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Some stereotypes die for good reason. The City of Westmount, for example, is no longer the exclusive home to what René Lévesque once dismissed as “white Rhodesians” — haughty WASPs, noses hiked high in the air, whose use of French was limited to asking the help to bring a Pimm’s Cup to the lanai. Today, nearly a quarter of the burgh’s 20,000 souls have French tongues, and over 75 per cent are bilingual.

Westmount’s demographics may have shifted, the edges may have come off its blue-blooded pedigree, but its sense of entitlement remains stubbornly intact. The City of Westmount reminded us of as much when it tried to block one of the province’s largest infrastructure projects in recent history because of concerns about noise.

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In February, Westmount went to court to get an injunction against the KPH Turcot, the consortium charged with rebuilding the Ville-Marie Expressway. The reason: some of its residents would suffer “irreparable prejudice” resulting from the “noise pollution” generated by those very cars passing through Westmount’s borders, according to court documents. These inconveniences, Westmount wagered, necessitated the immediate halt to construction. The very eardrums of certain Westmounters were at stake.