Fact-based journalism that sparks the Canadian conversation<\/p>\n
Saad Tekiout\u2019s vigilantism says a lot about the failures of a thoroughly rutted city<\/p>\n
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In May, a nine-year-old Montrealer named Mikey Arice was riding his scooter to a park when his front wheel caught in a pothole. The scooter went flying\u2014and so did Arice. He tore up his pants and banged up his scooter, but he wasn\u2019t hurt. \u201cI nearly knocked my teeth out,\u201d he says in a video he posted to TikTok and Instagram after the close call. \u201cLuckily, I was wearing my helmet.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then he addressed the city\u2019s recently elected mayor, Soraya Martinez Ferrada, directly. \u201cMrs. Soraya, I invite you to fix all the potholes in Montreal\u2014especially those near parks and schools. Accidents happen very fast.\u201d<\/p>\n
The mayor replied the same day: \u201cI agree with you,\u201d she wrote in the comment on his post. \u201cWe have to tackle the potholes on our streets.\u201d She then invited him to message her directly about the pothole in question; Arice said he\u2019d get back to her after his homework was done.<\/p>\n
Decades of deferred maintenance, broken patching machines, a procurement system that has systematically squeezed out small operators, and a city that spent the winter with no pothole contract at all have left Montreal streets in a state of self-inflicted crisis. In January alone, the city fielded nearly 4,000 pothole complaints, a record high, and nearly five times the 796 logged over the same period last year. More than a quarter of Montreal\u2019s roads are in poor or very poor condition, according to a 2025 report by the auditor general, and it would take $3.3 billion to fix them.<\/p>\n
But the cost isn\u2019t only measured in dollars. Montreal\u2019s potholes have flattened tires, damaged cars, and sent pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers to the hospital\u2014and worse. Last summer, a fifty-year-old cyclist spent a week in a coma after being thrown from her bike when its wheel caught in a deep pothole; a month later, a second cyclist hit the same unfilled crater and badly bruised her face. In 2019, a driver died after hitting a seven-metre-long trench on a highway northeast of Montreal.<\/p>\n
Montrealers have always grumbled about their roads. The potholes were a fact of life, met with a shrug\u2014c\u2019est la vie, applied to asphalt. But with complaints at record highs, damage claims mounting, and frustration boiling over the city\u2019s perceived lack of action, something has shifted. Montrealers aren\u2019t shrugging anymore.<\/p>\n
When Arice posted his video, he didn\u2019t just mention the mayor. He also tagged Saad Tekiout, better known as Marquize, a landscaper by day and vigilante pothole filler in his off hours. Instead of waiting on city officials or contractors, Tekiout has been roaming Montreal with bags of asphalt and a compactor, filling potholes at his own expense and posting the results online. Within forty-eight hours, Arice\u2019s pothole was gone.<\/p>\n
Vigilantes, by their nature and function, can be hard to pin down. It took a month of messaging, four communication platforms, a missed rendezvous at a university, and one last-minute change of venue before I finally met Saad Tekiout in a parking lot in the southwest of the city.<\/p>\n
Tekiout\u2019s elusiveness has less to do with his not-quite-legal pothole-filling operation than with the fact that the twenty-five-year-old just never stops moving. He works eight hours a day at his landscaping business\u2014which he\u2019s owned for four years\u2014and fills potholes for hours before and after work; when we finally met, he had just finished giving a guest lecture on serial entrepreneurship at HEC Montr\u00e9al, the graduate business school of the Universit\u00e9 de Montr\u00e9al. He also receives so many messages, most of which are requests to fill potholes.<\/p>\n
Tekiout was born in Morocco and immigrated to Montreal with his family when he was fourteen. He can\u2019t remember a time when he wasn\u2019t struck by the dire condition of the city\u2019s roads. \u201cI feel like it\u2019s a part of our culture,\u201d he jokes.<\/p>\n
This winter, one finally got him, giving his car a flat. By then, he\u2019d heard enough stories from friends whose vehicles had been damaged by Montreal\u2019s cratered streets. When the snow melted in April, he got to work. By the end of his first month, he had filled about fifteen potholes.<\/p>\n