Water water everywhere, but not a drop

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday, my husband and I visited my father in law at the Veteran’s Hospital in Ste. Anne de Bellevue to find that the sink in his room was covered in a plastic and he was drinking from a bottle of water and not the usual hospital issue container.

 There was a boiled water advisory on the entire West Island, my husband informed me. Pointe-Claire, Baie D’Urfe, Ste. Anne de Bellevue, everywhere but Dollard, which gets its water from Montreal.

 My father-in-law’s room on the 10th floor overlooks Macdonald College and especially the farm, where cows are sometimes seen grazing. The building has great views on every side,with the view of the Ottawa River and St Lawrence (St. Laurent)..Water water everywhere, but not a drop.. A metaphor for a problem that is looming large and on a planetary scale..

 Well, in Threshold Girl, www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf  I add a bit about the water at Macdonald, for Flora did not mention it in her letters. It was her father Norman, who had contracted typhoid in 1896, who mentioned that he was afraid of the water on the railroad in Northern Ontario, so he walked around parched all time. So he claimed. As he didn’t drink alcohol, I have to wonder how he managed, especially in the heat of summer. Perhaps he waited until he found a stream and filled up a canteen or something. Well, it’s better he didn’t drink alchol, it dehydrates.

 Anyway, as I’ve mentioned on this blog, clean water was an issue on the Island of Montreal in 1910.

 Macdonald College, founded in 1907, first got its water from the river, but by 1911 that place was getting its water from a well! You see, there was a typhoid epidemic in 1909!

 Laurentian Spring Water capitalized this event with ad campaigns such as above. My husband’s grandfather, the father of the man we were visiting in the Veteran’s, was the President of Laurentian Spring water.

 I am also writing a book about Montreal in 1927, that is all about water. Milk and Water, where I have my own grandfather, Jules Crepeau, the Director of Services, meet up with my husbands grandfather and argue over the ethics of selling water!

 There was another typhoid epidemic in Montreal in 1927, traced to milk.

 Now, I live in Vaudreuil, a section that has had problems with drinking water in the past. I’m not scared about water, I don’t particularly like drinking water out of plastic bottles, as I fear the plastic leeches out and might promote breast cancer.

 But we are about to be hit with a big one time water bill. They are putting in a new water system. They say they have to: Mandatory government regulations after Walkerton.

 

 

 

When the Prince of Wales Visited Montreal

Here’s me in front of H. Dandurand’s car, the one that is supposed to be the first in Montreal (around 1900, I guess..it’s more like a carriage, isn’t it?)

This car is on show at the Chateau de Ramezay museum across the street from City Hall, where the picture below was taken in 1927, with the visits of the Prince of Wales (Prince de Galle) and Prince George and the Baldwins. A big crowd was on hand, which according the the Gazette included street urchins taking in the pomp and ceremony  from vendor’s wagons in Bonsecours Market. Street urchins, what a cute name. They don’t call them that anymore.

That event  happened about 40 years  (one week off) from the day Charles de Gaulle, a guy with a lot of gall, proclaimed VIVE LE QUEBEC Libre from a window at City Hall.

I wrote a play about 1967 in Montreal, Looking for Mrs. Peel, www.tighsolas.ca/page3.pdf.pdf

I’m writing a play, I think a play, about Montreal in 1927, when the Princes Visit and my grandfather has a fight with a prominent English citizen over the basic right to clean fresh water.

H. Dandurand was among the list of mourners at my grandfather’s funeral in 1938. My grandfather, Jules Crepeau, was fired by the city adminstration (well, by Camillien Houde) over the Montreal Power and Water scandal, (I have a quote in a newspaper with Houde saying he wants the clear ‘the clique’ from City Hall…and then later in 1937 he was  run over by a Montreal Constable  while he was collecting a HUGE life pension. Hmm. He died a year later from accident related disease, bone cancer. No more pension for my grandmother and her kids.

Camillien Houde has a huge street on the Mountain named after him: Mederic Martin a little bridge, Dandurand a street in Rosemont and my grandfather a street and park in Ahunsic (north of TMR). Small thing.

In the early 80′s, while my husband and I were searching for our FIRST computer, and the ONLY place selling them was located in an area we didn’t know well, despite the fact we lived in an apartment in TMR. Anyway, LOST (No cells of GPS’s back then) I looked up to see where we were and we were at JULES-CREPEAU street! A street named after my grandfather! What a coincidence.

Water Water Everywhere, but not a drop to drink.

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.