WARNING: Paragraph 1 of this column is open to reading traffic, but expect detours due to sentences under construction and unfinished cone-junctions.

With our city’s first election debate coming up next Thursday, it’s time to discuss Montreal’s most aggravating daily problem:

City construction, or city obstruction, depending how you see it.

We all grumble and murmur about road construction almost every day, but treat it with the same fatalism we do the weather. We see it like a flood, blizzard or earthquake that’s beyond human control — practically an act of God.

Powerless, we face down our endless “rues barrées” with black humour and tired jokes about living in Coney Island or playing Game of Cones.

When we gather with others, it always starts with cone-versations, as everyone moans about how long they took to get there.

Tourists buy miniature orange cone key chains to remember our city by, then pose for selfies beside downtown bulldozers and barriers.

Foreign film crews have dubbed us “Holey-wood.”

A recent online video of one construction site captures the times. On one side of a sealed-off street are orange signs saying “Sidewalk closed. Use other sidewalk.”

The camera pans to the other side, where identical orange signs say “Sidewalk closed. Use other sidewalk.”

To borrow from Jean-Paul Sartre, there is no........

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