Two people died in a house fire in St‑Michel on Saturday morning.
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Kate
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Kate
A young man drowned off Verdun Beach on Friday evening.
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Kate
Police chief Fady Dagher is holding a presser late Friday evening to announce the suspension of 14 officers from Station 39 in Montreal North for committing or tolerating racist and hateful actions. Cutting and collecting dreadlocks as trophies is mentioned.
steph
Good start.
MarcG
Seems like it’s been updated since you posted: “He also confirmed that two police officers are suspended, three were reassigned and the rest of the unit was “relocated” so they won’t have contact with citizens for now.”
jeather
So fourteen of sixteen cops are still working and being paid, two are not working but may or may not be unpaid, and this investigation (run by whom exactly? Their coworkers? Good for those who reported this but I bet a lot more knew and said SFA) has been going on secretly for two months now. Glad we have so much accountability.
Kate
Charges may be brought against two of them. At least the DPCP is involved in the file now.
More detail in Saturday’s column by Patrick Lagacé where he emphasizes the unusual situation in which police informed their superiors about actions by their colleagues, breaking an ageless taboo.
SMF says she’s closely monitoring the situation. And wishing it would go away, I’ll bet.
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Kate
A man was attacked and mauled by a German shepherd dog, Friday afternoon in Maisonneuve. According to this account, the dog took off after the attack and has not been located, nor has its owner.
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Kate
SMF promised Friday to make Park Avenue safer all the way from Pine to Jean‑Talon. A period of reflection and consultation has been suggested over what to do next.
Plateau mayor Cathy Wong says it’s a vague announcement – she was hoping there was already enough information collected to move ahead with concrete plans for better cyclist and pedestrian safety.
SMF’s administration has a style, i.e. lots of public consultation, after which proposed new ideas will be set aside in favour of traffic fluidity and parking. In 2029, will we be looking back at four years of unimaginative status quo?
Joey
Too bad for Cathy Wong that Projet didn’t have two terms to redo Parc Ave.
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Kate
The first local strawberries are in, and I find that an ordinary small cardboard basket now costs $7.00.
Is that going to be standard pricing this summer?
MarcG
I passed by Atwater market a few weeks ago and they’d fixed the price of a smallish container of greenhouse strawberries at $8.
Tim S.
4$ on sale at my Provigo this morning.
(But lots of other stuff was plenty expensive..)
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Kate
A social media trend called body‑checking – a term familiar enough in a hockey town – has been experienced by women on the streets of Hochelaga‑Maisonneuve recently.
What pleasure the assailant gets from doing this, I don’t understand, unless it’s a way to infringe on a woman with plausible deniability. I simply bumped into her as I passed her in the street, Your Honour.
Blork
I think it’s a way for the most pathetic and stupid among us to get a very brief thrill out of doing something “real” (meaning something they saw on social media), which – for bonus points – is also transgressive, and since people on social media get away with it then they assume they can too.
Yet another example of how social media demonstrates and elevates the stupidity in society; a stupidity that in the past was largely harmless because it had no voice and was pretty much confined to very small non-virtual social circles, but is now writ large and pervasive in mainstream culture. Thanks, Zuckerberg!
David
It is not a new phenomenon… My sister and her roommate lived in mile ex in the 80s and would get their kicks out of seing weird gyrations they could make the Hasidic men go through to avoid being touched a woman they were not related to.
Blork
Yes, but the difference is that this is the first I (and I assume most people) have heard of doing that, whereas if social media were around then it would have spread as a meme and been done by many people all over the place.
Kate
That’s different, David. I’ve seen a young Hasidic man hide his eyes because I had a shirt on with a collar button open, and I certainly wasn’t walking around Mile End intending to be provocative. They’re a culture of extreme attitudes towards gender interactions.
But your sister and her friend were not actually touching strangers. The assailants in the story I posted are finding ways to hit random women quite hard and get away with it.
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Kate
Christopher Watts, the sexual predator who ducked out of a halfway house in Montreal last week, was arrested in Ontario on Thursday.
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Kate
The Bon-Pasteur monastery fire happened in 2023, but it may be 2028 before the people who lived there can go back home. But, since the building is classed as heritage, doing any work on it involves not only money and materials, but negotiations.
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Kate
Weekend notes from Le Devoir, CityCrunch, Journal de Montréal, CultMTL.Places you cannot drive even if you want to.
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Kate
Radio-Canada sent a photographer and a reporter to talk both to neighbours and residents of a homeless camp in Hochelaga‑Maisonneuve.
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Kate
The REM is to get two stations after all in the Sud‑Ouest: Bridge‑Bonaventure and cough Griffintown‑Bernard‑Landry.
Uatu
Great! Now they can wait for delayed trains too lol
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Kate
TVA reports on construction congestion near the bridge, the mayor now promising to use drones to monitor sites.
After her promises to reduce traffic congestion and cones, SMF needs some magic. If drones don’t do the trick, there’s always AI.
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Kate
TVA posted advice on Wednesday on ways to get to the airport but now there’s another – a new bus route linking the REM’s Des Sources station to YUL, at least until the REM’s A2 branch opens.
Nicholas
First link should go here.
Kate
I was planning to post yesterday’s story, but thanks for the correction!
Nicholas
TVA is really milking this story, two articles in two days. No suggestion to take any of the other buses, like the 747 or the 209/214/460.
Joey
As I entered minute 25 of waiting for an Uber at the airport yesterday evening, I was wondering why the only transit option until the REM’s Trudeau spur is done is the 747. This seems like a simple and convenient option for a lot of passengers. I was also wondering why the airport was continuing to allow free passenger pickup and drop-off despite the construction causing huge traffic build-ups. Other airports charge a fee if you want to drive up to the terminal; Montreal should implement that until the construction is over. When the wait for a cab is almost a long as a flight, there’s a problem.
Tim
This is great new. The CTV link does not display the correct times. Go here instead: https://rem.info/en/news/new-bus-connection-between-rem-des-sources-station-and-yul-starting-june-17
The rem page also states that a single zone A fare is good for 120 minutes. Did that change? I always thought it was 90 minutes.
jeather
The stm site says 120, which surprised me for the same reason.
Here’s what I don’t understand about what is legal — you can do bus to metro to bus, but also Metro to bus to metro? I thought it excluded two metro rides, and they only know where you enter anyhow
Nicholas
They switched it from 90 to 120 minutes when they did the zones in 2021 or so, I believe.
It was previously true you could never do two metro trips on one ticket, but when the Two Mountains REM opened they realized people might do Blue to REM to Orange/Green. So now they allow two metro rides with a REM or bus in between (doesn’t say Exo, but unlikely to happen).
DeWolf
120 minutes is a good amount of time but what I really don’t understand is why the STM is so intent on making things difficult for everyone by imposing so many restrictions on what you can do within those 120 minutes.
Many other cities give you a 120-minute window in which you can use transit however you want. If that were the case, the STM might lose a few extra fares here and there, but they’d probably gain overall ridership, especially now that fewer people have monthly passes.
Blork
There’s also the question of whether or not that 120 minute time frame is respected. For example, the A+B tickets I use to get from Longueuil to Montreal is supposed to be valid when I board the RTL bus, transfer to the Metro, and then board an STM bus in Montreal. All on the one ticket if within the 120 minutes. (Ditto the reverse when going home.) But there have been at least two occasions where I realized afterwards it had deducted two fares from my OPUS card instead of one.
Hence the continuing circus act of juggling three (three!) OPUS cards to get around this burgh.
Nicholas
The original sin of OPUS was not copying Oyster or Octopus but instead grafting the old ticket system onto a card that could easily deduct any monetary value. We could have had one card for any zone, and it just has money on it, and every time you travel it takes the correct amount of money off the card. You wouldn’t even need exit gates everywhere, just at the Laval and Longueuil stations (and assume every non-tap exit is in Zone A), and the same for the few off-island new REM stations, and then make Exo trains open-style tap outs.
bob
It’s almost like transit could be made simpler and easier if it were free.
Blork
Careful, Nicholas; such sensible talk is dangerous!
mare
I remember when an electronic travel card system was introduced in the Netherlands. It counts the actual number of km because it’s tap-in and tap-out. And if you travel by bus between 2 cities it became as expensive as by train. If Opus worked like that a single ticket to St-Anne-de Bellevue would be easily $10 or so. And it’s very easy to forget to tap out and then your complete balance is used. Great way to rip off tourists! Montreal’s system is ridiculous complicated, especially if you travel,off-island, but still very cheap for longer stretches.
Secret tip: if you travel by metro to a short appointment or need to drop something off you *can* return home on the same ticket by metro. Just board a bus, tap your opus card and then change your mind and get out again. I might have used that sometimes.
Nicholas
mare, they had distance-based fares before the electronic travel card, with a “stripkaart”: a long ticket with 15 slots, say, and if you took a bus trip of 4 zones the driver would stamp the 4th slot, and then if you do 3 zones they stamp the 7th. But you had to decide where you were going when you boarded and the driver had to do the math from wherever you got on to where you were going. And if you changed your mind mid-route you were in trouble (just like if you suddenly change plans in Montreal and need to go to zone B or C).
But my point is either system could be cheap or expensive. I take your word for it they used the gate media change to raise prices, but agencies really try not to for fear people will try to stop the fare media change because they’re annoyed by price change. I do remember people saying that the replacement of the guilder with the euro resulted in a lot of prices being rounded up to a round number, sometimes causing a 20-30% increase, so maybe that was it.
But Montreal could absolutely keep prices where they are and just deduct whatever the charge is when you tap out (or, if you forget to tap out, the final station of that line, with a Dutch style form to complete if you forget, which they give you a few chances per year). It’d actually be pretty easy because for the rail with gates (Metro, REM) you only need to have tap outs off-island, with the presumption it’s Zone A otherwise, so a cheaper reform. (Only locals take Exo rail, the tourists are a rounding error, but yes they’d have to tap out.) For buses there are very few on the island cross a river, so STM is fine, and you could also assume buses that do cross the river are ones nearly everyone takes across a zone boundary, and then just have readers for the few people doing Vaudreuil to Ile Perot or whatever but not going to St Anne, and then just have notices on those few buses that cross a boundary (many Exo buses). And since the ARTM decided that buses in all zones have the same fare as a bus in one zone, generally, this isn’t even a big problem with tapping off on buses: you could allow any bus trip to be one zone, and then if you take rail it adds more zones/money to take off.
There are solutions that can not only be revenue neutral but even save people money, and it would reduce confusion for occasional users crossing zones, as you just tap and go, which might induce more trips and this more revenue for the agencies.
jeather
Someone on reddit made a little infographic showing when a multitrip pass got cheaper than a 10 pack of tickets and as always it’s quite a lot of use — more than 2 a day (except for a monthly pass, which is usually around 15-16 round trips). I’ve had to take the metro a bunch this month (and it worked out great due to the bus line change), but just kept getting annoyed at how little they make it worth occasional trips.
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Kate
The CAQ’s Quebec constitution bill fizzled as the parliamentary session ended, and – with any luck – will become only a curious footnote in Quebec’s legal history.
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