How to rein in construction mess

Discussions were held Thursday at a summit meeting by the city on how to minimize construction sites around town, including cracking down on contractors who don’t work fast enough. CBC radio talked about putting in less intrusive bollards instead of orange cones, which suggests that it’s the actual cones that have become offensive.

La Presse’s report on this is fine, but contains one of those irritating codas from Ensemble, in which Alan DeSousa complains that the city is “coming too late to the party” and should have done this earlier.

Journalists are trained so rigidly now to include “balance”, that we get this pointless counterweight that adds absolutely nothing to the story – and, what’s more, the journalist clearly knows it, because they never bother to challenge the Ensemble spokesman to explain what they would do differently and how that would be better. Because they know there’s nothing useful to be extracted that way, obviously. What is the point of telling us DeSousa says it’s too late? Should city hall just shrug and say “No point in doing any of this, it should have been done years ago” and give up?