Police shot someone overnight in Ahuntsic‑Cartierville and it’s being investigated by the BEI. No more specific location is given.
Meantime, a member of the SQ elite squad against organized crime shot himself in the hand Friday morning in the secret clubhouse of the Escouade nationale sur la répression du crime organisé.
Jean-François Roberge says that Go Habs Go and “Go Canadiens Go” are acceptable. The STM hasn’t said whether it will change back.
Top guns all around
évidament ça fait partie de notre patrimoine!
But Shirley there’s an exception! Is a terrible system of government.
https://medium.com/@scottconnerly/the-shirley-exception-a970ef292d66
This has been fun, at least it’s hit fewer international outlets than Italian in an Italian restaurant did.
Weekend notes from CultMTL, CityCrunch and La Presse.
Driving restrictions of the weekend.
A house in Ahuntsic (100, rue Somerville) once occupied by the Iraqi consul to Montreal, and which has stood empty for more than 30 years, will finally be demolished. Twenty‑four trees on the lot are also to be cut down.
Oh, interesting. I have wondered what that place was, that explains it. Weird place for a diplomatic property but it is awfully pretty up thataway.
Many years ago I jumped the fence with a friend and explored the house. It was partially burnt but was interesting for its indoor swimming pool that seemed to be in the living room. I always carried a digital camera back then so I must have some photos somewhere.
All the houses on the river side of Somerville Street should be moved to join the two waterside parks they interrupt. A linear park with ecological functions would be an excellent replacement for this example of very poor urbanism.
A park? Urbanism? How boring! Why stop there? As long as we’re off-topic & making stuff up, I propose tearing out the entire street, banning people from the area, and rewilding it completely. Phase 1 of everything within 50 meters of the river, all the way around the island.
/s
@CE I’d be curious to see any shots that exist, for sure.
I went down memory lane looking through old photos but unfortunately couldn’t find them (if they exist).
The headline that an ex director of Projet Montréal has been found guilty of electoral fraud sounds serious. Marie Depelteau‑Paquette’s crime is that she did not include overtime pay for campaign workers in 2017 as part of Projet’s expenses, which are limited by law during a campaign.
Depelteau‑Paquette pleaded that she was only following orders – but she’s the one that may have to pay a heavy fine.
I see no reason not to hold hte bosses responsible, too.
Yes, but they were not on trial.
The background to this – who’s ultimately responsible for handwaving the issue or, in fact, who brought it to the attention of the authorities – is not clear, but to me, it’s not crucial enough for journalists to spend time digging into it.
I mostly found the headline a more startling than the story, which is about irresponsible bookkeeping, not targeted fraud.
Fair enough. Just because it wasn’t published doesn’t mean it wasn’t investigated.
The story confused me, but the decision cleared some stuff up, and arguably it’s worse than the story makes it out. I’ll try to summarize, but may make a mistake here or there.
There were four permanent, salaried employees of the party, and during the electoral period they did extra hours. The law says that all expenses during an electoral period should get included, but there are a few exceptions, including regular ongoing expenses for the administration of a party. The DG of PM asked the official agent, the person responsible for all payments and expenses during the electoral period, if these hours should count, and she asked Elections Quebec, who, after some back and forth, said yes. Those employees were salaried, so instead of paying them the party considered giving them time off later, but EQ said both paid and compensated hours counted. The official agent asked the DG for information to include the overtime, at time and a half, as an expense either way, and the DG said that would be fine. Right after the election, they found they had spending room under the limits, but were short on cash (this was 2017, so they weren’t rolling in money). Electoral expenses are partially reimbursed by the taxpayer, as part of public financing, but they must be paid out within 90 days, and without enough cash on hand they might not meet the deadline. The party BoD and, partially, the mayor, said to stop any potential payment and discuss the hours, and that at another board meeting they decided to count the hours as volunteer, at the suggestion of the DG, according to two witnesses. The official agent objected, saying employees can’t legally renounce that compensation, though they then did after the fact. The official agent even paid out of pocket for a legal opinion, beyond that provided by EQ, to confirm she had to include these expenses. The employees still got compensated with time off, that varied based on the number of extra hours that were done, which the judge said showed it wasn’t volunteer hours, even if the time off was taken outside the election period. As well, when the DG went on maternity leave, she told her replacement to hide info about the hours from the official agent, to get one of the four employees to keep two sets of books to both discount the hours officially but count the time off and lastly that the employees taking the time off should do it on days the official agent wasn’t in the office, so the official agent wouldn’t know about the extra time off.
One could argue that things were unclear at the time. But what the judge accepted in her decision was that the official agent tried to get the expenses filed as per the rules given from Elections Quebec and a lawyer she paid out of pocket for advice, and the DG said she would file that but then chose, likely with the encouragement/direction of the board, not to, and to hide the information, likely knowing that was against the law. It may seem as a bookkeeping issue, but given the actions involved, the judge thinks it’s also wage theft and bad faith, intentional circumventing of the law, reporting requirements and other things. And the judge said while others might have been charged, only one was, so she could only rule on that. $5,000 may seem like a lot, but given the specific intentional actions of the DG of the organization, not some low level employee, one could argue the fine and the coverage aren’t disproportionate.
Lastly, to guess at the answer to Kate’s question, Elections Quebec was already aware of the potential for these extra hours when the official agent asked about how to treat them, so when the final report was filed with zero such hours, I’m sure there were questions raised. It could of course have been a tip off from the official agent or one of the four employees, or a board member. I skipped over a few paragraphs of the ruling so I don’t know for sure it wasn’t mentioned, but I didn’t see it.
In 2015, McGill University opened its Social Accountability and Community Engagement office in response to a critical report about shortcomings in its medical program. Now, in the cold wind of anti‑diversity, equity and inclusion coming from the U.S., it has closed the office and replaced its three nonwhite workers with one white person.
Police witnessed one man shooting another, early Friday on Ste‑Catherine near Crescent. The victim is in hospital and the attacker was swiftly arrested.
A little later, but still very early, a man was found dead on the esplanade of Place des Arts near police headquarters, as Radio‑Canada emphasizes. He had injuries but no homicide number has been given out because the circumstances are unclear. (TVA suggests that it may be the 10th homicide of the year.)
To meet its responsibilities, the city has to raise an additional $215 million for the next budget.
Blaming collective agreements, metro costs, and a lack of provincial funding is always the go-to but it seems a bit weak…
For context, this artcile from 2020:
“Several questions have gone unanswered. The City informed us that it would be running a deficit of at least $105 million for the 2020 fiscal year. However, to date, it is refusing to cover this shortfall with the $251 million surplus. It’s inconceivable and unacceptable. It has some explaining to do,” said Stéphan Meloche, the administrator of the Syndicat des cols bleus regroupés de Montréal (CUPE 301).
How did we go from a 251 million surplus to a 215 million deficit in 5 years if not in part due to mismanagement? is this the whoel picture or liek 2020 a question of one pot not counted against another? Some transparency would be nice before making these big statements. Maybe we could cut the police budget (821 million 2024).
Well, there was Covid, too (the article is dated April 28, 2020)…
Ian, everything has become more expensive since 2020. I’m surprised the budget hole is as modest as $215 million, actually.
And although I’d love to see some of the police budget reduced, we both know this would result in immediate and loud claims that Projet doesn’t care about law and order.
There are just so many ways to make up for some of the shortfall. The city always goes to the same well, rather than look at other ways of bringing in funding.
Here are a few ideas:
Time -based permits: The longer the time you request on the permit, the higher the cost. You want a permit that uses the sidewalk for 30m for 30 days, it’s X on day 1, But on day two it’s X+10%, for example. So if it was $100 on day one, day two is $110… the longer you are on public property, the longer it will take.
Permit Abuse Fines: When you request a permit to use the street and you put up a no-parking sign, the sign must carry a permit number. That permit number is publicly available to be verified online. If a citizen checks and see you are violating the permit, you will be fined, double the amount of the permit. (I don’t know how many times people on my street have individually called the city to verify permits only to find that they got a permit for 100m on one side but put up their signs on BOTH sides for 200m or more.)
Process savings: Pay cities employees a bonus of 10% up to 25% of the savings to the city, in the first year if they can suggest a process that will increase the speed and costs of the city. They get paid, the city gets the work done faster and cheaper.
No Free Parking: Put a cost to every single parking spot in the city into the budget, including all the spaces used by the STM, the police, and the fire department. Every damn spot. Add the cost of those parking spaces to the budget of those departments, so that on year 0, there is no change in the overall budgets. If the space is worth $150, your budget gets a bonus of $150, but a bill of $150. But now, you have a value to each spot and if you want to ask for an extra spot, you know you need budget approval. And if you can audit your spots and not use as many, you can therefore keep the money and the city can put the spot back into the usage of citizens… which increase spots available for resident permits and/or parking meters and tickets, which would increase costs.
Electronic parking ticketing: Have a car/truck that runs up and down the streets and processes the licence plates of cars. It can track those who have tickets to pay (and send the boot people), cars that are abandoned or stolen, cars that violate the timed zones and finally print the tickets. It won’t allow the city employee to give preferential treatment to construction workers, for example. — Important — There is a button for the employee to hit to mark cars that are temporarily parked for loading/unloading, or have a handicapped placard etc. This will also keep people from being ticketed who do have a resident permit as it can access the database. Among the advantages, the city can track licence plate to handicapped placard and by looking at it, it may be able to adjust parking if the handicapped space is used all the time… or change to have loading/unloading zones, etc, from the data collected.
“(SPVM) received a $63 million budget increase for 2023, after overspending their budget by $50 million in 2022.” link
Worth noting, the police budget was already $679M in 2021 – which of course they went over, by about 30 million.
I can imagine where some of this budget shortfall might be coming from.
That said, yes, I realize everything is more expensive than in 2020… but have bookkeeping methods changed, too? Not counting the surplus against the deficit in 2020 as an excuse to not increase wages for city workers was a misdirection, an accounting shell game. Projet was in charge then, too. I’d like to see a fuller picture, I don’t trust these simple (or more appropriately, simplified) statements – nor should anyone. Fool me once, et cetera.
Ephraim
I just went through the process for a parking permit this week.
First off, the process is clear as mud and involves tracing a map on a city website about how much space you need, possibly including sidewalks. (There is no “I need a parking space” option.)
Second, once the borough has issued the permit, a person needs to hire a third party to get and set up the no-parking-you-will-be-towed signs.
Third, the permit holder must fill out a form and email the city 12-14 hours before the permit is in effect, and do this every single day.
Somewhere in this process you get a permit number that you have to print up and stick on the vehicle’s dashboard so you don’t get towed.
If your job finishes early, you need to email the city to say the job is done. The city tells you the cost upfront but only bills after the fact in case of changes.
There are way too many places for errors to creep in, too many unnecessary steps, and too many people and companies involved.
Kevin – Which is why it needs to be simplified but also searchable. They frequently film on my street. They frequently violate the permits. They frequently have the residents calling the city to complain because they take so much of the permit parking area. Which is why it needs to be an open database and the city needs to get a better system in gear. You are also supposed to use certain signs….
And we have all seen people put up chairs or signs trying to reserve spaces on the street… only to have them removed, because without a permit… they mean nothing.
The only chairs I ever see reserving space are when people are moving house, which is a rare enough occurrence that it seems to be generally agreed that it’s a reasonable exception. Do you see people doing it for other reasons, Ephraim?
@Kate – Yeah, mostly students who don’t realize we don’t do that in Montreal… like trying to reserve a parking space in the snow.
People definitely do the chair thing for moving and it’s very much respected. I’ve probably done it 15 times in my life (including just the other week when I needed a spot to make a large delivery).
When I was finding third parties to put up signs there were FOUR options: with and without permit. Putting up the signs themselves or DIY. SO MUCH WASTED EFFORT.
But the people putting up signs have to rely on trust because they don’t have access to the permits, only the permit number. It’s so stupid, so quebecois. Le sigh.
A Superior Court judge struck down the tuition hike and francisation requirements for out‑of‑province university students on Thursday, a case brought by McGill and Concordia.
But it’s not all rainbows and roses. The tuition rules stand for nine months, during which the government has to come up with a new fee structure. But the requirement that 80% of the students at those universities have to learn French besides everything else they need to do is gone – until the government finds a way around this.
Pointing out that there is no data to support the CAQ’s insistence that outsiders don’t assimilate is a win all by itself. Uncle Frankie is still mad about growing up in Ste Anne hearing English, outsiders ruining Quebec is his hobbyhorse.
It also leaves open the question of what assimilation actually involves, and how a person can prove that they’ve been sufficiently assimilated.
Hence the obsession with hijabs.
The bill for the renovation of the La Fontaine tunnel has jumped by $250 million – rising to $3 billion. Announcements were made as the renovated section prepares to reopen, but the unrenovated section will take till 2027.
Of Montreal’s 68 metro stations, only 30 have elevator access. Advocates for people with reduced mobility want us to do better.
I’ve been sent this link to Lemay’s plans for the Black Rock memorial site. I find it all rather conceptual and colourless, rather like the kitchens in recent condo designs.
But how far are they moving the Rock? That isn’t even mentioned, and it’s the only question I want answered.
I was also curious about that. From https://montrealirishmonument.com/:
“Construction on the park will begin in 2027 once the Hydro-Quebec sub-station is completed (2024) and the Ville de Montreal redirects Bridge Street and repurposes la rue des Irlandais (2027).”
Does that mean the road is moving and the park will just be built around the existing location of the Rock?
Based on that overhead mockup it looks like they wouldn’t have to move it at all. My crappy visualization.
Thanks, Marc G.
It would be nice if the PR stuff could make that clear.
I don’t know that I have close relatives under the Rock and I don’t even know whether anyone has a list of those presumably buried there. But it’s likely. So I do feel something about not having the dead dug up a lot as they create this site.
I think MarcG is right; they won’t move the rock, they’ll relocated the road.
I like the design from what I can see of it. Those renderings always look a bit cold and spartan, but it has some interesting lines and the curved walls look both visually interesting and practical for cutting down on the traffic sounds.
At least there isn’t a breakfast bar.
It seemed unlikely that the train tracks would be moved, so it is kind of boxed in on one side.
I was waiting for you to say that, Kate 😛
Great if the rock stays put, but when/why did the wrought iron shamrock fence get removed? It was some quality metalwork, and marked the memorial off from its surroundings quite well.
Annette: Based on Google street view images it was removed between 2009 and 2012.
It’s amazing how much cities can change. The big empty lot east of the rock used to be the Goose Village neighbourhood, then the Autostade was there in the 60s and 70s (you can see the rock on the south side of the stadium in the photo). Fun rabbithole fact: the stadium was designed to be easily movable so most of it is still being used for amateur baseball in Thetford Mines.
Thanks, MarcG.
STM buses have put the words “Go Habs Go” up on their buses on and off for years. But an OQLF complaint has put an end to that.
I had to check this wasn’t an April Fool. It isn’t.
The Gazette also reports this, but about “Go CF Montreal Go” which has also been sported from time to time on STM buses.
Update: Someone reminded me that buses never had “Go Habs Go” but in fact “Go Canadiens Go”.
Defund the OQLF
Are they going to shut off the lights and bring the game to a halt when people chant those three words at the Bell Centre?
We live in a parody.
Gross government being gross.
Something has gone wrong in society. Why do so many village idiots have power?
Kevin: because people want to feel that the people in charge are no smarter than they are.
I’ve seen a few buses with “Allez Canadiens Allez!” which doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well.
The buses didn’t say Go Habs Go, which would have been the obvious thing. Instead they said Go Canadiens Go (and also Go Alouettes Go), which was kinda dumb but OK. Allez Canadiens Allez is absurd. I can only imagine an anglo complained to make the OQLF look bad. Haven’t had a Pastagate in a while.
Between this and the CAQ refusing to budget on the alcohol limit – even after someone was killed by a driver who had been stopped with a blood alcohol level between 0.05 and 0.1 an hour before the incident – it’s seriously time to have a provincial election…
Kate
If the people in charge are taking these complaints at face face value then they are in fact missing the forest for the trees.
Nobody is making a complaint about “Go! CF MTL Go” because they’re offended by the language.
They’re making complaints because they’re desperate to interact with anyone in a meaningful fashion.
We should be treating these complaints as cries for help from desperate people.
They reported this on the CBC national news FFS. But I suppose that’s better than hearing more about tariffs. National comic relief courtesy of your friendly neighbourhood OQLF.
Also, I’m quite sure I’ve seen GO HABS GO on buses before. But that might have been 20 years ago, or it might have been an RTL bus, or it might have been a real-time AI manipulation beamed directly into my brain. (Sorry, spending too much time on FB.)
Well here’s a pie in the face for the OQLF… suits ’em, I dig the look.
https://www.montrealgazette.com/news/article894384.html
I saw a 55 bus this afternoon that had a sign in the front window of the bus that said “Go Canadiens Go.” It looked pretty official, it was hard to see from my bike but it looked like the STM logo was underneath the offending message.
Common les boys!
I wish we could learn to accept who and what we are; Quebec needs therapy.
Aweille le gang!
It doesn’t feel like new news that more and more people are turning to food banks when their rent leaves them with no money for food. But the food bank operator quoted here is right: this is an untenable situation. In essence, society is forced either to subsidize landlords, or let people starve.
The Hudson’s Bay Company is planning to liquidate its remaining stores, leaving open the question what will happen to the red sandstone landmark on Phillips Square.
Quick, somebody re-open Morgan’s!
My parents called it Morgan’s for years.
@Kate, It’s happened to me, too. They say long-term memory is the last to go…
Morgan’s was bought by HBC in 1960.
We used to keep christm ornaments in an old Morgan’s box
@Ephraim the very last Morgan’s lgo was a weird pastiche of the old Morgan’s logo and the Bay’s “mod” logo. The M was gloroious.
At one point not that long ago there was a Hudson Bay Company museum in the downtown Hudson’s Bay store. Then one day it was gone. Fun while it lasted tho.
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