Good luck may have saved you so far from drinking filthy germ laden city water, but can you afford to take the risk?
Ah, fear tactics. They’ll get you every time. In this case the company belonged to my husband’s people, the Whites and Wellses. The well was on Craig Street which doesn’t exist anymore: they built the Jacques Cartier Bridge over it. This ad was in the Gazette in May 1909.
But the city could hardly sue for slander because over this ad. In March 1909, Dr. LaChappelle of the Provincial Board of Health gave a talk to the Canadian Club on “The Montreal of the Future.” He admitted flat out that Montreal’s water supply was causing deaths because the city’s infrastructure was ill-planned, ‘built against the laws of nature’, as he put it. That’s why Montreal’s mortality rate was 25 per thousand whereas other similar sized cities had a mortality rate around 18 per thousand to 14 per thousand.
“Within half a century,” said the Dr. “we shall have much larger city, with a probably population of two million.” Something had to be done. (Well, actually, Montreal’s population is just under 2 million today.)
He said a new source of water had to be found, perhaps out in the St. Lawrence, but even that would have to be purified. And, then, there was the sewage problem. Each municipality dumped it where it wanted. Even the water in the back river was polluted, said LaChapelle.
The municipalities, he said, had to be amalgamated into one and the issue resolved.
So, there it is, proof that Montreal had a water problem. By 1920, I have read (In Terry Copp’s Anatomy of Poverty) the vastly improved the water problem, but not the poverty problem. Hmm. My grandfather, Jules Crepeau, who was Assistant Greffier (clerk) in 1909, because Director of City Services in 1920. Too bad he didn’t leave behind a diary or letters. My grandfather got dumped in 1930 over some scandal to do with Montreal Power and Water.
