Johanne Lorti was holding on to his partner, Martin Labelle, on their motorcycle when a car swerved to avoid a huge pothole on Highway 15, colliding with the bike and sending both riders airborne.
Labelle was killed.
Lortie was badly injured, suffering a fractured pelvis, a broken femur and five cracks in her spine. She says Labelle would still be alive if the roads in western Quebec were better maintained.
“We pay insanely high taxes for potholed roads,” she said. “Let the city take care of its citizens and then send the bill because the other way around isn’t working right now.”
Repeated deaths on highways 15 and 117 have prompted a group of Laurentian mayors to call for more action on both of Quebec’s highways.
Just Monday, an eight-year-old girl and a 37-year-old woman died on Highway 117 in Labelle, in the Laurentians.
Michel Lalonde, mayor of Sainte-Adèle, and her colleagues in the region are calling on the Quebec Ministry of Transport (MTQ) to transfer some of the road repair responsibilities to them.
“What I’ve said to other mayors is that if within two or three weeks we don’t have decisions from the ministry, we’ll probably prepare solutions and suggest what we can do to them,” she told CBC Montreal’s Daybreak. But that’s conditional on them being given enough funding, she said.
Repair is coming
MTQ said it cannot handle the average annual daily traffic volume that Highway 15 is designed for because the infrastructure is “too old,” a spokesperson wrote in an email.
Its latest figures from 2019 show that the stretch of highway 15 passing through Saint-Adèle had an average daily traffic of 30,000 vehicles.
MTQ’s Sara Bensadoun says the ministry is investing $300 million in roads and bridges in the Laurentians between now and 2024.
“We are fully aware that there are some areas on Route 117 that are not up to our standards, especially potholes, but unfortunately those potholes are seasonal,” Bensadoun said. “That’s why we have to come back from time to time to do some repairs and we will continue to do so.”
In an email to CBC, an MTQ spokesperson confirmed the ministry’s plans to repair sections of highways 15 and 117 in Saint-Jérôme, Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, Mont-Blanc and Mont-Tremblant.
Catherine Hamé Mulcair, the mayor of Sainte-Anne-des-Lacs, says she knows firsthand how terrifying driving on Highway 15 can be.
“No one drives in the lanes,” she said. “Everybody’s driving a little bit off the lanes and that’s obviously not a safe way to drive on the highway.”
Growing use
Hamé Mulcair is calling on transport authorities to consider major repairs to Highway 15, northbound and southbound.
“It has reached a level of degradation that is significant,” she said. “Because of the pandemic and because of the growth we have in the region, I think maybe the freeway was used a lot more than what was actually planned.”
Morin-Heights Mayor Timothy Watchorn, who has been on the council for 20 years, says Morin-Heights has seen a huge increase in traffic on its main arteries.
The region has doubled its population in the past two decades, growing from 2,100 to 4,755. Cottage visitors make up about a third of the population, Watchorn says.
“On a busy summer day, there are 6,000 cars going down a small road in downtown Morin-Heights,” Watchorn said, referring to a traffic test conducted downtown in the summer of 2021.
“We are trying to work with MTQ. It’s very difficult because we have to try to implement robust bylaws and fast bylaws … we’re trying to get people to know that people live here.”
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