POP Symposium and ARCMTL presented :
The Future of Montreal Nightlife / L’Avenir De La Vie Nocturne À Montréal

September 27th, 2025 at the Rialto Clubhouse in Montreal

 

As part of the POP Montreal 2025 Symposium, ARCMTL hosted a round-table discussion on the topic of nightlife policies in Montreal.

The discussion was hosted by ARCMTL Director Louis Rastelli, who has been part of Montreal’s music and arts scene since the 1980s and whose work as a cultural historian includes the NightsofMontreal project.

The discussion included the following persons, all invested in and passionate about Montreal nightlife:

Palden Khe-Changsoo, an independent booker operating as Worst Dad Ever since 2016, as well as managing bookings for Casa del Popolo, Sala Rosa, Sotterenea, and P’tit Ours (the former URSA.)

Max Honigmann, communications officer for the Mtl 24/24 nightlife advocacy group and  producer of electronic music events for a collective called Exposé Noir since 2017.

Mint Simon is an artist and musician currently playing in a band called Cave Boy, who also recently took over management of the former Blue Dog bar.

John Weisz is founder and president of Indie Montreal, a longtime concert promoter now working with different cultural organizations and artists, as well as the founder and executive director of La scène musicale alternative du Québec (SMAQ), which represents the interests of independent concert venues across Quebec.

Sergio De Silva has been a part of nightlife in Montreal for close to 25 years as a musician, promoter and owner of Turbo Haus in the Quartier des Spectacles.

 

Louis Rastelli: I’d like to start though with a quote from the great New York critic, Fran Lebowitz. She had a thing that she would say during the years that New York was being cleaned up by Giuliani and all that, she would say, “Pretend it’s a city.”

Now Montreal is obviously a city and has had a reputation for over 200 years of nightlife. Let’s not forget, it was already happening when American soldiers after the war of 1812 stayed in town and got royally smashed, all through the Prohibition, the jazz age, the sixties, the seventies, the disco era. And I’d even say in the nineties and 2000s with the dance scene and the rave scene.

However, for perhaps 15 years now, the policies Montreal has had in place are more like “pretend it’s a suburb.”

We can look at what are the issues, a brief rundown of some of the main examples of what has been happening the last 15 years.

2009 might be one of the first instances of a single condo shutting down a venue. There was the Main Hall that had a couple years of great shows on Saint Laurent, just south of Saint Viateur. One neighbour managed to shut it down. The affiliated bar, Green Room, couldn’t survive after that either.

And we found out that after shutting down the Main Hall, the person ended up selling their condo because they realized, “Oh, it’s just loud around here.” But that was an early instance of the borough putting the [resident] first, if they complain. We had a similar situation with one or a couple of neighbours most recently with the Diving Bell, with Champs, Blue Dog. There’s even a story of a show that was cancelled after a noise complaint at 7:30 pm during soundcheck on Saint Laurent. Apparently, the police showed up and actually had them cancel the show.

Another similar example—and this relates to the city being open to shutting down or sending the cops, or fining people for one complaint—in 2018, I believe POP Montreal used to have its headquarters on Saint Urbain, near Sherbrooke. And there had been an outdoor barbecue and party, and I think it was acoustic bands that played in the Saturday afternoon. We were supposed to do something with them the next day, but there had been a complaint from someone from their balcony in an apartment building right near there, and they ended up cancelling the second day of afternoon Hootenanny acoustic music.

These are examples of that thing that’s been going on: the ability to put one person ahead of anybody else no matter where they live. Le Divan Orange was a similar situation. That was in 2016, and there were a couple of things that happened there. The borough had reclassified the street as far as noise complaints, to be able to complain on Saint Laurent after 11 instead of after 2:00 or 3:00 AM. They had lowered that time limit around 2015 and by 2016, Divan Orange was being hit with endless noise fines by one neighbour.

They tallied up to about $30,000 and they ended up not being able to continue. They got money for soundproofing and they did soundproof, and they just couldn’t get past the hurdle of still having to pay that fine and lost it. That person ended up moving away as well.

There are other policies that have closed down some venues, specific policies, especially one that states you can’t have a concert venue or an amplified music license if you have a wall that’s adjacent to a residence. That seems entirely reasonable, except for, I think it was in 2018, Les Bobards, long-time, mostly world music venue, right at Saint Laurent and Marie-Anne, they had a long-time next-door neighbour, which was a hair salon on Marie-Anne, near Clark.

Here’s another policy that came into effect in the Plateau: due to the housing crisis, which has been an excuse for many years, they loosened the ability for landlords to convert commercial spaces to residences. “Hey, there’s a housing crisis!” A lot of landlords with empty storefronts jumped at the chance to make some money. And there’s a lot more money to be made by selling a condo and pocketing a half a million dollars than trying to run a commercial space with businesses that come and go.

So they generously let all kinds of commercial spaces on major arteries convert to residential. And the Bobards’ hair salon converted to a residential unit. They immediately started complaining and they lost their license for shows because you can’t possibly have a concert permit with a wall shared with a residence.

The thing that happened there that’s quite sad is that there was no grandfathering in the fact that they were there first. And you know, there’s a notion of acquired rights and a lot of things they could have possibly done to fight that. But unfortunately, this is one of those things that is another major threat.

La Tulipe is a very celebrated and recent example of exactly that: the borough feigned ignorance about, “Oh, we didn’t realize by letting this building turn to condos on Papineau that there would be this problem.”

I’m not sure that they didn’t realize that. Once again, they have a very specific interest in encouraging more and more residential units everywhere. If there’s lessons to some of these stories is that, once again, pretend it’s a city. There are a handful of major, major streets like Papineau, Mont-Royal, Saint Laurent, Park Avenue, considering that there are dozens or hundreds of small, quiet, residential streets.

But in this case, the common thread to a lot of these really is that the individual is at the top of the chain of privilege, especially if it’s a recent arrival, someone who bought a condo or a residential unit and moved downtown. The reason that the last couple of administrations have been so obsessed with that is that there is a chronic outflow of residents from the central districts of Montreal.

It’s been at about 40,000 residents leaving the central districts for the suburbs every year, for many years. And there was a study that just predicted that it will continue to be 40,000 lost over the next five years. We’re looking at 200,000 less residents downtown in the central areas. The philosophy seems to be that by making downtown more suburban, people might stop deciding to move to the suburbs.

However, given that we’ve had about 15 years of this sort of ‘suburbifying’ of downtown streets in urban districts, and the exodus is still happening… And the fact that there’s actually 10 times more development in the suburbs. We’re going through a massive boom of suburban sprawl, if anybody who travels to the suburbs might have noticed.

Maybe pretending it’s a suburb and trying to make it as quiet as possible isn’t actually attracting all that many people coming here. Is it quietness? Is it the ability to have super quiet and safe streets and no noise that will bring people downtown? That, I don’t know.

Sadly, with all of this that I’m talking about, I’ve not heard much from the last couple of administrations: that nightlife and arts and culture is something that will attract people to come and live in the city, or visit the city. What do people involved in that scene and in those businesses need?

There have not been a lot of opportunities to be listened to. I’m someone who’s very active. I go to consultations. I go to forums and all kinds of things. And there has not been a lot of opportunities to just be listened to or gather people from the arts and culture to listen. We can hope that this can change.

There was a new nightlife policy proposition that was unveiled in the spring, and I believe is going through the process of potentially being adopted as a bylaw. A bunch of us here took part in the consultations in the spring about that, and let’s just say the document, which I have here, is not something that listens to or has any much feedback directly from the concert scene.

What we see are: a proposition to designate a zone where concert venues can be allowed, regulating more clearly the permits. And, you know, having the city authorize in a deeper way anybody who does want to have a concert venue as well as ridiculous noise fines that could start with a $10,000 fine for a first noise complaint.

The policy basically makes it look like they’re gonna try to scare away anybody from ever opening a nightclub again in Montreal and possibly driving out the ones who do. Now this brings us to the future. The near future is that there is an election coming up. There’s an opportunity for a lot of debate about what should be done.

And there’s also the future in that we’re starting to see a lot more concerts, culture and nightlife, and things move away from the centre of town. One of the hottest venues this summer was by the train tracks just north of Bellechasse, near Van Horne. That got shut down. Partly in reaction to the Divan Orange and all of that era of noise complaints, venues started moving up to Jean Talon and further. There’s a certain hipness now to the Chabanel district. We’re talking past the highway.

So, is the future going to be that we just end up going further and further to places where there won’t be these complaints? Or can we consider a different one where we all work together and try to make it so that this kind of nightlife and culture can stay in the central districts and downtown.

I’ll ask everybody for a mix of your own war stories and experiences that might relate to what’s been going on as far as shutdowns and difficulties and what you might think is the main things that you’d like to see in the near future ahead of the election as potential propositions policy.

Palden Khe-Changsoo: Well for me, as an employee for Casa del Popolo and its umbrella of venues, we would like to see some clarity on what is considered “noise” and how loud it is. We would like to see the possibility of decibel meters being included in any policy regarding noise complaints. Just because we will be able to record at what frequencies the noise is at. And if we were to go under some sort of review with the police or with the city, they can determine what is a reasonable or unreasonable amount of noise. We’ve been experiencing noise complaints for the last, I think, 20 years, and it’s consistently been getting worse. We’ve been told to try and mediate with our neighbours in order to come to an agreement about when our shows would end so that they can continue living peacefully there. But even through that, we’ve still continued to get noise complaints specifically from one individual who lives next door.

This isn’t something that’s new. The individual’s lived there for some time, but we can’t get to any sort of agreement with him. And it’s still up to the discretion of the arriving officer to write us with a noise complaint and to determine whether or not we are being, I guess, noisy.

Max Honigmann: Yeah, that’s an extremely frustrating and sadly very common scenario of just one single neighbour kind of putting a wrench in the operations of a longstanding venue. It’s really unfortunate. Me, as an organizer, we’re more working with kind of blank slate venues all around the city.

So, my perspective is a little bit different from kind of brick-and-mortar concert promoters. On one hand, as Louis mentioned, nightlife will always kind of pop up in new places. This is part of the kind of urban development cycle. So, Chabanel is a really interesting place right now. But to be honest, that’s definitely not the entire solution because the problem always follows.

I’ve been doing parties since 2017. Formerly safe areas, industrial areas, are now filled up with condos and that’s kind of just how it always goes. So, unless you have actual solutions to preventing these problems before they can come about, and also managing them once they do, solutions that don’t involve immediate criminalization, you know, police being called right away, fines being the first kind of proposed mechanism for enforcement. It’s just going to keep following us.

I still think there’s a lot of potential to revitalize downtown. I think nightlife is a critical ingredient for this. We’ve all walked down a dark street at three in the morning and you’ll feel a lot safer if there’s a bunch of people out and about, and things are happening, rather than just like one or two seedy characters.

Nightlife does bring this kind of life that can attract people. It’s definitely not the type of thing that’s going to attract suburbanites, but if you’re a suburbanite, why would you expect that kind of life in the city? I think there’s a bigger social question there, especially for noise complaints that come about at like 7:00 PM or 8:00 PM. POP Montreal has done stuff at Entrepôt 77 over on Bernard– and people from POP can correct me– but I think that venue is no longer able to be used because of a little bit of music in the evening on a weekend. Like, come on. Nobody’s getting woken up from that. So, there is a kind of expectation problem, I think, that needs to be corrected as well on a human level.

Mint Simon: Yeah, I feel like I’m in all different spheres of nightlife. I’m an artist, so obviously I care about the venues in the city and I’ve played at Divan Orange and all these spaces that have closed.

And it’s been just really tragic to lose that in this city because music has always been such a big part of what makes Montreal so special. So many people move here to start music projects, to explore, and I feel like we are slowly losing that as we lose more spaces. I opened a bar, I went in on buying the Blue Dog location, which closed. And we’ve turned it into a gay bar.

And some of the owners are the owners of Champs upstairs as well. So, I do know a bit enough about what’s going on up there. I can’t speak to their exact law situation because it’s not my place. But there is a neighbour there that’s causing a ton of problems. They’ve lost dancing. They can’t even do karaoke. They really can’t do anything. And Champs never had noise complaints before. It turned into a queer space, somewhere like Diving Bell as well, which has been pretty queer focused. If you look back to the Village and you think about Drugstore, which was an incredible lesbian bar that really was the home for so many queer people that got shut down by noise complaints as well many years ago.

What we’re trying to do in the Blue Dog space is create a new sort of gay village, mini village, with Champs with DD’s, which is what the new space is called. We’re concerned for sure about what’s to come from this neighbour, but we’re sort of like, “Fuck you. You’re gonna come for Champs? Okay, we’re gonna move downstairs.”

And upstairs at Champs, they’ve been doing a ton of soundproofing and just had a sound test. They’re waiting for the results of that, which could help determine their permits and just trying to control this one neighbour who… I’ll just say, personally wants to buy the building. I don’t think it’s so much about the noise issue for her, because from what I understand, she actually is the landlord.

So, it’s pretty ugly around there, but we’re kind of just flooding it with queer people, and being loud on the street. We had an opening last week and there was a ton of people and not a single cop, so I was pretty happy to see that. But who knows what’s to come.

Jon Weisz: And, if I’m not mistaken, that was another case where a new owner, the complainant, was allowed to turn commercial space into residential space next to two venues and a bar.

Mint Simon: Yeah.

Jon Weisz: And that’s when the complaints started.

I have a lot to say on this. I’ll try to keep it brief.

Essentially, at any given time in Montreal, there is between 5 and 10 people who are holding the venue community hostage. That’s what it is. There are a few hundred noise complaints in each central borough every year. I think it’s about 600 in the plateau and in Ville-Marie. About 5-10% of those are related to venues. And we’re hearing that it’s almost always a single person who’s calling repeatedly to complain about noise in venues. So really this is a problem that needs to be solved through mediation, through sitting down with the 5 to 10 people who are causing the problems and the venues next door to them saying, okay, how do we solve this?

We’re not sending the cops, and we’re not fining anyone. We’re sitting down and figuring out a long-term solution, so that you guys can do what you do, and the neighbour has peace and quiet. And that’s essentially what SMAQ has been recommending for years and years and years now, when it comes to a licensed venue, to take the enforcement of any noise complaints out of the hands of the police, out of the hands of the SPVM, of “la moralité” and to give it to a mediation service that is not there just to bring the hammer down, but to understand the situation and to solve it.

That’s one solution. The long-term solution when it comes to noise is something called the Agent of Change principle, which essentially grandfathers in a venue’s right to make a certain amount of noise, but also a neighbourhood’s right and a citizen’s right to benefit from peace and quiet.

So, whenever someone makes a change to the neighbourhood, like a condo developer putting up new condos or a new venue being built, it’s the responsibility of the person making the change to make sure that they’re catering to the land and its uses in the vicinity. Toronto does it. London does it. Tons of cities do it. And that’s ultimately what we and MTL 24/24, and I think pretty much everyone in the nightlife community has been pushing for, for as long as I can remember.

There’s also an, an issue that hasn’t come up yet. We’ve talked a lot about noise and a lot about regulation, but commercial rents have become a really big problem for venues.

70% of our SMAQ members are renters. And most of them, even if they’re pretty sure that they’re like going to be okay for the next year or two, three years, virtually none of them have any long-term visibility, there’s no long-term runway on their venue survival. Because when it comes time to renegotiate their new lease, they’re probably going to see their rent jump 20, 30, 40, 50%.

And for a critical mass of venues, that’s likely to mean their closure. So there isn’t really anything, any magic pill, any magic solution because, you know, we exist, businesses exist in the commercial real estate market. Take those buildings housing certain venues out of the commercial real estate market, to create a “land trust,” which they’ve done in the UK and they’ve done in Austin. And there’s a few other similar projects elsewhere in the world to create a land trust that can start buying up those venues, take them off the market and guarantee their use as cultural spaces for 25, 50, 100 years. And in return, the venue operators would be constrained by what we’re calling a ‘cultural lease.’ They would have to give back to the community in meaningful and predetermined ways. So those are some of the solutions that we see.

One last idea a ticket levy whereby every ticket that’s sold to a large-scale event in Montreal, there would be a $2 add-on to that ticket. So, if you buy a ticket to the Bell Centre that costs $130, you’d pay $132 and that $2 would go into a fund that would invest money in independent venues and in independent cultural spaces that essentially function right now as a research and development playground for artists.

Artists will play small venues. No one makes any money at that level. I mean, these guys can tell you that, no one is making a profit. And it’s same for the artists too. But then those artists develop and they end up getting picked up by Evenko/Live Nation, which is great. Except that everyone who has done the research and development, which is very expensive and very resource intensive, isn’t reimbursed for the value they’ve injected. In other words, Evenko/Live Nation get all of that work for free.

Sergio Da Silva: What we have is a fucking PR nightmare. That’s what we have. You treat music, you treat culture in the city, like it’s a fucking nuisance, and this is what you’re going to get every single fucking time. And that’s what we’re dealing with right now.

When I look at the people that I’m around, the people I interact with on a daily basis, or I’m just in the city and I’m walking with my partner and someone says Hi to me – and it happens 30 fucking times when I’m going up Saint Laurent –people are like, “How do you know that person?” Shows, shows, shows, shows.

It’s the only thing that we have that we can use to build community in the city of Montreal. And like John had said, there’s like 30 people fucking it up for everybody. Like the how we allowed that to happen blows my mind every time I think about it.

And some of the more concrete issues that I’ve noticed as somebody who runs shows, who owns bars, who has been a part of nightlife forever – there’s one thing. And John, I said I wouldn’t mention it, but I’m gonna. Like Mint had said, Champs lost their dance permit, but it wasn’t the city of Montreal that took away their dance permit. It was the fucking province of Quebec. So, you have the province of Quebec dictating what the rules are for the city of Montreal. The city of Montreal can’t legislate and then enforce its own rules. Because you have the Régie des alcools, and the morality police, basically the police arm of the Régie des alcools, who are now coming to enforce their set of rules.

So, it’s nice to talk about what we can do and how, what solutions that we may have. But it’s important to remember that there’s still this second lever of government that is above the city of Montreal that needs to be frankly fucking abolished. It has to be looped into the SPVM so that Montreal can then dictate, legislate, and enforce its own rules for what’s best for the city of Montreal.

Morality only exists here in Montreal. In fucking in Levis, in fucking Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!, they don’t have the fucking morality police. Why the fuck do we gotta do it here? And it goes back to like the 1950s! Like they were put in place because of the idea that Montreal was a place that you could smuggle alcohol in. It was for Al Capone. Like that makes as much sense to me as making rules because of fucking Santa Claus.

Like, what are we talking about here? Doesn’t make any sense. So, everybody here has very valid points, very valid concerns, but you know, the kind of the elephant in the room, and it’s also best that we actually don’t talk about this to people who maybe don’t know, because ultimately, they’ll use it to supersede the problems that are happening within the city of Montreal, the rules that we already have, to jump them and then go to the province.

But a fundamental issue that needs to be changed is to allow the city of Montreal to legislate and then basically enforce our own fucking rules. Otherwise, we’re just talking to each other for no reason.

Jon Weisz: Yeah. And what happened with Champs, just to explain for people who might not be aware, is the neighbour tried to go to the city to issue noise complaints. The city said “They’re under the noise limits. We can’t do anything.” So, the Champs neighbour, the owner of the building next door went around them to the Régie des alcools, and Champs got fined. Do you remember how much it was?

Sergio Da Silva: They lost their license for nine days.

Jon Weisz: And they had to soundproof and they had to pay a fine.

Sergio Da Silva: And again, with soundproofing, I’m just going to say this one thing and then I’ll shut up forever. Soundproofing is an idea that seems nice and it seems like this can maybe help, but if you ask any sound expert, refurbishing a hundred-year-old building to be soundproofed so that it’s going to work within the bylaws is fucking impossible. You might as well put your money in a fucking fire.

Put that money towards engaging with the population, changing the narrative, showing people that this art is worth engaging with, and you’re living in the city. This is what you should be doing instead of watching another fucking Office rerun. How about you go outside and make a goddamn friend? I don’t know what to tell you.

Louis Rastelli: Really good points there. With the election coming up, and the proposed nightlife policy, there’s a few things that come out that maybe can be considered and further discussed.

Like the idea of designating a neighbourhood – well, it used to be called Downtown – where there weren’t very many condos. You know there weren’t many permanent residents. It was very much a transient downtown, immigrants and students coming in waves and gradually moving up and finding a different part of town to settle.

The fact that we have four universities downtown and all that student housing, all the hotels, the tourism, there wasn’t that much of a problem when it was primarily all the office workers leaving. You make noise all night. That dynamic has changed so much. There is a kind of a “Project Vancouver” going on right now. I’ve spent some time in Vancouver recently, and I think we could see what the future is for our downtown.

When you have an almost unlimited number of residential towers that start popping up, we’re not going to be able to go back to that idyllic past when the office workers leave, businesses, stores are closed, and after 5:00 PM, it was the domain of the night in most of the downtown districts. The students living there weren’t ones to complain.

The suggestion had come up to designate part of the east section of the current Gay Village as a safe zone for nightlife. I think we could all agree that we don’t want somebody at the city to designate a zone without talking to us or something like that. I don’t think it’s even a solution to designate a specific area. And a land trust to try to maintain places where they are maybe doesn’t reflect the dynamic nature of nightlife and venues that really do evolve with the city, pop up in other places.

However, would it be a workable idea to have some sort of huge committee involving stakeholders, music fans, festivals, venue owners, bookers, to consider designating some neighbourhoods that would be noise safe? “Noise tolerant” might be a word for it.

Obviously, these would probably have to centre around commercial streets where you already have shops and businesses – and as many as possible businesses and workers that go home at 5:00 PM for example. Do you think that could be an option to start? Presuming that the election comes and goes and there’s an opening to have some sort of open consultation.

Palden Khe-Changsoo: I think that that would be a great idea. It would be a great start, but seeing how the city wants… I don’t remember the specifics, but I recall that they wanted to create designated polls or areas for nightlife, but these areas would only come into fruition if there was a public consultation.

Louis Rastelli: Yeah. They actually would involve a permanent committee with residents and I think monthly meetings with the bar owners and noisemakers and residents. Fantasy land, if you ask me.

Palden Khe-Changsoo: Exactly. It’s hard to really see that come into reality. But it would be a great idea to have certain commercial arteries designated as nightlife zones, cultural zones, where venues and bars and businesses would be safeguarded from these noise complaints.

Max Honigmann: I certainly think that protecting certain areas could be a part of the solution. But when we look at the current program as it’s set up, of these nightlife vitality poles, a big part that’s missing is noise protections. A lot of it focuses on operating hours. So, if you’re a venue within one of these zones, you can apply to get extended hour permits for your bar. There’s funding, you know, for soundproofing, things like that. But there is still no Agent of Change principle which John mentioned earlier. I personally believe that that’s just the kind of common-sense approach that should be applied everywhere in the city.

That’s the other downside of these nightlife vitality zones. If they’re getting all the attention, all the protections, well, what about other places? Like I think every neighbourhood, no matter how central it is, deserves to have a vibrant nightlife. And as Louis noted, you know, nightlife is spanning out further and further around the city. But we definitely need noise protections to prevent these issues because funding is great.

As has been mentioned soundproofing can only go so far. And when you look at the lion’s share of the venues that have closed, almost all of them are on Saint Laurent, which is known for decades to be a nightlife zone. I think one of the big problems with how we’re currently governing all this is that all the onus tends to fall on the venues and there’s kind of no responsibility that’s given to residents.

So, for example, if you’re moving into a place that’s known for nightlife, I think there should be some, I don’t know how it would look, but an obligation where maybe the owner of that building before you sign a lease or buy a condo, has to make you sign a paper that you’re aware this is a nightlife area.

Jon Weisz: They do that in Toronto.

Max Honigmann: You would think it would be common sense, but sadly a lot of common sense is missing from this whole thing. And that was one of the big flaws with the new noise bylaw as well, that they were proposing with first time fines of $10,000, which is absolutely insane.

Like they were already too high. The higher fines in the Plateau were one of the main reasons directly behind a lot of concert venues closing in Plateau. But the city’s argument on that was, “You can trust us.” This is a last resort if nothing else works. But it’s like, can we trust you? You know, so far, we haven’t necessarily seen that much goodwill. We’ve seen a lot of big words, but then places like La Tulipe remain closed.

As has been mentioned before, a lot of it falls in the hands of an individual cop or an individual noise inspector who might be having a bad day or whatever. We need concrete protections, not just nice words and sadly that trust has been broken. So yeah, I think we’ll have to go further, much further than the nightlife fatality zones as they’re currently being proposed.

Mint Simon: I think to that point too, like, I don’t know about you, but, all my friends and I used to live in the plateau 15, 20 years ago.

Now, if we’re thinking about rent increase, not just for commercial spaces, but for residential – who are the people who are moving in on Saint Laurent? Because I don’t know anybody who can actually move there. So, the people who are moving there are not necessarily young people who want to be out and about and actually enjoy the area for what it is and what it always has been. I think if that continues to happen and there are rent increases on residential spaces, we are going to lose culture in general. We are going to lose the young people and the students. And that part of Montreal that made it so special, which was it being affordable, especially for musicians — to my point earlier, like so many musicians came here to live because it was more affordable. So, I don’t know who’s moving in on Saint Laurent, but I don’t know that they’re necessarily concerned about music and nightlife.

Jon Weisz: Yeah. I mean, to the idea of designating certain streets or zones where you can expect there to be more noise, that could work. I think the first step would be to change our relationship to noise, to venues, and to nightlife.

The new nightlife policy that came out last October: there’s a lot of really good things in there, but it tends to kind of treat noise and nightlife and parts of the cultural sector as a nuisance to be controlled, as opposed to a cultural, social, and economic force to be amplified.

And whether the solution is designating certain streets or certain areas, like having different noise thresholds for different parts of the city, or whether it’s having the same threshold with mediation – we’d have to look at each model. But I think the first step, no matter what the proposed solutions end up being, is to recognize that noise coming from amplified sound isn’t just a nuisance that we have to suppress as much as possible. Like there’s the obvious cultural and social benefits. But the venues that you guys run and the events that you put on, the shows that you play, have really important economic impacts locally.

There’s been different studies done in different parts of the world that try to quantify the effects that live music has on their neighbourhood. One of the most often cited studies is called the Chicago Loop Study that found that in a certain neighbourhood in Chicago, where there’s a lot of concert venues, every dollar spent on a ticket for a show put $13 into the local community. So, if someone spent, I don’t know, $10 on a concert ticket, $130 went into the restaurants, the cafes, the bars, taxi services in that neighbourhood.

There has to be like a seismic shift in the way that we think about nightlife. Once that shift happens, I think a lot of the different ideas that we’re talking about here are going to find fertile ground. But as long as we’re still looking at nightlife as something to be governed by the morality police and as something to be sort of tempered and tolerated, we’re going to continue to see the same types of problems that we’re talking about here.

Sergio Da Silva: I feel fucking crazy. I feel like we have this conversation every year and it’s the same sort of talking points. And we talk about it and we talk about it, talk about it. We’re going to do 24-hour bars, we’re going to do whatever goddamn fucking bullshit they think is going to work.

But ultimately, like John had said, there has to be a basic change in the message that’s going out about what nightlife is. You cannot have the city of Montreal without nightlife. It does not exist. The city is nothing without nightlife. And to try to separate these two things, to try to treat it like it’s somehow the problem and not the fucking solution and the reason why I’m here, is starting to weigh on me and it’s starting to be like a burden that is just so unbearably frustrating.

And I’m going to continue to do it. Pure spite, I’m going to continue to run this stupid little venue that I run. And that’s all we can do. We could talk all day long about what we’re going to do at the city level, what the government’s going to do for you, but ultimately, keep going to play under a fucking bridge. I don’t know what to tell you. Like art doesn’t exist because the venues exist. The venues exist because art exists and we’re always going to find ways to do it.

So, it’s important to remember that that’s why we’re here. That’s why we do what we do. And I’m just frustrated; I’ve been talking about this at length like a fucking lunatic for five years almost. And I feel like at some point, somebody has to see the fact that why we’re here is for this thing I deserve; everyone in this room deserves a certain quality of life, and part of that is enjoying that life. Your quality of life, of having things be quiet at 11:00 PM shouldn’t infringe into my quality of life, to fucking have a life. I can’t do this. I fucking can’t.

Jon Weisz: I also think there’s been a lack of economic data about the potential of nightlife broadly, and the live music specifically.

There’s an organization called the Canadian Live Music Association. I sit on the board and they recently put out a Canada-wide economic impact study that showed a number of things. One, that live music is an $11.2 billion sector that’s almost as large as the automotive sector, who gets tons of government money.

I might get the stat slightly wrong, but I think it was 11% or 15% of all tourism dollars are directly related to live music. That’s insane. Like all of the things that one can do as a tourist, about 10, 15% is going to a place to see live music. I mean, this is just live music. This isn’t even all of nightlife. And I think that we haven’t even begun to understand the potential of this sector.

And they have begun to understand it in the UK, which is why a lot of the ideas that we’re proposing are based on projects that were put forth in the UK, because they have data and we don’t. But really I find it frustrating to no end.

Louis Rastelli: That’s a really good point and I just want to underline that it really is the entire art sector—writers, artists, visual artists, musicians—that for the last 25 years have felt like we’ve been used like fertilizer for gentrification, right?

For a while it was Verdun, St. Henri— it’s like high-end restaurants now. I don’t know if some of these arguments will work in the city because the artists have been going around and turning, you know otherwise affordable, cheap districts into high-end condo, high-end restaurant districts.

That’s got to be seen as a great success by the city. Just keep these people moving around, they’re going to fertilize the rest of the city. If there’s all this data that has to come in, we really need to anchor it into the respect for the artists, respect for the people.

That’s a phenomenon that is part and parcel with this. Why do we keep moving around? The rents fly upwards, things get turned to condos, which, you know, sort of like casts in gel a bunch of people that are going to be in that neighbourhood forever. That’s something that doesn’t help either.

But there has to be a wider respect for what happens to artists. The challenges… I mean, none of us make any money, pension fund, whatever. But we somehow persist. We should all get medals for continuing for years and decades, doing this. Like Sergio said, it’s like we might as well bang our head against the wall, but we still do it, because we love to, and we want to. But we’re not getting that respect. We have contributed a ridiculous amount to the gentrification of the city in the last 20 years. And we’re not getting anything out of it ourselves other than perpetually being forced out.

Jon Weisz: I want to throw out really, really quickly: another stat that came from the recent US Live music study, they found that 64% of all the venues surveyed were losing money. 64% are losing money.

Louis Rastelli: We do this for passion, there’s no money in this. 0. We do it because we want there to be arts in Montreal. I heard that we were able to go a bit long, but what do you think for some questions?

Audience 1: Thank you guys for all your opinions and all of your points of view. It’s really important.

I read a piece a little while back about how we all know that these complaints are coming from like, 10 people max most of the time. If we could get the province, the city, the morality whatever to agree to designate some of these folks as like vexatious litigants—that’s a crazy word to say out loud. But that has happened in other cities, in other places where venues, municipalities, people in general have been harassed, for the lack of a better word. If we could get folks on board, do you think it would start to deter folks from making these complaints? Or do you think it would make a difference at all? Or is it just kind of more bureaucratic shit?

Sergio Da Silva: I think you have to make it as difficult as possible to make these complaints. So, I think that’s a great place to start to really disincentivize people being able to call the police, call 9-1-1, whatever.

A cop doesn’t need to come to a fucking punk show. Like it doesn’t need to happen. So that’s definitely something that I would like to see going forward: just any way to disincentivize people from calling the police—for any reason, period—but also, to make a noise complaint. I think that’s something that could work very well.

Jon Weisz: Our solution is mediation. Take it out of the hands of the police. It’s not a police matter. The police don’t want to be handling noise complaints. We talk to them and they’re like, “Do you think we want to be doing this shit? Like, we’re obliged to follow up.” And a lot of times they see that the complainant is just not being a good faith actor.

In other cities, like New York, they put it on the desk of mediators who immediately follow up and find solutions. Like one of the classic—I love this story—do you guys know Bar Datcha? They had an issue with an upstairs neighbour, and they realized the neighbour was only calling in noise complaints during the summer. Why? Because he had his window open. ‘Cause it was hot. So, they bought him an air conditioner and the complaints stopped. $600 solved the problem. And I don’t know the specifics of all the different issues with neighbours, but I’m pretty sure for a lot of those situations, there’s relatively simple answers that can be put in place.

Mint Simon: I can actually speak as a neighbour. I live behind Bruno Sports Bar and they’re fucking insane.

I’ve had men scream at me in the alley and almost physically attack me, and I’ve never called the cops. And I went to the bar and the manager and they were so fucking nice and they were like, “We’re going to put a sign in the back just to let people know they can’t smoke back there and that they’re being violent. And if anything happens, come talk to us and we will have them removed.” I would never have even imagined to call the cops because I live behind a fucking sports bar.

Sergio Da Silva: I own a bar. I know every single one of my neighbours, they all know my name, they all have my phone number. They know exactly who to get in touch with.

If there’s an issue, they can talk to me immediately and that’s good for a building that I’m in. But just recently they built a huge student housing behind my bar. And then immediately after they came in, you know, one of these kids is coming off of like an Adderall binge because it’s finals and he doesn’t like that Wednesday night we have a really loud show, and then I’m getting threats of a $12,000 fine. So, like, yes, it’s good to build that community. Yes, it’s good to talk to your neighbours. But at a certain point you have to disincentivize these people from just getting super upset one day and then making that call.

And then again, these are transient people. They’re students from fucking Luxembourg, or whatever. It’s like, you know, he’s going to fuck off right back, but I have to deal with the consequences of his decisions and him being upset. So not allowing people to just sort of like knee jerk and make that call is really something that we should be looking into.

Max Honigmann: Yeah. If I can jump in. I love this idea of vexatious litigants, which would be a great band name as well,

Louis Rastelli: Or a blacklist.

Max Honigmann: Yeah. I think it’s great because it is harassment and there should be some kind of pushback there. I’m not sure what that would look like, but I think one of the underlying issues as well here is that we need people from the nightlife industry/community in these institutions. We need mediators that know the bar owners, that have these people on speed dial. They can make things happen quick. They can find solutions. That’s part of it. We need a nightlife office at the city, whether it’s a night mayor or commissioner. Kind of like they have in Ottawa.

Right now, there is a kind of small nightlife directorate, but they’re mostly from the economic development service. And they’re great, but they’re really not people from the nightlife. We need champions in the government who actually understand the issues and the community and everything.

Louis Rastelli: Because we don’t have too much time, probably one more question.

Audience 3: Nine or eight years ago, there was this exact same panel at POP and it was election time and we were discussing all these same problems. And all the politicians showed up and we never saw them again.

Sergio Da Silva: I mean, it’s incredibly hard. And what we’re trying to do here and what we’re constantly talking about is you’re trying to legislate culture. Culture’s just going to happen, wherever it’s going to happen. So, you’re talking about zones and you’re talking about whatever, it becomes a bit fishy and it becomes a bit weird when you keep talking about this thing in terms of economics, or these other things that you want to think are concrete.

But really what we’re doing is creating community and we’re creating culture. To be like, “I’m going to make rules so that happens” is fucked. The only way we’re going to be able to do this, I think, personally, is helping the people who are already doing the fucking work, trying to find different rules, trying to find different ways to do this.

It seems crazy. There are people doing the fucking work every day. How do we make it easier for them? You know, you look at the documentary about Peace Park, where fucking Dave Boots was able to make skateboarding legal at Peace Park. And he did that with the SAT, he did that with barely any help from the city.

And now, it’s become a community hub, a place for these people to create culture. He didn’t need a big fucking 15-year debate about what he wanted to do. He fucking did it. And that’s really what we have to be doing.

Louis Rastelli: Yeah. Respect. We need just respect and recognition that we’re doing it. It’s already happening.

Let us keep doing it. Let’s not have to do this again in eight years. Well, listen, I’ve really got to thank Pop and all of our great panellists and all of you people for the passion for the music, for the nightlife, and for coming out and having this great discussion.