major urban planning project between 2005 and 2015, le Plan d’urbanisme de Montréal , which impacted almost every borough in the city. Each borough had a specific plan for their sector, with goals of updating previously commercial neighbourhoods to mixed-use ones, preserving heritage sites, and privileging public transport access for residents for example; and each borough made changes based on their needs. After reviewing the entire urban planning doc for Villeray-Park Extension (the neighbourhood Bar le Ritz is in), I couldn’t find a single mention of the borough needing to advise current residents or businesses of modifications to their zoning designation. This, however, isn’t consistent across different boroughs. The ‘Amendments to the Zoning By-law’ document of the borough of Cote-des-neiges Notre Dame des Graces says that “generally speaking, the draft by-law [of a zoning by-law amendment] is subject to approval by way of referendum,” ; and the ‘Amendments to a zoning by-law’ document of the Ville St Laurent borough specifically mentions that after adopting the initial draft bylaw, “the Borough of Saint-Laurent organizes a public consultation in order to inform residents and corporate citizens of the proposed urban planning bylaw modifications.” This even requires a public notice indicating the date, location and subject of the consultation is published in the local newspaper.

The lack of consistency here is laughable, and it would just be funny if the reality wasn’t that the impact it has on businesses like le Ritz is deplorable. Don’t get me wrong, the city and its boroughs can and should be able to update the ways we use urban space to accommodate changing times. But when the difference between communicating a zoning change to a business, or not, could be the difference between them continuing to succeed, or potentially shutting their doors due to an unsustainable accumulation of fines, something has to give.

Despite all this, le Ritz is still alive and kicking, thanks to a few changes and some smart business savvy. First and foremost, le Ritz now has a strict policy on live music. “You know, we kind of tell everyone, live sound has to be done by midnight,” Meyer says. “You can have DJs go till 3:00 AM or whatever, but we try not to have any live instrumentation going past 11 or 12.” But the key to both le Ritz and BSTB’s success, Meyer admits, is just knowing what they’re doing and keeping at it. “We have the experience, and we were able to turn Ritz into a space where people like going to shows. (...) Even now the calendar's pretty booked solid, right until June, but I never want to rest on my laurels and just be like, oh, well, the calendar's fine. I'm always looking for new stuff, whether it's DJs or new bands - you always gotta be on your toes a little bit.”

Now of course, one would think that the issues faced by a promoter like BSTB face and a venue like le Ritz face would be quite different- but the reality is that the overlap is far greater than perceived. “As a promoter, the less rooms there are to book, it sucks because then it gets harder and harder [to work,]” Meyer relates. “There have been times where it was like, we had a band, they gave us the date [they could come] and we couldn't book them because there was no room. And that sucks.” In a world where promoters and venues are interconnected, like animals in a symbiotic relationship with one another, the loss of one cripples the other. And as someone in both worlds, Meyer has seen the real impact of venue closures: “I think for the community, it sucks. Even during the pandemic, I remember people were talking about how maybe Casa was gonna close and that was like, ‘oh, shit, like, what would that do?’ You know, these places become hangouts, where people meet and where stuff happens and we need them, you know?”

While indie venues like Turbo Haüs and Bar le Ritz have managed to hold their own despite continuous issues, that’s not to say that there haven’t been things attempted by outside actors to help. Here we turn to a key piece of the venue issue puzzle: the city and public initiatives. I wanted to save this topic for its own section, because while researching for this series, talking to people like Sergio and Meyer, it became clear to me that while there have been public initiatives to try and help places like Turbo Haüs and le Ritz survive fines, shitty neighbours and pandemic-related low business, there are issues even WITHIN these supposed aid measures that aren’t working.

Let’s start with soundproofing. You would think that an easy fix for noise complaints would be for all venues to invest in proper soundproofing, right? The city even announced back in 2022 that they were going to give $1.4 million to small music venues to help soundproof their halls, in order to reduce the number of noise complaints from neighbours. So what's the catch? The problem is in the classification - what qualifies as a small venue. “Not a lot of people know this, but a lot of the grants and the money that are given out for venues for soundproofing and all this stuff only go to venues,” says Sergio. “Technically, we're not a venue; we're a bar that has shows. [To be considered a venue,] there are certain rules that you sort of have to adhere to. So, like, you can't be open if there's no show. Any of the adjacent buildings to you cannot be residential. Your main focus has to be music. So places like MTelus, Corona Theatre, those count. But like, l’Escogriffe, us, all these other places, they're not venues.”

Meyer echoed that same sentiment, and was kind enough to define some of the jargon for me. “It kind of goes like this: if you have what is known as a ‘salle de spectacle’ license, like a live music venue license, in the eyes of the law that is considered a space where you only open your doors when an artist books it, and you sell tickets in advance, and people are coming to see that specific artist. But if you're a space like, say BarFly, where you're open seven days a week, where you still have shows and sometimes people are selling tickets, [it’s not the same.]

Because of this blatant example of bureaucratic idiocy, our favourite indie venues can’t even benefit from the aid that’s purportedly being given to them. “A lot of the grants and money that was out there to support venues during COVID for soundproofing, all that stuff, we're not eligible for,” Sergio says. “During the pandemic, I didn't get any money from SOCAN, SODEC, Factor, any of that shit - because I'm a bar that has shows, I'm not a venue.”

“It's just red tape,” Meyer echoes, “red tape designed to make you pay. Like my yearly liquor license fee could be a lot less if I chose not to have a live music permit. And then we also have to get [a different] one, because one of the bartenders at Ritz just started doing movie nights. We thought, great, there's no problem. But someone from the Régie came by, like, ‘we noticed that you're advertising movie nights, do you have a permit to do that? Because if not, you need to get one.’ It's always just a cash grab.”

Far from the system helping out businesses that need it most, with initiatives like this it almost feels like a slap in the face. And for soundproofing specifically, the idea of a perfectly soundproofed venue is virtually a practical joke: “It’s just ridiculous,” Meyer tells me. “[When I spoke to the city], they were like ‘no sound should bleed out of the venue’. And like, I’ve walked by MTelus [when they’ve had a show going on] and you hear it on the street. Do you know how hard that would be to completely soundproof a place [so that you couldn’t hear it from the outside]? It's just not feasible.”

When it comes to public policy, there ARE actual laws that the city could implement to help venues from the get-go: one that Sergio told me about is the ‘agent of change’ law, an urban planning principle that would force developers to invest in soundproofing when either buying spaces next to pre-existing music venues or when developing new builds. This initiative has seen a fair amount of success in places like Toronto, so it seems like it would be easy to implement here. So why haven’t they done it here?

Sergio’s take, albeit cynical, may just be on the money (no pun intended): “Everybody wants it. For some reason, they won't do it. I mean, I know why they won't do it - because the fucking developers don't want to have to deal with spending the extra money to make sure that they’re where they're supposed to be in terms of soundproofing and ensuring the quality of life and people around them remains the way it's supposed to be. And when you get all your fucking money from property taxes, you don't want to piss these people off. So everybody's kind of, like, jerking each other off to make sure that, like, nobody else gets what they want. Like the the city gets their fucking scratch from the property taxes, the developers get the money from the people who are moving in, and they get to tell them, like, “yeah, whatever, it's a nice neighbourhood. But then people move in and they're like, oh, this fucking sucks. I'm next to goddamn fucking venue.”

It sucks to hear that, and it sucks for all of us who would want to see something done in the spirit of helping indie venues actually live up to its hype. It also feels like if the indie venues we care about keep going under, what’s the point in even caring about it? After a while it feels impossible to stop, and it becomes just another fact of life. Meyer shares that sentiment with me: “I mean, you could look at it in so many ways. You could be like, well, there's just another business on sale around that doesn't exist anymore. [...] That would be the cynical view. [...] And I'm always like, are we next? That's the thing. You don't want to be next. It's just never good when a venue closes or some kind of art institution is shut down, you know, for reasons that have nothing to do with art. You know what I mean?”

But places like Turbo Haüs and Bar le Ritz, any creative spaces, deserve to be protected, even if the powers that be don’t seem to agree. “[Creative spaces, especially DIY spaces,] have to be protected in the whole process as well,” Sergio says. “Like, the city has to allow these places to exist, and check in on them and communicate with them to make sure that these places stay safe without having to worry about some guy shutting you down. They're important to the vibrancy of the local music scene, of the art scene in the city. Everybody, [from larger venues to small DIY spaces and everything in between] has a role to play, and you have to be able to allow them to exist and exist safely.”

If you’re anything like me, one of your favourite things to do on days when you’ve got a moment of spare time or the sun is out might be walking around your neighbourhood. I started doing it in earnest over the course of the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 to at least be doing something with my life and get a little exercise in at the same time, but it’s quickly become an activity I couldn’t imagine not doing regularly. Aside from the obvious benefits of getting fresh air and getting your blood flowing, I find it offers an excellent opportunity to get to know your neighbourhood - its inhabitants, businesses, amenities, and eccentricities alike - and develop a link with your community, even if you’re not out there shaking the hands of passersby and walking in and out of every storefront you pass like some sort of cartoon caricature.

It’s through this practice that, in the past five years or so, I’ve noticed a shift in my own community. I live in Verdun, historically a working-class neighbourhood (often considered one of the city’s poorer ones), that was even a partially dry community from 1965 to 2010; with taverns, nightclubs and cabarets banned, and alcohol sales restricted to restaurants with liquor licences, grocery stores and the SAQ. That particular ban was eventually lifted entirely in 2013, and in recent years, Verdun has changed quite a bit in contrast with its twentieth century self. Today, it's one of Montreal's most desirable areas to live in, and it was even listed as the eleventh "coolest" neighbourhood in the world by Time Out magazine in 2020.

It’s one thing to say that, and another thing to have experienced it firsthand. ‘Gentrification’ or ‘social change’ is something that you read about in textbooks or news articles, but walking around my neighbourhood, I have seen it in action. Since moving to the area in 2018, I’ve seen locally owned restaurants that had a small yet thriving following disappear; small businesses that had a particular niche shuttered despite initiatives from the borough to promote street traffic; and chain restaurants or expensive boutiques cropping up to take their place. Not to sound cynical, but there isn’t a Starbucks here yet, and I know that when that happens it will be the death knell of this neighbourhood.

I say all this to make the point that while the comings and goings of our daily lives march on, the powers that be are actively, and constantly, attempting to reshape the world around us - affecting our communities, our laws, and our politics - oftentimes without us not noticing. As a wise slacker once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” I like to think that there’s a message in that about being proactive and cognizant of what’s happening in the world around you, and the next logical step being that with that knowledge you can do something about it.

For their part, Sergio and Meyer don’t think we can just let things go as they are. The message I’ve gotten, from both of them, is that together we are stronger. When it comes to complaints, “people have to speak to each other,” Sergio tells me. “It shouldn't be up to the city to decide what's going to go on there. Make friends with your neighbours. Make sure that everybody understands. (...) Like, that's the issue- in order for this to work without any hiccups, you have to create community, you have to create communication. Like, I don't want to fucking call the city. Nobody wants to call the fucking cops. Come speak to me. I'm very personable. We can figure something out.” Meyer’s experience with the city gave him a similar perspective. “I took a lot away from that meeting we had with the borough,” he says. “They were pretty transparent: they said ‘get the press on your side’. [The woman we met with] was like, ‘You guys are having problems, we can't help you, the cops are going to keep badgering you - you need to get the press on your side to turn this into an issue so that we can get involved. She said ‘I know that sounds kind of fucked up and backwards, but until there's pressure coming on us because the media is talking about it, there's not a whole lot we can do. But if we get public pressure, then we need to figure out a solution.’”

It’s a simple, yet effective idea: in a world where the public figures we depend on to make a difference, and protect the spaces we care about, can’t be brought to task, and the interests of capital trump those of the people, we need to make our voices heard and take action to make a difference. That’s the only way we can make the present moment, the world we live in, someplace viable and livable for all of us. I’ll leave the last words here to Sergio, who summed up the idea perfectly:

“Everybody here is doing their best to get by and support each other and make sure that everybody can have a good time and fucking get that connection, you know what I mean? I'm literally in therapy right now because, like, we're not helping each other. We all have the same fucking problems, we're all going through the same goddamn thing - everybody talks about like, fucking rent, food, the fucking cost of just like being alive - and then people are like, ‘well, I'm just going to try to make as much money as I possibly can so it's not my problem anymore’, or ‘I'm going to send my kids to private school,’ or ‘I'm going to use private healthcare’ - basically ‘if you're fucking in trouble, that's your fucking problem’. That just doesn't compute anymore, and it drags me down every day when I see it… because in that situation the problem's never going to get solved! If the people with the resources have decided that they're going to bow out and use other things, everybody gets fucked. And like, we're all fucking scrimping and crawling all over each other trying to get by. Just be there for each other. Be cool. Just be cool.”

Part Three of Leaving Eden: Montreal’s Venue Problem - COMING SOON

Leaving Eden: Montreal’s Venue Problem - Part Two

Part Two: The present

McSweeney’s List (22 May 2024)

McSweeney’s List (15 May 2024)