The STM has extended its metro loitering ban for another year.
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Kate
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Kate
This commentary and response grabbed my attention so that I’ve been thinking about it since the weekend, so I’m linking it here. J‑F Lisée had a column in Le Devoir on Saturday, but I only noticed it when it was dissected by Learry Gagné in a thread on Bluesky: “La chronique du Devoir de JF Lisée sur les musulmans est d’une extraordinaire malhonnêteté intellectuelle…”
Worth a read.
Toula Drimonis also lit into Lisée, but on Instagram.
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Kate
Access to the airport is partly closed while the multi‑level parking structure is demolished.
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Kate
The city made a law that owners of vacant buildings had to register them with the city, but CBC finds it’s not being enforced or obeyed.
Ian
I found it interesting that there was no link to the registry, so I looked it up & found out why:
It is not available to the public.
“The new registry of vacant buildings in Montréal will be available soon. In the meantime, certain boroughs continue to post their respective lists prepared prior to the coming into force of mandatory vacant building registration, on January 1, 2026.”
You can pay, borough by borough, but these lists are not available for every borough and there is no guarantee of how complete they are.
https://montreal.ca/en/how-to/get-list-vacant-buildings-borough
Joey
So the city already has lists of vacant buildings, certainly comprehensive enough to know that the number of buildings on the registry is too low. What is the point of the registry, then? From CBC:
“Once the list is more complete, Braun said the city can talk to owners about why the building is vacant. In the midst of a housing crisis, she says the city wants to increase the housing supply and discourage speculation.”
But also:
“Strict enforcement is needed, but he cautions that the city needs to think outside the box about what else it can do to encourage owners to repair or repurpose their buildings more quickly.
“‘Fines will not revitalize a building,’ he [Dinu Bumbaru[ said. ‘It might help sort of wake up the owner, but sometimes we’ve seen owners who couldn’t care less. For them, $10,000 is not much.'”
I wonder what productive activity the city could do with the time, money, energy and goodwill spent on a needless registry that won’t lead to any measurable change. A cynic might posit that the city came up with this registry scheme to indefinitely delay even having to pretend that they’re thinking about maybe one day doing something about vacant buildings.
Jonathan
I thinks it’s a bit of an unfair critique. The registry has only been in effect since Jan 1 2026. That means it has been 4 months since buildings have to be registered. I think we should be looking at the record after the first year of implementation, at the earliest. Also, the form to register the building is available here: https://montreal.ca/en/register-vacant-building
It doesn’t seem that the objective of the bylaw is to have the public access a list of vacant buildings, but I would expect eventually (again, maybe after the first year of implementation), it would be available on the open data portal of the city. Right now only the Ville Marie borough has that data available, and for 2022. I can see they also have a database from 2025 where you can find vacant commercial building across all boroughs.
The article mentions the bit about the law requiring maintenance of a building. But it’s a bit confusing because it doesn’t strictly have to do with vacant buildings, but all buildings, even though it was part of the same bylaw that was voted on at the end of 2023.
Additionally, it looks like the law was codified in January 2026. All aspects of the law including on the maintenance of buildings. While it doesn’t mean that they can’t enforce a law beforehand, usually it is much easier to enforce once it’s been codified because it becomes officially part of the legal ‘guidebook’, easily accessible to enforcement officers and residents (i.e. can’t argue you didn’t know about it).
All to say that I would take a look from Jan 2027 and see where the city is at.
Joey
@Jonathan I can imagine two primary benefits a registry could provide:
1. Accurate information about how many and which buildings are vacant, so the city can act (agreed that this should be public info but will hardly be helpful to your typical citizen… developers on the other hand…) to ensure the buildings are brought up to code and are actually used
2. Data that can be used to demonstrate that we need better laws/regulations about how vacant buildings are treated – additional taxes, forced sales, etc.
On the first point, the city already has lists of vacant buildings, so it’s unlikely the registry will provide substantially better information (especially given that vacant building owners aren’t even registering their buildings). So maybe we can just live with the information we have?
On the second, it’s clear the city has no idea what to do about the problem of vacant buildings – or rather lacks the courage to act (Ian can tell you about Richard Ryan’s posturing on this issue in Mile-End).
So the registry will probably not move the needle but in the meantime (i.e., several years of designing and deploying this thing) the city has the perfect excuse to continue to kick this can down the road.
Put it another way, assuming things improve on the registry front, what should we expect the city to do about vacant buildings?
Kate
Keeping a building empty should cost the owner a large recurring fee, because it costs the city money to safeguard empty building sites, keeping them from being squatted and possibly set on fire by accident.
I would love to see a law that after five years’ vacancy, the building would be forfeit to public ownership, but our laws treat property ownership too tenderly.
SMD
Amen, Kate!
mare
@Kate Five years?! You’re too kind for this world. In the Netherlands commercial and residential buildings could be legally squatted after 1 year of left empty/unused. So companies hired people to temporarily live in work buildings and houses to prevent this. I used to have an artist studio this way. Was supposed to be renovated after 6 months but instead I stayed in it for 4 years and then it was demolished and replaced by housing. I only paid $30 per month for hydro.
The current Leegstandswet (vacancy law) is even better, it requires companies to take their empty buildings and houses and put them onto the market, otherwise they have to pay huge fines, backed up by a lien on the property so they’ll never be able to sell it without paying the fine first.
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Kate
Montreal’s first Design Week opens Tuesday with a string of open houses and other arty events. The studio where Montreal City Weblog is created will not be participating this year, but you never know.
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Kate
The victim and the only suspect have been named in the fatal stabbing at the Tam‑Tams on Sunday. According to TVA, both men have police records.
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Kate
86% of the STM’s maintenance staff have voted in favour of the proposed collective agreement, ending a two‑year negotiation.
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Kate
Saad Tekiout, who owns a landscaping business, has taken to repairing potholes himself. But the city says it doesn’t want people doing this work voluntarily.
Also, note this: “Dans une déclaration écrite transmise à Radio-Canada, le cabinet de la mairesse affirme que « c’est décourageant pour tous les Montréalais de constater l’état dans lequel nos rues ont été laissées par l’ancienne administration.» Soraya, sweetie, we’re six months into your term. You can’t blame Valérie any more. You made promises about the state of the roads (and their cleanliness too) and now you’re finding out it’s not so easy to deliver. Blaming Projet now is a weak, weak move.
Ian
Valerie would have blamed Denis.
It’s a normal and reasonable thing to expect a one year transition…
Unless we are pretending that the problems with the roads started after the election.To be real the roads are utter shit right now but letting PM off the hook is ridiculous.
Next spring, yeah, knives out.
Kate
I don’t remember Mayor Plante blaming the previous administration – at least, not in that way. There was a sense that they knew they were undertaking road repairs that had been neglected for a long time – other things, too, like the complex refit of city hall – but not with a particular taunt towards the Coderre era. Denis’s mistakes (like the entanglement with Formula E) didn’t need extra emphasis from Projet.
Ian
That’s very selective memory. PM definitely excused the proliferation of traffic cones and construction sites on the previosu administrations, but they totally blamed road surfacing on them. too. PM seemed to be perpetually incapable of taking responsibliity for any infrastructure problems, and absolutely blamed everythign either on previous administrations, Provincial funding, or a lack of vision on the part of the population – especially blaming all vehicular traffic on private ownership and recalcitrant businesss owners. It was a such a prediatble pattern that most people started ignoring it even in the media.
Besides, how many years were PM in power, again? How are these urban planning geniuses leaving a legacy of roads that turn into a moonscape in a mere 6 months?
bob
Plante changed nothing about the corruption that is this city’s lifeblood. And neither will Ferrada. Tune in this time in 2031 for the same observations.
Joey
I don’t disagree with your point, Kate, but it’s revealing that we blame the (current/previous) mayor for the city’s inability to build roads that have some semblance of durability to them. Whether our mayor were a anarcho-syndicalist or an ethno-nationalist white supremacist, they should be able to instruct the city’s public works department to demand better from its workers and contractors. And yet…
DeWolf
People think potholes are the problem but they appear because roads are crumbling from the bottom up. If the foundation is broken, you’ll be getting new potholes every year.
I don’t think we can blame Soraya for this year’s catastrophic pothole season any more than we can blame Plante. The real blame is on successive municipal administrations that underinvested in infrastructure. In many boroughs, nearly half of all streets are in bad condition. That took decades to happen.
Is corruption and poor quality work the issue? Sure, but not in every case, because there are plenty of examples of streets that have been repaired in recent years that are holding up well.
The only way to fix things is a full dig-out. Which is obviously very expensive and disruptive. PM was doing that more than the two previous administrations but it wasn’t nearly enough — and yet even then, everyone had a meltdown because of all the orange cones. I’m not sure exactly how Soraya is going to fix the streets when she cut the budget for road repairs. If we don’t see massive amounts of roadwork in the next two years, the problem will only get worse.
Incidentally, the idea that PM managed to hold things together for eight years only to have it all fall apart within six months of them leaving power required some pretty nefarious planning on their part. Pure evil! One might even say it’s witchcraft.
Kate
Exactly. SMF promised to remove orange cones from the cityscape, but she can’t properly repair deeply fissured and fractured roads without major digging and cone placement.
Ian
Ah so nobody is to blame then, it’s just a legacy of failure that can’t attributed to anyone in particular and nobody has been able to do anything about it.
Glad we got that sorted out.
Kate says “Soraya, sweetie, we’re six months into your term. You can’t blame Valérie any more.” OK, fine.
If 6 months is enough to assume that everything is Soraya’s fault now, 8 years surely should have been enough to move the needle.You can’t simultaneously blame the 6 month noob and absolve the 8 year legacy on the same terms for the same reasons.
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Kate
24Hrs tells about the train dépoussiéreur that cleans the metro tracks after closing time: a single vehicle dating from 1967 that cannot be replaced.
Chris
What do you mean cannot be replaced? It’s a glorified vacuum cleaner, hardly beyond our engineering abilities. Of course we are too broke/cheap to do so, but…
Kevin
Earlier this month was provincial stage day, and one of my kids got to go to the STM garage and spend the day checking out this machine and many others.
The mechanics have the tools, equipment and the skills to build an entire train from scratch. They could certainly build another train-sized vacuum cleaner if they had the time and money to do so.
Oh, and it’s not mentioned in that piece, but it’s a three-car train. The first is the vacuum, the two trailers are the garbage containers.
Joey
Interesting piece. The guy in charge explains that, obviously, the cleaner train can be replaced – in fact the new ones can clean more than just the tracks – but the cost would be in the tens of millions of dollars, so the STM prefers to tinker and have his team keep it running. To Kevin’s point, they have a ton of expertise – having replaced the engine from manual to automatic, etc., over the years.
“A glorified vacuum cleaner” seems like a stretch but what do I know.
CE
Anyone who has ever seen the condition of the tracks on American subway systems, NYC in particular, knows how good of a job this machine is doing.
Joey
Also too, the article makes clear that the issue isn’t litter, it’s filthy dust from tires, breaks, the engine, etc., that if not vacuumed can be pose a health risk to transit users. While it does pick up small items as well, that’s not the intention of twice-weekly cleaning that takes nearly all night.
DeWolf
Question since it’s related: I live right above the metro and every night around 1am and again around 5am (if I happen to by lying in bed awake at either of those times) there is a fait but noticeable rumble as some vehicle passes down the tracks. It’s the only time you’d ever guess the metro line is underneath because normally there’s absolutely no vibrations or sound.
Anyone know what it could be? I was thinking it was this vacuum train but it happens more often than twice a week.
Kate
Might be this. I don’t think this is the vehicle from the 24Hrs story, but it’s also a cleaning vehicle. Back in 2011 I won a drawing for a small group of people to visit the metro after closing, and I brought Ben Soo with me, who took that photo at Snowdon station, where we stopped to have wine and snacks.
We rode around the system on a diesel-powered trailer thing – they have to use some diesel vehicles at night because they need to turn off the current, and they’re very intense about triple‑checking that the juice is off before they do any work on or near the rails. I seem to recall that yellow thing is also a diesel vehicle.
CE
In the video the STM worker mentions that there are diesel vehicles that use the tracks after hours.
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Kate
I was just listening to CBC radio news, where they reported Mark Carney’s announcement of Canada’s first sovereign wealth fund in which he will make it “easy for you to invest in the fund.”
Isn’t this basically the return of Canada Savings Bonds?
bob
It’s an entirely different animal. CSBs were a way for Canadian residents to provide the government with more income, and were a safe investment with a low return. They were also not transferable, so there was no secondary market for them as there is for typical bonds. They were kind of like voluntary tax that the government paid you back for.
This new thing seems more like a slush fund for private companies (the usual suspects) doing quasi-public projects, and it is not clear how it will provide revenue to the government. It seems also like a way to bypass direct government oversight over how this $25 billion (and eventually more) will be used and accounted for, since it will be managed “at arms length” (look at the management of the Canada Pension Plan and its “active” investment strategy to see how that is likely to go – https://archive.ph/ov2VH ). It is also unclear what the “retail investment product” will be, whether that will be transferable, or what the institutional products will be. It seems like it is modelled on an investment fund rather than, say, a development bank, and I think that $25 billion provided to the Business Development Bank of Canada would benefit the economy and “regular” Canadians more than this money siphon for 1%ers.
Blork
Given the crazy yo-yoing and probable imminent crash of the index funds, having a stable bond investment that also helps the economy (if that is indeed what this is) sounds mighty appealing. My first question is will these be available before the AI bubble bursts and guts everyone’s retirement savings?
bob
It is not a bond offering. It is almost the polar opposite of a bond offering. It is a pool of cash to be “invested” in heavy construction and engineering, big agriculture, mining, and such, via cronies of the Liberal government. Eventually, you will be able to buy shares of it by some government-facilitated mechanism whose details have not been sketched out yet. The model is basically that of a private equity firm, but theoretically directed at large projects of supposed national importance.
Kate
Thanks for the explanations, bob.
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Kate
Alexandre Boulerice has made it official that he’ll move to provincial politics with Quebec solidaire. He means to stay on as an independent MP till the Quebec election, expected on October 5.
bob
Avi Lewis says he won’t run there, so who’s it likely to be?
Kate
Does anyone think the NDP can win there again without Boulerice?
CE
No.
Tim S.
If I want to be an NDP optimist, a vote split between the Liberals and BQ might mean you only need 35%ish to win. A coin flip similar to the Verdun byelection.
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Kate
The city has abolished its periodic pickups of hazardous garbage as “too expensive”; borough mayors fear that people will simply chuck these things out in the regular garbage, or dump them on the street.
MarcG
As far as I know this service wasn’t offered in Verdun and I’ve always dragged my ass (by Communauto) to the Eco-centre. Sometimes you end up sitting in a huge lineup behind a bunch of massive dump trucks – they’ve added an estimated wait time to the website. I currently have a bunch of miscellaneous toxic junk in the garage waiting to go. I’m reminded of how the company they hired to manage one of the Eco-centres was found to be just dumping everything in the woods.
su
So now it will be up to individuals to dump things in places like La Falaise and the sewer system
dhomas
I go to the eco-centre from time to time (I just went this weekend to dump a TV that I could not repair). But I have a car. It’s really far if you don’t have a car. For someone in Tétraultville (not far from me), like the lady in the article, the closest eco-centre is in RDP! This will make people who want to do the right thing have no choice but to do the wrong thing.
I saw a range next to the garbage can in the park close to my house. I expect to see more of this kind of thing soon.
Kate
I don’t think Villeray has had a hazardous pickup since I’ve lived here either.
I’ve hauled things in a big Ikea bag on the 193 bus to the Eco‑centre in Frédéric‑Back park, but it’s not exactly a pleasure jaunt. I’m reminded I need to do this soon with a busted monitor and some other junk.
mare
If you don’t have giant objects, you could do this with a Bixi and a Bixi trailer. Or use your own bike and a Bixi trailer.
If you arrive by bike —at least in the Rosemont eco-centre— you don’t have to wait in line. I must admit that it feels rather nice to see the long line of waiting cars and just cycle past them. I’m sure there’s a German word for it.Chris
schadenfreude. or you mean even more specific?
Ian
Selbstgefälligkeit haha
Mozai
I remember a toxic-waste pickup for household items that use to happen twice a year in the plaza outside Mont-Royal metro station, but I couldn’t find info about when exactly it happens — I’d have to come across is by accident, then rush home and return to drop off paint cans and dead batteries. I haven’t been lucky enough to come across it again since Covid started, but most of my toxic waste is battery cells and pharmacies have drop-off bins for that now.
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Kate
A man was stabbed Sunday afternoon at the Tam‑Tams, and there’s been one arrest.
Why does CBC describe the location as “Avenue du Parc and Chemin de la Côte-des-Neiges in the Ville-Marie borough”? Sometimes it feels like the people writing our news are talking about another planet.
Monday morning: the victim has died.
Nicholas
Essentially all of Mount Royal Park (not counting the cemeteries, mostly) is technically in Ville Marie borough, with the northeast corner at Park and Mount Royal Aves. So half of the intersection of Cote-Ste-Catherine and Park is in VM, half is in the Plateau. So they did mess up the street name, but the borough is technically correct, even if literally zero people would ever call that anything but the Plateau (or Mile End), and if told it wasn’t the Plateau would guess it’s Outremont.
Joey
Yes, but the area where the Tam Tams are is completely Parc Ave.
Nicholas
Joey, I assume you mean completely west of Park Ave. Which would make it Ville-Marie. (I remember back in the day it was much bigger and stretched into Jeanne Mance Park, but last I went by it was all on the mountain side of Park Ave.
Blork
They must have updated the article because now it says “Parc Avenue and Côte-Sainte-Catherine Road.” (It says that’s where the police were called to.)
Kate
Freelance proofreading by Montreal City Weblog.
Joey
I actually meant to write “completely along Parc Ave.”… anyway, the question isn’t which borough the stabbing occurred in, it’s that it occurred along Parc Ave, not along “Avenue du Parc and Chemin de la Côte-Ste-Catherine,” which is not an actual place.
Blork
Joey, Ave. du Parc and Chemin de la Côte-Ste-Catherine is an actual place: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ESKHU2CiDwqGjzDW6
Joey
@Blork, yes it’s an intersection, but not a street (as the original article implied). Moreover, that place is not where the Tam Tams are. Now the article states, “On Sunday, police were called to a section of the park that is near the intersection of Parc and Duluth avenue,” which reads less like someone from ‘another planet’ wrote it, as Kate properly put it…
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Kate
Minimum wage in Quebec rises to $16.60 an hour this Friday – May Day. Does anyone have info about actions or marches that day?
DavidH
The big unions march is on Saturday May 2nd. I’m sure other groups have more lively things planned for May day itself.
anton
Doesn’t seem like a lot, given the exchange rate. In Germany it’s 14 Euro (22 CAD), even though overall I’d say people are poorer and costs are kind of lower.
R T
Germany’s minimum wage is pretty high, and Germany has a more productive economy than Quebec. The minimum wage in Germany is the highest in the EU by purchasing power and around 60% of median hourly earnings (9th in EU when coneverted to monthly earnings), while Quebec’s median wage is roughly 50% the median. Most EU countries with a minimum wage (5 don’t have one) fall into the ~50-60% range.
How is it that Germany’s minimum wage has 37% more purchasing power than Québec’s when it’s only 10pp higher compared to their respective medians? Because German workers are about 34% more productive per hour worked. Quebecers close what would be a large gap in living standards by working about 20% more hours per year.
Ian
From my union:
MAY 1st at 3 p.m., leaving from Dawson, and another one at 6 p.m., leaving from Square-Victoria.
MAY 2nd: Large demo for International Workers’ Day: This intersyndical protest will depart from the Georges-Étienne-Cartier Statue in the Plateau at 1 pm.
SMD
Square Victoria will be hosting a fair of sorts starting at 4pm on May Day, with different groups hosting information stands and a free bike tune-up station. Then the speeches and march get going around 6pm.
Ian
@R T If Germans are 34% more productive, they are experiencing 34% more wage theft.
Productivity has gone up decade over decade way faster than wage growth.When I worked corporate we had a target of 20% growth every year. After hitting it for 5 years straight I asked my manager if this meant we would see our wages doubled. He gave me a very dirty look.
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Kate
Quebec politics was front and centre this week: Côté mixes the political colours and Godin implies that anglophones are pulling Charles Milliard’s strings. Meantime, PSPP is hampered by a certain weight and Christine Fréchette juggles her cabinet while Super Minister Drainville gets on with the job.Canada’s new ambassador to the U.S. joins a class with Michael Rousseau and Mary Simon.
Playoff season is always a good hook so Ygreck gives us Fréchette’s starting lineup. Côté’s fan can’t see a problem (and this is from a Quebec City cartoonist!).
Of course, Trump never goes away. Godin shows him chomping down on a Mexican-Canadian sandwich, Côté finds him lost in a game of snakes and ladders and Ygreck sees him parting the Red Sea.
Sometimes a cartoonist will illustrate news I don’t see anywhere else. Godin notes Quebec’s abandonment of a system in place since 1970 for testing water safety at several beaches. (Story here on Radio‑Canada.)
And once again, Côté with good social observation, and a possible upside to the end of home postal delivery (although I’ve never seen one of those cartoon mailboxes in real life).
Daisy
That’s the kind of mailbox I grew up with, living on an acreage in the countryside. The mailboxes were at the side of the road and the mail was delivered by a right hand drive jeep.
Ian
Same. One thing I wanted to point out though is that when you have mail, the postie moves the flag to the upright position so you know to check the mailbox, then you put it back to the horizontal position. It is left horizontal when there is no mail. 45 degrees isn’t a thing.
Daisy
That is correct. For some reason ours didn’t have a flag though; instead the whole mailbox was rotated to show there was mail.
Daisy
Also, you could lift the flag / rotate the mailbox yourself, in order to indicate you had left outgoing mail in the mailbox.
CE
I had one of those mailboxes when I was a kid when I lived in the middle of nowhere. People could be quite creative with their boxes, I remember the most popular novelty boxes were plastic ones shaped like a corn on the cob. My favourites though were homemade boxes made to look like little replicas of the owners’ house.
Being able to put a letter in the box to mail it was a cool feature.
CE 16:03 on 2026-04-28 Permalink
I wish they would ban smoking on the platforms and pissing in the entrances.