A bylaw to ban new places of worship in Outremont will remain on the books.
The borough held a referendum Sunday on whether to keep the bylaw in place, and the Yes side won the ballot with a total of 1,561 votes, while the No side picked up 1,202 votes.
A total of 2,773 votes were cast, representing 60.2 per cent of the 4,452 eligible voters.
“There was never any winning in this referendum. Even if our side prevailed, you have one community pitted against another,” said Abraham Ekstein, a member of Outremont’s Hasidic Jewish community who led the No campaign. “At the moment, Outremont, as far as we know, is the only municipality in the country to have this sort of ban.”
The bylaw was introduced last year after the borough approved a building permit for a new synagogue on Bernard Ave. It ostensibly applies to all religious groups, but Outremont’s Hasidic Jewish community — which represents about 25 per cent of the neighbourhood’s population — felt singled out by the bylaw.
Ekstein says his side plans on fighting the regulation in court, on the grounds that it violates religious freedoms.
“From the beginning, I thought that if the ban were to pass, it tells me Outremont is an environment where the local council is hostile to its Hasidic population,” said Mindy Pollak, Montreal’s only Hasidic Jewish city councillor.
Nanci Murdock, who ran the Yes side’s online campaign, said the referendum was a “tipping point” for Outremont’s merchants and residents.
“We need to have a healthy balance of secular and non-secular activity on Bernard,” said Murdock, who lives near Bernard Ave. “We absolutely, 100 per cent believe in diversity and religious diversity.”
While only a sliver of the neighbourhood was eligible to vote in the referendum, both sides waged an all-out offensive until the last minute. They amassed dozens of volunteers to knock on doors, hand out flyers and run a social media campaign to push their agenda forward.
Over 22 per cent of the electorate turned out on Nov. 13 for early voting — 1,007 ballots were cast ahead of Sunday’s referendum, according to the Outremont borough.
The ban on places of worship applies to Bernard and Laurier Aves. While no one contested its application on Laurier Ave., Hasidic families say the new temple, the fifth in the borough, is necessary to accommodate Outremont’s growing Jewish population.
A similar bylaw has been in place on Van Horne Ave. since the 1990s.
It was a grassroots campaign to oppose the Bernard Ave. ban that triggered Sunday’s refrendum.
“Bernard Ave. is literally the last street where places of worship are permitted (in Outremont),” Pollak said. “Considering that residential streets are also off-limits and there are the other bans in place, this is it for the Jewish community. I am the first person to say that it might not be an ideal street. However, we have to allow them somewhere.”
Bernard Ave. flanks the northern edge of Mount Royal and houses an eclectic mix of vintage Montreal haunts — Lester’s smoked meat and Cheskie’s Jewish bakery come to mind — but also trendier spots that serve sushi, gourmet burgers and other modern delights.
Murdock says the battle for Bernard Ave. became one that pitted religious freedom against free enterprise. She claims that new places of worship threaten an already delicate balance in Outremont.
“We respect their religious rights and their freedom to meet and practise their faith, but how much is too much? When does (the freedom) threaten the commercial viability of the community and how the rest of us would like to experience life in this neighbourhood?”
For Pollak, there’s room for compromise regardless of the outcome of Sunday’s vote.
“The broader message is that if we want to be an inclusive society in 2016, we have to embrace all different culture,” she said. “Of course there are issues that can pop up, but as long as we can sit down and talk together, I’m 100 per cent sure we can resolve them.”
Related
