The village resists

There is a scene in John Abbott College media professor and provincial Green Party candidate Ryan Young's new documentary, The Village Resists:The Forced Municipal Mergers of Quebec, where the filmmaker himself becomes part of the story.

His video camera brandished on a polling station in Ste. Anne de Bellevue on referendum day in 2006, Young is quietly observing the proceedings from the sidewalk as a police officer marches up to him and tries to get him to leave, arguing that his presence is illegal.

It takes a couple of explanatory phone calls by then-Ste. Anne borough mayor Bill Tierney to explain Young is an independent filmmaker and has nothing to do with his campaign to get people to vote "yes" to demerging.

Listening to Young speak about his film, it almost seems to make sense that he got nearly directly involved in it. "(Making this film) was almost like a duty," he said. As a long-time resident of Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Young was shocked to learn about the plan to merge all of Montreal into a mega-city. A Master's student at York University in Toronto at the time, he was astutely aware of how disastrously the merger attempts in Toronto had proceeded, and was unenthused about the idea of a similar experiment in Montreal.

"I didn't know where it was going to go," Young said of his two-hour final product. However, he said, he knew he wanted to end it on an optimistic note. So even though post-demerger trouble arguments with Montreal have yet to be completely resolved, Young provides his viewers with scenes of Ste. Anne de Bellevue celebrating as it wins its demerger referendum.

There was a less personal reason for Young to focus on Ste. Anne de Bellevue too. "(The francophone press) characterized the demerger movement as exclusively anglophone, and exclusively upper-class," Young said, and he wanted to show that was not the case by focusing on a middle-class town that is equally francophone and anglophone.

And he does it in spades. Young's film zooms in on several key protagonists, from an elderly Ste. Anne resident rocking in her rocking chair as she expounds on the undemocratic nature of the forced mergers, to a fireman who lost his job along with his colleagues once the town merged with Montreal in 2001. Others include Bill Tierney, who spearheaded the demerger movement in his town as borough mayor, especially once he found out the team he had cast his lot with in the 2001 Montreal elections, Gérald Tremblay's party, would indeed end up interfering in a referendum process despite promises not to.

Along the way, Young also interviews several political scientists who talk about how democracy works best when it is run locally, a view the filmmaker espouses himself.

The movie perfectly captures both a tumultuous history in Montreal and Quebec politics, as well as the spirit and vigour of one of the West Island's most famous villages. "(This demerger process) created one of the largest grass-roots moments in Quebec history," Young said, adding he was very proud to have been the only filmmaker to have put it on tape.

The Village Resists will be screened in the Casgrain Theatre at John Abbott College this Saturday, November 15 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets can be bought for $10 at the door or are available at TWIGS café in Ste. Anne located at 85 Ste. Anne Street.

Young hopes to project the film in Beaconsfield, Montreal West and other areas before Christmas this year.