MONTREAL - The long-standing practice of keeping secrets about Quebec’s crumbling roads became untenable in 2011.
The reason: government silence was exacerbating considerable fear among the public this summer after leaks about the risk of a Champlain Bridge collapse, followed by the sudden partial closure of the Mercier Bridge for emergency repairs, followed by the partial cave-in of a Ville Marie Expressway ceiling.
By August, 61 per cent of Quebecers did not believe Transport Quebec when it said road infrastructure was safe, a poll showed.
In response, governments opened their files.
But despite steps toward transparency, the powers that be are still not as open as they could be.
For years, Quebec resisted divulging inspection reports, systematically rejecting Gazette access-to-information requests for reports on the Mercier Bridge and the Turcot Interchange.
In June, Sam Hamad, then Quebec’s transport minister, suggested Quebecers didn’t need to see them and wouldn’t understand them anyway.
A month later, federal Transport Minister Denis Lebel said information in the government’s Champlain Bridge files could needlessly alarm the public.
The tone has changed since then.
This fall, Quebec disclosed Mercier and Turcot reports.
The Mercier documents showed inspectors did not detect problems involving corroding gusset plates on the bridge’s provincial side. On the federal side, the deteriorating metal connectors had been replaced years earlier.
The Turcot inspections showed engineers have given all 35 of the structures in the interchange and adjacent structures the worst grade possible. Quebec also revealed it is spending $254 million repairing them until they can be torn down after the new interchange is built.
The province also created a searchable online database of inspections of thousands of provincial structures.
Ottawa is also opening up.
After initially rejecting Gazette access requests, Transport Canada did an about-face this fall, making public inspections for the Champlain Bridge and the federal half of the Mercier.
The Champlain reports disclosed that several parts of the approaches to the bridge were badly deteriorated and had to be replaced. As for the Mercier, inspections showed that five years before Quebec closed part of the Mercier, an inspection found plates on the federal side were corroding and had to be replaced.
Montreal also got into the act, making public detailed inspections for 35 crucial overpasses and tunnels, and giving one-page summaries for 500 other structures.
Mayor Gérald Tremblay said it was a new era of openness at city hall.
But it only goes so far.
This month, the city refused to provide The Gazette with the inspection report that led to this summer’s closure of Square-Dorchester St. because of structural concerns. The small downtown street is built over an underground parking lot. Tremblay has “committed only to providing the complete reports of 35 structures that are within the division of bridges and tunnels,” a city spokesperson said. The Gazette has filed an access-to-information request to obtain the report.
There are other examples of transportation-related information governments still want to keep under wraps.
In 2011, these Gazette access requests were thwarted:
Quebec won’t provide a list of the major repair work carried out on the Mercier Bridge between 2006 and 2011.
Montreal police refused to provide station-by-station crime statistics for the métro system.
The Agence métropolitaine de transport, a provincial agency, declined to disclose a study it commissioned in 2009 about the electrification of commuter trains.
The Gazette is appealing the three refusals.