L’Itinéraire, the community group that’s trying to come up with innovative ways of supporting the poorest people in the city, is announcing a new idea today: take those old coin-operated parking meters that the city is about to have a giant surplus of, repaint them green and ask people to dump their change in it voluntarily to help the poor.

On paper it sounds like a fantastic idea. It’s reusing equipment that would otherwise have been trashed, with a minimum of modification, and it gives people something to do with their change instead of handing it over to squeegee-kids and panhandlers.

But in practice, with how much Montrealers hate parking meters in general, will many of them be motivated to dump money in a symbolic representation of their hard-earned money being taken away by the government?

UPDATE: Gazette intern Ryan Bergen has the story. He notes that the meters will cost $750 each to refurbish and the information that goes with them will be in French only.