English leaders in Verdun are relieved to hear that Verdun’s website is only temporarily disabled and will return live by the end of October.
Verdun’s communications officer Francine Morin says she took the site down last April, but only as a temporary measure until she finished completing a new version of the French site, which goes live next week. The English site will then be updated and published over the next few weeks.
“The city has obtained a new platform to give every borough the same look,” said Morin. “I didn’t have the resources necessary to continue updating the English version of the site, so I disconnected it rather than give our English-speaking citizens incorrect information.”
The borough of LaSalle faced similar circumstances, but they decided to leave their English site live without updating it, rather than leave English-speaking citizens without any information at all. “We’ve never even discussed removing our website,” said Pierre Dupuis, the Communications Rep. for the Borough of LaSalle. “More than a third of our website visitors consult the English pages, so we know they need that information.”
Verdun’s lack of a website inconvenienced at least two different groups of residents. Those living on and near Churchill Street received notices about a road closure and disrupted bus, garbage and postal services in French on Thursday, September 13. The letter included “English upon Request” on the bottom of the letter, but since borough offices close at half past noon on Fridays, no one could provide a translation before fines came into effect the following Monday.
“I went the borough website to find the notice in English so that I could print it out for my elderly neighbours because they aren’t online,” said Crawford Park resident and Suburban contributor, Rohinton Ghandhi. “There was an error message that rerouted you to the main city of Montreal site.”
On Monday morning, Verdun delivered English notices to four different residents including Ghandhi, but in the meantime, he mentioned his concerns to long-time Verdun resident Joseph Quinn.
“It’s a disaster. I’ve lived in Verdun for 70 years and we have always had bilingual access to the borough of Verdun,” said Quinn, whose son Ken contacted the Suburban last Friday.
Ken forwarded information from a website popular with Verdun residents. On that site, Linda Levesque Telfer posted that she received a letter from a borough official after complaining about the missing website. “As Verdun doesn’t have bilingual Borough status, according to the bill 101, we cannot provide an English version of all the content of our Web site,” said the letter, which was written by Karine Benoît from the Accès Verdun office.
Note: This story appeared in the City edition of the Suburban yesterday.
