Montreal City Weblog

Updates from November, 2018 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

• Kate 20:03 on 2018-11-03 Permalink | Reply  

  Guy Laliberté plans to build a pyramid on the Clock Tower pier, working with his new outfit Lune Rouge Entertainment. It’s intended for a new show “generating experiences and emotions that help us connect to ourselves and each other.” It’s supposedly a temporary structure.

  Which reminds me: the appeal to emotion just cringes me out, bad anglo that I am. I grabbed a photo of this metro poster last summer:

  

  and then there’s this Quartier des Spectacles thing, from their website; the slogan is also displayed around the area itself:

  

  A square kilometer of emotions? Get me the hell out of here!

  You can see it really doesn’t work in English (from the website, obviously not posted in public places):

  

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• Kate 08:24 on 2018-11-03 Permalink | Reply  

  The New York Times style magazine does Montreal this weekend: picture of Habitat (taken in summer, not as it looks right now, drab under a gray sky over a gray river); list of posh hotels, mention of St-Viateur bagels and a couple of vintage clothing shops.

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• Kate 08:14 on 2018-11-03 Permalink | Reply  

  Valérie Plante is off to Hollywood to promote Montreal as a location for film shoots.

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• Kate 07:41 on 2018-11-03 Permalink | Reply  

  There’s a festival this weekend, so media have been implicitly lauding people and even commercial establishments that generate very little trash, but I’m not too impressed. In order to reduce your waste that much you have to devote your life to it, and don’t tell me the woman described in the CBC piece, living in St-Constant, can make the purchases described without using a car – buying everything in bulk, going to farms, buying wine en vrac. Bulk buying also means plenty of clean, safe space for storage. A certain level of wealth and leisure are necessary before embarking on this venture.

  As a reliable source tweeted recently, “100 corporations are responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions and presenting the crisis as a moral failing on the part of individuals without noting this fact is journalistic malpractice.” Which isn’t to say that making a few changes in your lifestyle is futile, but there’s a commonsense limit to how much you as an individual can do, vis-à-vis how much time and money you have to devote to it and how much of a dent you can really make in the problem.

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• Kate 07:29 on 2018-11-03 Permalink | Reply  

  Radio-Canada interviews Lionel Perez but signals with its headline that city hall opposition is still trying to find a role. Perez claims that his party acts as a watchdog, nipping at everything Projet does (true) and that it proposes constructive ideas and solutions (not so true, at least from my observation post).

  Perez says he finds Projet dogmatic, claiming that it “governs for its base” rather than for the people, a condemnation of democracy in action: if the majority of Montrealers who were engaged enough to get out and vote chose Projet, it’s not reasonable to claim Projet’s “base” is something other than the majority of people who voted. Maybe Perez feels he’s acting for the silent majority who couldn’t even be bothered to vote, but if so, that’s a political dead end: they won’t vote for Ensemble next time either because they don’t vote.

  Perez may be trying for a muted version of populism: by suggesting that Projet is elite while he speaks for the people, he’s echoing the tone taken by shriller politicians around the world. In the arena of Montreal municipal politics this won’t work. If it’s framed as elite merely to vote in an election, your party can’t win by playing to the non-voting electorate.

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