The Point : Community Legal Clinic

À Pointe Saint-Charles, quartier populaire de Montréal, une clinique juridique vient s'ajouter à un vaste réseau de services communautaires, qui ancre dans le concret un certain refus de la «société d'exploitation» et le bouillon d'une «société nouvelle». Expérience passionnante, mais qui n'a rien de facile pour les avocats, confrontés avec une méthode et un langage qui ne s'apprennent pas à l'université. Service, éducation, animation, participation, telles sont les fonctions grâce auxquelles la Clinique juridique communautaire constitue un ferment d'évolution de la société ambiante et le creuset d'un citoyen nouveau.

The film explores the dimensions of the housing crisis in Canada, the definition of cooperative housing, and its possibilities as described by some of the people who are living in such dwellings today. Here, housing is owned and operated by people as users, not as investors. The film emphasizes an alternative in housing: security of tenure and mutual aid as the owner-families have come to value them.

When an old area of a city is to be demolished to make way for a new low-rental housing development, is there anything that the residents can do to protect their own interests? This film, produced in 1968, airs such a situation in the Little Burgundy district of Montréal. It shows how citizens organized themselves into a committee that made effective representations to City Hall and influenced the housing policy.