Ted Rutland has a terse and well‑supported piece in CultMTL laying out how much the city is overfunding the police.
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Kate
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Kate
Two youths suspected in recent violent street robberies were arrested in St‑Calixte. Can I say that I was glad to read they were 18 and 19 years old and thus will be tried as adults?
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Kate
A fairly large student demonstration was held Friday afternoon against COP15, with a lot of police keeping an eye on it. Protesters feel that these meetings are all talk, in which targets are agreed on then never met. It’s difficult to argue with that when it’s true.
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Kate
Montreal’s Moroccans have been lit up with the progress of their national team at the World Cup. Having defeated Spain on penalties Tuesday, the Morocco team reached the quarter‑finals and will face Portugal on Saturday morning. As someone points out in the item, Morocco is now supported not only as the only African country but the only piece of the Islamic world still in the contest.
Saturday afternoon we see the revival of a centuries‑old rivalry as England faces France.
Incidentally, Canada shouldn’t feel too bad about its defeat by Croatia. That team defeated Brazil on Friday – also on penalties, but even so. Not a team that first comes to mind when you think soccer, Croatia is one of the smallest countries to reach a World Cup final, which it did against France in 2018.
I’m hoping for just a little honking, whoever wins Saturday’s matches.
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Kate
Police have reopened a 26‑year‑old cold case: in 1996, a young woman called Patricia Ferguson vanished in Pointe‑aux‑Trembles. It’s mentioned here that there have been new developments in the case, but nothing about what they are.
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Kate
Things to do on the weekend from CultMTL, CityCrunch, more to come.
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Kate
Quebec has adopted its law making the oath to the King optional.
The premier also blew off the tradition of an end‑of‑session press conference as the National Assembly rises for the Christmas break.
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Kate
Radio-Canada looked into the hard lives of Inuit women living on Montreal’s streets.
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Kate
The city is considering changing some downtown zoning to make it possible to convert some office buildings to residential use, since the trend for remote or hybrid work is growing rather than fading away.
Cadichon
There’s some confusion in that article. Residential use is already authorized all over downtown, so zoning is not an issue there. But I guess outside of downtown, some smaller office buildings are zoned for commercial use only.
shawn
I was hoping to read something like this. Makes so much sense. Can’t wait to see which buildings may convert.
DeWolf
Here’s an example of what Cadichon means. This is zone 0004 which encompasses the area around Central Station and the Bell Centre:
https://www1.ville.montreal.qc.ca/CartesInteractives/ville-marie/doc/VM_4.pdf
It’s zone for mixed-use, including commercial/industrial on any floor, so basically it’s an area where you can build whatever you want. The area near the train station is almost 100% offices, but the area near the Bell Centre is now mostly residential.
Basically, there’s nothing stopping a developer from converting office buildings into residential, so I’m not sure what else the city is planning to do. Maybe they’ll streamline the permitting process?
DeWolf
1425 René-Lévesque (the old brick building at the corner of Bishop) is currently going through the approvals process to be converted from office to residential:
https://forum.agoramtl.com/t/1425-rene-levesque-ouest-agrandissement-et-conversion-etages/4107
400 René-Lévesque was converted from office to apartments in 2019:
https://mtlurb.com/topic/11148-encore-residences-400-r-l-17-etages-2019/
I’m not aware of any other recent conversions in the downtown area, but I’m sure they’re coming. The only part of downtown that is completely dominated by offices is a narrow corridor running from Place Bonaventure up to Sherbrooke, which is exactly the route of the REM, so I’m sure there are quite a few lower-grade office buildings ripe for the picking.
shawn
Right, 400 René-Lévesque was the one I remember.
Cadichon
1420 Sherbrooke was also converted 10 years ago.
DeWolf
I had no idea that was a conversion! The building looks so different now I just assumed it was a new build.
A couple more projects currently underway include the conversion of the old Point Zero HQ into a 26-storey apartment building:
https://forum.agoramtl.com/t/980-saint-antoine-ouest-26-etages/249
There’s also 1900 Sherbrooke West:
https://forum.agoramtl.com/t/gramercy-residences-9-10-etages/1064
Dominic
The parking lot on top of Gare Centrale would be perfect for a high rise
DeWolf
The station’s owner has a proposal to build three towers with 1,800 housing units on top of the station’s parking garage, but there hasn’t been any word about it since 2019:
https://forum.agoramtl.com/t/895-de-la-gauchetiere-gare-centrale-etages/612
https://renx.ca/cominar-plans-major-residential-developmentsThis article from 2021 suggests it’s still in the works:
https://storeys.com/cominar-canderel-billion-dollar-purchase-montreal-bull-market/
DeWolf
@Dominic there’s a proposal to put three towers there. 1,800 housing units.
https://forum.agoramtl.com/t/895-de-la-gauchetiere-gare-centrale-etages/612
It’s been in gestation for a few years, not sure if it’s still moving forward…
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Kate
CF Montreal is losing Ismaël Koné to Watford FC in England, and coach Wilfried Nancy to the Ohio team Columbus Crew.
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Kate
CBC’s Verity Stevenson talked to several people trying to preserve urban wildlife and their hopes for government help.
Radio-Canada’s Valérie Boisclair also looks at the story and about how the city plans to devote more space to preserving animal and insect species.
The Flickr Montreal faune/wildlife gives a sense of the many species around us in the Montreal area – for now.
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Kate
The Journal de Montréal is going to end its Sunday paper edition – which seems an odd choice, since isn’t it usually Sundays that people read the paper over a leisurely breakfast or brunch?
Kevin
Catholaïcité!
Daisy
Le Devoir doesn’t have a Sunday edition either.
Ephraim
There never was a Sunday paper growing up. The big paper was always Saturday, large enough for 2 days of reading. But I guess I have another question… people still get the paper edition? I haven’t held a newspaper in my hands in at least a decade or more
Josh
I always wondered how it developed that the big US broadsheets put out their big editions of the week on Sundays, while in Canada the big newspaper day was Saturday. Maybe the idea was that most of the stuff in the Saturday edition (sections like Auto, Home, Travel or the big Op-Ed takeout most shops ran) had longer shelf lives and people could put them off until Sunday if they chose?
But yeah, the NYT, Boston Globe, LA Times etc all put out their biggest editions on Sundays while (when they all had paper editions), the Gazette, La Presse, the Toronto Star, the Globe etc. all went big on Saturdays. Never understood how that came to be.
Daniel
Josh, I’ve wondered the same thing. I know that in Spain and Argentina for example the big day with the magazine and special sections is/was Sunday. I believe it’s the same in the UK. The answer is ad money, of course. I’m not sure how, but it’s all going to go back to that.
I’m not as cynical as some when it comes to the news operation bending to the will of advertisers, but certainly when it comes to something as elemental and operational as when to put out the big edition, it was going to be all about ads.
U.S. newspapers did try to have it both ways by selling a “Sunday” edition on Saturday. (All the preprint special sections and coupons with a little fresh news that was then swapped out for the *actual* Sunday edition. So little happened or made the news on Saturdays that this wasn’t a huge job.) It was called the bulldog edition, supposedly because it was “aggressively” out ahead.
If you subscribed at home, you got a thin Saturday paper delivered. But if you were at the shop and picked up a single copy, you were far more likely to grab the bulldog. The Saturday paper just looked sad next to it. This helped the Sunday paper to boost its circulation numbers, since it was essentially on sale for two days. (And, yes, bigger circulation numbers = more ad money.)
I worked on this stuff for quite a while but typing it out now all seems so quaint in the age of instant news!
Kate
As Ephraim says, time was there was no paper here on Sundays. Doing research for the history stuff on my blog calendar, I got used to seeing zero Sunday editions from the Gazette and La Presse archives. I think it was a combination of the dominance of the Catholic church in Quebec and the influence of the “blue laws” in other parts of Canada that held off the Sunday editions until the 1980s.
DeWolf
@Ephraim, I get the paper version of Le Devoir every Saturday because it was offered for $2 extra per month when I got a digital subscription. It seemed like a good deal. And just like reading a real book, there’s something pleasurable in taking time to read an actual newspaper on the weekend. I spent enough time staring at screens as it is…
Ephraim
@DeWolf – And then getting the black oily ink marks off of everything 🙂
mare
I miss real printed newspapers. I used to read the whole paper, front to back, every day (except Sunday because Dutch newspapers only publish 6 days per week) even articles in the business and sport section sometimes. Now I probably read more newspaper articles, but from many different newspapers. I rarely go to the front page of the 3 newspapers I subscribe to, but get there via links on Twitter/Mastodon, in their daily emails, or from here and some other websites. So I read much more selectively, and more content I agree with.
CE
Years ago, I boarded in the house of an old man whose kids had long ago moved out so he had extra rooms that he let out to students at an incredibly low price. It was a very neighbourly house and we received the provincial and city newspaper every day. A neighbour came over every morning with the Globe and Mail and we’d all sit around reading the papers. Other people would drop in throughout the morning and read them too. By the end of the day, they were all marked up and coffee stained and cut up. If my landlord would go away, I’d put them all together for him and he’d read through all of them when he got back to get caught up on what happened.
I too miss the papers but I find that the print versions are now of such low quality that it’s not worth subscribing anymore.
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Kate
A 16-year-old boy was shot with an air gun Thursday afternoon in Anjou. Both these reports mention it happened near a school, but that the school itself was not involved in the incident.
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Kate
It’s not the first time this has been presaged, but fifteen community organizations in Park Extension are going to lose the spaces they’ve had for years as the CSSDM prepares to empty the William Hingston building for repairs and renovations that may take years. These organizations look after the many new arrivals that often land in Park Ex because – at least till recently – it has been affordable.
The borough mayor is promising to find some kind of space for the organizations, but not in the short term.
We have not learned to think ahead about this kind of thing at all.
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Kate
A woman pedestrian hit by a car in Park Ex on Wednesday has died.
Four women pedestrians have died on Montreal streets over the last month. Three of them were in their 80s.
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