A CityNews headline says residents of Chinatown are concerned about plans for Stella, the sex worker support organization, to move into the area but city hall is making the group wait and intending to consult potential neighbours.
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Kate
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Kate
Projet Montréal handily outspent Ensemble in November’s election. Projet’s post‑election report says it spent $1.5 million while Ensemble’s outlay was around $1 million.
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Kate
The blue collar union chief says one reason for so many potholes is that workers are pushed to work too fast, so that they don’t have time to make lasting patches. They also mostly use cold asphalt, which doesn’t bind well and gets quickly gouged out by snow removal procedures.
In related news, the city is finally going to remove some old streetcar tracks that have been popping up through St‑Antoine Street for sixty years. They should sell pieces off as souvenirs.
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Kate
CBC reminds us Wednesday of the profound fiasco of the federal government’s Phoenix pay system, which dwarfs the SAAQClic mess in depth and time scale.
Some large IT systems work properly – Visa never seems to misplace a purchase or a payment, for example – but something has gone badly wrong with these government systems. I’m also put in mind of the British Post Office scandal, in which faulty software saw hundreds unfairly prosecuted, some driven to bankruptcy or suicide. (The UK post office also functions as a savings bank*, more money handled than by ours, but it was a similar situation of IT simply failing to work at a grand scale.)
I wonder where the failure points are, or if anyone knows.
The Phoenix pay system also has its own Wikipedia page, where we’re reminded that Phoenix was a Stephen Harper initiative.
*Reading British books, it used to puzzle me to read of people “putting money in the post office”.
Joey
The Conservative idea that we can just outsource the basic functions of government to largely automated systems keeps failing in part because governments begin by hollowing out their teams and relying on inadequate numbers of IT professionals to manage these insane projects (nothing is built from scratch, often many legacy systems that are ‘quirky’ at best must be integrated into some Frankenstein fork of either an off-the-shelf or bespoke ‘solution’) and so everyone gets taken for a ride. If step one of the next major government IT project isn’t hire dozens of engineers to work for the government – and not the consortium of contractors – failure is basically inevitable.
jeather
It still causes new problems, it’s not just historical ones. One of the issues was that it was in Miramichi, which — unsurprisingly — was a way to lose staff because people didn’t want to move there, so they left the public service instead. I understood that the pay system did need to be updated, but every part of Phoenix was flawed.
The Post Office scandal was a bit different because people at Fujitsu and, I think, high up in the Post Office, knew perfectly well there were problems in the software and just lied and lied about it, then prosecuted people on those lies.
bob
There is also a tendency to trust machines over people. People lie, but if the machine says it is so, it must be so. The future of AI is pretty much that: people knowing the machine is spewing nonsense, but who will go with it because it is the machine, and machines can’t lie. Plus, it’s a nice way to cover your ass when it all turns into a dumpster fire.
The other issue is that the people commissioning these systems have no clue how they work – neither the software, nore the business logic they implement, so they have no way of knowing what is actually going on. If the people supervising the implementation of an accounting system know nothing about programming or accountancy, the contractors can do as they please, and charge accordingly. The same goes for infrastructure, or whatever. Even where there is no direct financial corruption, the corruption is in the negligence.
We have moved away from where institutions are run by people with expertise in that institution’s area to where they are run by politically reliable functionaries. University presidents need not be academics, hospital directors need not be physicians, unions are lorded by people who haven’t worked in their field in decades, and so on. Less so for the lower level functionaries – “nurse managers” who have never practices nursing, and whose only function is to cut costs, patient welfare be damned, e.g. The people who have authority over and within these institutions don’t have a dog in the race. It’s just a gig. They burn down the village, then move on – fail up if they can The institutions themselves, the people who make them up, lose their sense of purpose, and they get hollowed out, psychologically and spiritually, like people whose companies are bought by corporate raiders only to be dismembered. It’s been completely normalized.
Kevin
The problem of the past 40 years is hiving IT into its own department and keeping them siloed. I have had meetings where people were expected to make decisions about new software, or major shifts in websites, and had managers look at me like I was crazy when I demanded that the IT and engineering departments be brought in to see if their ideas were feasible.
And then those managers got very upset when six months later nothing was working and IT said they couldn’t do anything because what the managers had bought was useless.
Mozai
I can tell you from the corporate world there’s a persistent and pervasive idea that “if I don’t already know it / understand it, then it must not be important” and that turns into cost-saving omissions that bites corporations on the ass within a year. I haven’t worked in civil service but this smells similar.
JP
I’d never heard of the British Post Office scandal…but that sounds awful. In prosecuting hundreds who insisted they were innocent…couldn’t they have at least explored the possibility it was the software.
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Kate
Interesting piece on Policy Alternatives setting out the idea that the housing shortage isn’t caused by a shortage of supply, but by the financialization of housing.
Nicholas
The “supply-shortage argument” is encapsulated by the CMHC’s claim that “increasing housing supply is the key to restoring affordability.” If the argument is correct, then we should expect to see evidence that increases in dwellings per capita lower prices over time.
The entire article is predicated on this false premise. It is only true if there is no population growth, and no people wanting more space at home. But if you build 100 housing units, and 500 people move into the area, housing prices should still go up. You need to build more than the increase in population, and also more to account for the fact that people want larger homes with fewer people in them (for work-from-home offices, because people are less willing to double bunk kids and less willing to have roommates, etc.). And people so want to move to Montreal that our governments have chosen to prevent much of that by cutting immigration. So you need even more housing to tamp that effect down.
I won’t go through a point by point, but one question the author should be asking is why are housing prices up much more in areas where more people want to live than areas where people don’t? The financialized credit market in the housing industry exists across the province, country and world; RBC will sell you a mortgage anywhere in the country, on basically the same terms and interest rates, so it should have an effect country-wide, allowing people to bid up prices in less desirable areas. But it mostly doesn’t, because you only need to bid up prices when lots of people are competing for limited housing. As someone trying to sell a family home in a depressed rural area and maybe buy one in a desirable urban one, I can tell you that both markets are financialized, but one’s prices keep falling as the other’s keeps rising.
Related, landlords are greedy all the time, everywhere; if that was the issue then we wouldn’t look at a chart of housing prices skyrocketing and think landlords all got greedy in 2014 or whatever. They always are, but they can only act on that when supply is tight, which it very much is, so people have few options. Landlords keep telling us in quarterly earnings calls and presentations that keeping supply constrained is the best thing for their bottom line, and we keep having a certain set of people who claim to hate landlords somehow agree with their tactics. Maybe landlords are all lying to their shareholders to fake us out, but it seems like a risky move.
Kevin
Neat piece but it has a major flaw.
The piece says “Over the past half-century, the number of housing units has risen substantially relative to population, and their average size has increased as well.”
It is entirely possible for houses to get bigger while apartments got smaller, without increasing the amount of family-suitable housing stock, and that is precisely what happened. We have more McMansions with fewer people in them, while simultaneously having more 1-,2-, and 3 1/2s that are too small for families.
While it claims there is no shortage of supply, there very much is a shortage of the supply of the multi-bedroom homes where people want to live.
vasi
I don’t really know how to interpret these figures. If housing-units-per-capita are up, we’d expect a high vacancy rate, but the CMHC reports extremely low vacancy rates. You could explain part of this with changing household size as families have fewer children, but household size hasn’t changed much since the 90s. Or you could claim that some units are not on the market and therefore not included in the vacancy rate, but BC has a vacancy tax targeted at such units, and found very few. Something doesn’t add up!
The thing that most convinces me this piece’s thesis is wrong is cross-municipal comparison. I don’t see any reason to imagine that Phoenix or Atlanta or Indianapolis would have low “financialization” rates, they’re not some kind of socialist paradises. But somehow they keep prices low, and coincidentally build a lot!
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Kate
Many of Quebec’s hospitals are in poor condition. After reading so often about how decrepit Maisonneuve‑Rosemont hospital is, it’s surprising to find it only rates #8 on the list in this piece in which the Montreal General tops the list. The Douglas comes second after the recent incident in which burst water pipes damaged a laboratory building in that complex.
Nicholas
I assume the reason they haven’t put enough money to fix MR is because they were earmarking that money for the General and the Douglas.
Kate
They’re working on Maisonneuve-Rosemont (item from last year), but although the Douglas is old and probably needed some work, its situation only became dire last month.
Nicholas
I was joking, as PSPP has made it his mini cause célèbre to fix MR, and I doubt he will do the same for the MGH, even though if you have trauma downtown you’re going to the General.
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Kate
The city has levied 95 fines to municipal parties for leaving election placards up after the election, Ensemble getting the largest number with 38. Each infraction collects $500 for the city coffers.
Daniel
Love to hear it. Election placards create heinous visual pollution in our neighbourhoods and should be a thing of the past.
Mozai
I knew there were fines, but seeing election signs up a year after the election led me to believe the fines were never enforced.
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Kate
Spring break is coming up, from March 2 to 6 for most kids.
Items about things to do: Espace pour la vie, VSMPE, Pointe Claire, the Plateau, Anjou, Ville‑Marie, Saint‑Laurent, Verdun, Outremont.
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Kate
On Friday, a demonstration was held against the American force ICE at Garda World in St‑Laurent, and was crushed mercilessly by our police. This action has been condemned by Amnesty International as a violation of the right to protest.
Ian
some animals are more equal than others
Ephraim
Amnesty International is an unreliable metric for human rights due to a colonialist tilt and documented systemic racism. The organization frequently targets open democracies because they are easier to investigate and more lucrative for fundraising.They ignoring state sanctioned killings in authoritarian regimes. Use a strategy to prioritizes easier targets to maximize donations. The top-down control (colonialist) by the London headquarters over local branches, including ignoring and sanctioning local branches is concerning. In other words, it’s hard to trust anything that Amnesty says without considering that they want your money. A long way from where they used to be, when they stood up for the principal of things more than anything else.
In other words, the only reason they usually say something now is because they think they can get donations because of it. It’s easy to send observers to Montreal than it is to authoritarian regimes. It’s a tangible goal they can put in their newsletter… something like demanding change in Yemen is too far away to be relevant for fundraising.
Joey
bob
As I understand it, people were throwing ice (no irony intended) and other things at the cops , which justified breaking up the protest. But who were those people? The police have a history of using provocateurs.
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Kate
The city has launched an initiative called in English the Mobile Tactical Intervention Group as promised during the election campaign (second link from last September) to tackle homelessness.
On CBC radio at noon, executive committee chairman Claude Pinard, also on this spiffy intervention group committee, said they expected to clear up homelessness in three years.
The intervention committee is to meet every three weeks.
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Kate
According to Tourisme Montreal, nearly 12 million tourists visited the city in 2025, 7.3% more than 2024. A slight drop in Americans was more than made up for by an increase in visitors from elsewhere in Canada.
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Kate
This editorial by Brian Myles does the best job I’ve seen of assessing the long‑awaited report from the Gallant commission on what went so wrong with SAAQclic.
It seems to still be unclear who knew what when – how long Karl Malenfant was able to truly keep the premier, his finance minister and his transport minister in the dark, and how much Legault knew and chose to keep from the public till it was impossible to keep under wraps any longer. Legault continues to hold that his government did not know.
Some of this is bound to end up in court.
Tuesday, the Gazette’s Allison Hanes writes a column taking the report’s meaning is to exonerate the elected officials, but that ignores the looming fact that the politicians washed their hands of the need to keep an eye on a project of that size. Claiming that they were lied to for so long and so completely doesn’t hold up well as a testament to their intelligence or sense of responsibility for public funds.
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Kate
The issue whether Quebec’s government can hold back redistribution of Quebec’s electoral map will be heard by the Supreme Court. Montreal is to lose one riding, in the eastern tip of the island, where two ridings were to be blended into one – unless the changes can be rolled back.
(Thanks to H. John for letting me know the Supreme Court had decided to hear the case.)
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Kate
Two troubled brothers in Montreal North were given a light sentence of house arrest this week, closing the bizarre case of the men who lived with the cadaver of the Inuk girlfriend of one of them in their apartment for months (second link is from 2023).
I’m assuming in cases like this that a social worker will be sent to check in on these men, but who knows whether there’s the resources.
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Kate
Both these brief items say Google Maps is sending drivers to the wrong place if they ask for Trudeau airport – but not where they end up. Bain Colonial, maybe?
CE
When driving on the 20 to the airport, the highway signs switch back and forth when they indicate Trudeau or Mirabel airports. I wonder how many people have just looked for the airplane symbol and have turned off toward Mirabel and missed their flights at Trudeau.
Joey
TVA says they wind up at the fire service office at the airport… Uber also loves to send drivers down snow-filled and ice-covered back alleys to avoid spending 15 seconds waiting for a red light to change, especially when the alley is actually closed at the supposed exit point… to think cabbies used to have to know where everything was.
MarcG
Interesting to reflect back and see how GPS driving directions were early AI destroyers of knowledge.
Ian
Yes and no, using Waze has shown me some really good routes I would never have considered. It’s also really handy if there’s been an accident or roadwork up ahead that you can detour to avoid. FWIW Waze did get bought out by Googel but maintained its live user input so is a lot more accurate.
MarcG
Thinking about the increasingly frequent phenomenon of making conversation with someone who has an interest in a subject and you want to hear what they have to say about it… and they suggest that you just look it up on the internet. A literally dehumanizing enterprise. (Or maybe people are just fucking exhausted).
On the other side of the map-apps-are-useful ledger, I have to fight with them to not send me over the tracks in St-Henri because as far as I can tell they don’t consider the train schedules and I could end up rotting there for 20 minutes, and the other day there was a backup on the 20 and it directed a bunch of us to an offramp, only to send us right back on again after properly clogging up the local overpass, presumably in order to shave a few seconds off the total trip time.
Kate
No app completely compensates for knowledge of the situation on the ground.
Joey
@Kate no, but these algorithms are supposed to learn, right? Like you’d expect that after the Nth driver did not complete the route because the alley is closed at one end, the algorithm would adjust and conclude that the route is never going to work. Same for railway crossings – a true learning machine should be able to anticipate the likelihood that a train is coming. I wish these apps would allow you to designate a preferred route for regular trips and only suggest alternatives if the ETA is more than, say, 5% shorter.
MarcG
Not only do they not learn on their own but it can be frustratingly difficult to get changes made manually. When visiting Parc national du Lac-Témiscouata a few years ago, Google maps told me that the drive to a trailhead would be 20 minutes or so – it turns out the map had detected a bushwacking trail which wasn’t actually a road and it ended up taking way, way longer, especially because I trusted the directions and wasted a bunch of time circling around trying to find it. I told the park staff and they said they’re aware of the problem and have repeatedly asked Google to fix it. I just looked now and they’ve fixed *that* problem, but it now directs you down a different non-car-friendly-path which seems to be some sort of logging road. I wonder if the person I spoke to at the park has any hair left.
SMD
@MarcG I was there this summer and ran into the same issue. They now have a sign saying “Don’t trust Google Maps, this is not an entrance” at the trailhead.
Ian
Waze updates baased on user inputs, Google maps doesn’t. Given the random closures brought on by construction sites in this city, I find Google maps pretty much useless a lot of the time.
vasi
When heading to the airport, I’ve learned to ask for “Departures” rather than things like “Air Canada” or “YUL”. Somehow that always seems to send me to the right place, rather than some ridiculous route
CE
Whatever Uber drivers use for their GPS often sends them up alleys for some reason. Do the drivers have to follow the routes exactly as their GPS tells them? I can imagine them risking being accused of taking a passenger for a ride if they don’t.
I remember hearing a story on CBC radio about how a large portion of the human brain is dedicated to navigation. Relying on GPS to navigate is causing us to use much less of that brain capacity and it can start to atrophy. I’ve heard that taxi drivers and others who have to navigate space a lot have a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s. I stopped using GPS when driving after I realized that I had no idea how to get Joilette after driving there about eight times for work. Now I use a map and figure out my routes in advance and put it on a sticky note on the dashboard. Since I’ve put the map in my head already, I find I don’t even really need it. The strange thing is that despite GPS navigation only being mainstream for maybe a decade in a half, people think it’s completely insane that I travel without it. I’ve had people actually get mad at me about it and challenge me on my ability to get somewhere. It’s weird. I also find people now have a very low tolerance for getting lost, if I miss an exit or am not 100% sure about where I am or where I need to turn off, it seems to cause some people a lot of anxiety. I know one person who lives in Laval and she uses her GPS to get to the grocery store that she goes to a couple times a week. She said that she doesn’t know how to get there without it.
MarcG
Exactly. Now do that with every single problem that life throws at us and we’re in for a good time. Whatever part of our brains Covid doesn’t eat AI is primed to finish off.
Ian
That’s one way to look at it, but another is that having alternate routes proposed actually forces you to consider the validity between routes based on your won knowledge – so to be more actively engaged in your assisted direction-finding, and be more adaptable. For instance, I can get up past the decarie interchange and on my way top the west island in a couple of specific ways that most people don’t even consider, which I know because I car pool as a driver.
That’s jsut everyday stuff. When I’m going somewhere I’ve never been before, jsut looking at a paper map doesn’t tell me much except where the official roads are.
In any case, assisted maps aren’t the same as using chatgpt (lol) and hey, lots of people used to think maps were for chumps (like my grandpa who constantly got lost)
MarcG
Using assistive tech mindfully buffers against its lobe-melting capacity but that’s not how the majority are engaging with it. (In case it’s not obvious, I’m not saying I’m immune to this, see my experience at Témiscouata above). Another non-map anecdote: My wife teaches a language and many people assume that you can put words into Google translate or ChatGPT and copy/paste whatever it barfs out, then when corrected have a very hard time accepting that it isn’t that easy.
CE
I’m not against the tech, I use Google Maps all the time and think it’s a pretty good product (especially Street View). I use it to map out routes and it can figure out some good ones that I hadn’t considered before (I live on a street that is specifically designed to be difficult to access and just this week discovered a much more convenient route to access it from a taxi’s GPS). What I don’t want to do is have to blindly rely on it for all my navigation. I don’t think it’s healthy and it really cripples you if the tech is not available for some reason.
One other thing that we’ve lost because of this technology is asking people on the street for directions. It very rarely happens anymore and is almost always older people. When asking an actual resident, you’re possibly going to get a much more interesting and human response than what Google’s algorithm can provide. It was also a way to interact with locals while in a new place. I know it’s not a big deal but feels like one of a thousand cuts to human interaction.
@MarcG, I’ve had that same issue around ChatGPT, some people just can’t accept that it might have given them incorrect information. There are people who seem to think it’s some kind of all-knowing oracle.
Joey
Waze is very useful for routes you take often because it updates traffic data in real-time (given that so many drivers use it, the data is pretty good). Sure, I know the four basic ways to get to the airport from my house and I have my preferred route (which isn’t always the quickest – routing apps IMO overemphasize ‘shortest arrival’ at the expense of ‘most pleasant ride,’ ‘fewest annoying/dangerous stretches’ and ‘shortest distance’), but only Waza knows which route is going to be ideal at this particular moment.
@Ian at one point the city made a big deal of sharing construction data so that routing apps could incorporate closure and detour info but I suspect that fell apart (hard to believe even the city knows what’s going on anymore).
@CE I was taking an uber from the Bell Centre to Mile End last summer around 10:30PM. Uber had the driver go up MacTavish to Pine and then up Parc. Except it didn’t know that the McTavish/Pine intersection was closed due to an Alouettes game. The driver and I came up with a game plan (head west and go over Remembrance/Camillien-Houde), but when he started in that direction the Uber routing kicked in and decided he should go down Peel and take Sherbrooke east to Parc – according to Waze, that would’ve been about 15 minutes longer than going over the mountain, probably even longer since lots of traffic was being dumped into downtown due to the closure. The driver agreed to stick with our plan, which wound up being fairly quick, but explained that he might get dinged by Uber for abandoning the route. I was just grateful that the guy knew what I meant by ‘go over the mountain’ and didn’t refuse…
JP
Just came across this story and while it’s not about Montreal, it seems pertinent to this discussion thread.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/17/nyregion/peace-bridge-immigration.html
“Part of the reason for drivers’ errors seems to be their reliance on mapping apps, which have occasionally sent unaware motorists across the bridge. It was a phenomenon that The Times experienced last year, when a request for directions to a restaurant in Buffalo resulted in a trip across the international border. The Times’s journalists were told by a Canadian border agent that these inadvertent crossings happen “at least 20 times a day.”
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