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A Parks Canada recommendation that cyclists on the Lachine Canal bike path take a 13.6-kilometre detour to circumnavigate a 1.5-kilometre section of the popular path under construction for the next year is creating bike-path rage.

“Is this a joke?” wrote one irate cyclist on the Parks Canada Facebook site. “A detour of 14 km to replace a stretch of 1.5 km? Do you ever bike?”

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“Totally unacceptable and disconnected from reality,” wrote another. “How can you pretend that imposing a detour that’s 10 times longer than the zone under construction could be reasonable?”

Parks Canada announced that starting last Monday, the stretch of the bike path running north of the canal between Dollard Ave. and Angrignon Blvd., south of Ville St. Pierre and Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, will be closed because of renovation work on the canal’s retaining walls until June 2020.

On their Facebook site, Parks Canada suggests cyclists pedal south along the municipal bike paths of LaSalle Blvd. to the Aqueduct path running parallel to Champlain Blvd. before returning to the Lachine Canal path. The detour for a section that would normally take about seven minutes to cover would take between 45 minutes and an hour to cycle.