Bike-sharing continues to rise in popularity in Quebec, as Bixi expands into additional towns. Quebec City also has its own system, àvélo.
In general, cycling has been on the rise, a Vélo‑Québec report showing that growing numbers of Quebec residents use a bike for serious commuting and travel, and not just for kicks.
CBC looks into a group that matches people up, not for romance or sex, but for cohousing. Idealistically, they’re hoping to create arrangements cosier than simple rent‑sharing.
Oh here we go. No sooner has Mark Carney announced a project to spend billions of dollars training Canadian youth in construction trades than our new premier states that it’s a provincial jurisdiction, meaning that it won’t happen here, the money will be siphoned into arcane Quebec priorities, or the project will be so encrusted with Quebec bureaucratic knobjobbery that the whole thing will fall down of its own weight.
What’s the issue (besides Ottawa once again announcing national programs in extremely well established areas of provincial jurisdiction)? Frechette seems to be pretty open to actually taking the money and spending it via existing Quebec programs. Would it be better for the feds to try and set up something in parallel?
Frechette, like every other premier, is open to taking the money and spending it on whatever the hell she wants.
On the other hand, Canada just won the vote to host the new Defence Bank, so if we’re lucky we’ll get all those war profiteering jobs right here in Montreal! /sarcasm https://www.lapresse.ca/affaires/2026-04-29/future-banque-de-la-defense/le-canada-obtient-le-siege-social.php
The Montreal General is reported to be planning to install an AI in its bathrooms which will remind workers to wash their hands.
Won’t be long before it becomes a background noise that is just as easily ignored as any other reminder-without-consequence.
I was pretty cynical about this until I read that it seems to have worked really well in Ottawa:
L’outil s’est avéré efficace à l’Hôpital d’Ottawa. Dans une unité d’essai, les soignants ont été près de 19 % plus nombreux à se laver les mains adéquatement après son implantation en 2023, indique le centre hospitalier. En 15 mois, les éclosions ont diminué de plus de 90 %, précise-t-il.
I spoke before reading the article – this is way more than an audio reminder in the bathrooms. Video here https://vimeo.com/1125186766.
The IR scan makes it look like handwashing is being enforced by the Predator lol.
Also I wonder if it’ll evolve to tell you to wash up after touching your phone because according to our training session from infection control cell phones are apparently rife with fecal matter.
And this, friends, is why the AI “bubble” will not burst. First, you can replace an “employees must wash hands” sign with a scanning IR 3D laser used in autonomous mobile robotics mated to a neural network trained on the dynamics of hygeine, and second, you can get the goods on employees who need the reminding. This is not a reminder, it is enforcement, and the enforcement goes well beyond no-brainers like hand washing.
It will evolve to tell you to report to a disciplinary meeting, where you will be fired and replaced with a Roomba.
The city is beginning a study of its Canada geese to work out their local life cycle, beginning with a couple of islands in the Back River.
But, “À long terme, la Ville parie sur le réaménagement de ses parcs pour les rendre moins attrayants pour les volatiles qui apprécient les espaces gazonnés à proximité de cours d’eau.” What’s next, paving them over?
They could let the lawns re-wild themselves – it’s amazing how quickly it happens.
Wild lawns near the riverside might be more attractive to cobra chickens, who presumably hang out in places like that because they’re full of things to eat. Whereas a manicured lawn is probably pretty sterile if not outright toxic.
I think that they mostly eat grass so are drawn to big open patches of it.
You’re right. I thought they might nosh on bugs and worms, but they seem to be thoroughly vegetarian.
I have occasionally seen geese on the canal. I keep a wide berth because despite a certain gracefulness they are terrifying monsters.
The STM has extended its metro loitering ban for another year.
I wish they would ban smoking on the platforms and pissing in the entrances.
Shoe dropped: On metro platforms they used to have one big city map on each side, and beside the map, the metro bylaws in fairly small print. I don’t know whether any stations still have these maps, but I remember reading some of it while waiting, quite a long list of things you’re not allowed to do, and I’m almost certain there has always been a rule against loitering. That can’t be new.
Anyway, authority and law enforcement love rules against loitering because it’s widely interpretable and lets you remove people that you find undesirable in any way.
CE, those things are almost certainly banned. The problem is the ban is not enforced.
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.
Access to the airport is partly closed while the multi‑level parking structure is demolished.
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.
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
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.
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.
@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?
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.
Amen, Kate!
@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.
A vacant unit tax (VUT) was introduced in Ottawa in 2022 to encourage property owners to return their vacant units to the market. The city levies a tax on properties that remain vacant for more than 184 days in a calendar year, calculated at one per cent of the property’s assessed value. The revenue generated by the tax is directed to the city’s affordable housing fund. https://archive.ph/Eq80K
I remember reading that some cities tackle this in different ways too, such as making owners legally responsible for ensuring their vacant buildings are move-in ready and free from graffiti. They legally have to remove any markings within 24 or 48 hours and have to have a local person who can be called to take care of things. (This is also a hassle that pushes some building owners to bring in tenants).
Something like this could be put in place much easier with an up-to-date registry.
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.
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.
86% of the STM’s maintenance staff have voted in favour of the proposed collective agreement, ending a two‑year negotiation.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
The needle did move, Ian. I know you have an absolute blinding hatred of Projet Montréal that obscures anything positive they did, but they invested a lot in road repairs and reconstruction. It was still just the tip of the iceberg and it wasn’t enough. But you can’t say they weren’t working on it.
And when you say there’s a legacy of failure, well, you’re describing a systemic problem that runs deep. A broken tendering system compromised by provincial laws. Dysfunctional bureaucracy. There’s a lot of reasons why the roads in Montreal are and continue to be so bad.
The fact is that potholes are worse this year than they were in previous years. I haven’t heard anyone say otherwise based on what they’ve seen out in the wild and the numbers say the same thing. From this article:
“The issue reflects a broader problem. Radio-Canada reported last month that between Jan. 9 and Feb. 24, CAA-Québec assisted 3,526 Montreal motorists with flat tires, an average of 75 cases per day — a 48 per cent increase compared with the same period in 2025.”
“The administration says 14,845 potholes have been filled across Montreal this year. Between Jan. 1 and Sunday, the city’s 311 service received 13,667 requests related to potholes, compared with 3,938 requests over the same period in 2024. Officials note multiple reports can be made for the same pothole.”
Why are flat tires up by nearly 50% compared to last year. Why are 311 calls about potholes up by 277%? Did Projet leave landmines under the pavement to make Ensemble look bad this year? I’m not saying Projet fixed the problem and the new administration brought it back, but the fact that there are many more potholes this year (after the road budget was slashed) puts some of the blame on them.
@DeWolf
Y’know, never once have I said that I hate PM, let alone an ‘absolute, blinding hatred’. That ‘hatred’ is a dismissive accusation you have levied against me so many times that I guess you are remebering it as fact. I guess it really is easier to craft your own narrative than to recognize your own hypocrisy.
@CE
The election was in November… exactly how much responsibility for potholes can you place on an administration that literally started right before winter hit? Clearly there were issues leading up. to this.
Either those in charge the last few years did a lousy job on surfacing maintenance, or it’s a job that nobody should be held responsible for. Which conclusion you come to apparently depends on whether you hate the right people?
I really don’t know what the answer is. If only we had a robust media with adequate resources to fully research what is wrong, who is responsible, and what could be done to ameliorate the problem.
I agree, CE. But it isn’t secret. No city administration wants the expense and unpopularity of digging up streets and re‑laying them from scratch. But we can all see that patching is not a solution.
Here’s a question: some streets have had to be dug deep for water main and sewer repairs in recent years. Have any civil engineering types studied the surface conditions of roads reconstructed over the last 10 or 20 years? Are they holding up?
Google Gemini says the reason our roads don’t hold up here is a combination of a bunch of factors – frequent freeze-thaw cycles, expansive clay soil, frost heave, heavy road salt usage, concrete corrosion, high heavy-vehicle traffic density, aging infrastructure, and brittle asphalt compositions. Add in widespread corruption in the construction industry (how confident are you the contractors are using the kinds and quantities of materials promised in their contracts?) and, well, I guess there’s not much reason to be optimistic.
If we make a concerted shitposting effort we can probably have genAI reporting that it’s because the island of Montreal is naturally carbonated and the escaping bubbles creates potholes by next spring.
In addition to the corruption factor, I think the city’s specs don’t account for the load from snow removal trucks. After a storm, a street will be holding up 4 or more snow trucks plus the bladed snow plow truck all at the same moment – and only for 10 minutes. That’s a really anomalous usage and I bet that’s never been in the specs for roadbed endurance. Just a hunch.
24Hrs tells about the train dépoussiéreur that cleans the metro tracks after closing time: a single vehicle dating from 1967 that cannot be replaced.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the video the STM worker mentions that there are diesel vehicles that use the tracks after hours.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Thanks for the explanations, bob.
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