THE COURAGE OF THE WARRIOR

THE COURAGE OF THE WARRIOR - 
By Bernard Bujold -
According to military literature, one must know how to choose one's battles and never embark on battles lost in advance, otherwise it is destruction, failure and elimination. 
I wouldn't want to be a merchant and be in downtown Montreal in May 2020 because that would be a lost battle! 
Sainte-Catherine Street, which had been closed to car traffic because of construction for almost two years (closed in January 2018 and reopened in the fall of 2019), is once again a battlefield, and it will be so until December 2021 . 
It's the whole downtown area, from McGill College (Indigo and Place Ville-Marie) to beyond the street of the Imperial Cinema (former palace of my friend Serge Losique), which is currently fenced off with passages worthy of the best secret corridors in China... Even the streets surrounding the outside of the downtown square are fenced off. The Quebecor Empire is not even exempt because of construction of the new head office of the National Bank on his street! 
I walked the entire section of Sainte-Catherine Street under construction and I thought I was in a country of war, like in Afghanistan (which I saw in pictures...). 
Not only do Montreal merchants have to cope financially with the forced closure of their stores since last March because of containment and that they have to physically modify their sales spaces and their customer relations processes to prevent Coronavirus; now they find a downtown that has all the elements to be hated and make traffic impossible for consumers for the next year and a half! 
It is obvious that many, if not most, merchants will never leave this battlefield alive. It will be a massacre! 
Unless the Holy Brother André performs a miracle, which I doubt, because to the impossible no one is bound, not even Brother André... 
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