The National Assembly approved a motion Thursday that there will be no provincial money for baseball in Montreal; even the government has been flimflammed into referring to this as “the return of the Expos.”
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Kate
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Kate
Haiti is so shaken up by protests that the city has flown two of its workers home who’d been lent to Port-au-Prince to help with its long recovery from the 2010 earthquake. Eight SPVM cops seconded to the UN mission there are staying for now; tourists from Quebec are stranded at a resort, unable to reach the airport.
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Kate
The CAQ is talking big about helping Montreal catch up with its deficit in social housing.
Steve Q
Let’s wait a bit before being too happy because every so often we hear politicians make announcement about social housing and it never materialize…. or rarely.
The other problem is they need some funding also from Ottawa. Too many level of decision making. The federal shouldn’t have to deal with that. They should give money to the provinces and let them spend it wherever they want.
Kate
Yes, that’s why I said “talking big” – like transit, this is the kind of promise governments like to make to get public approval, and then we find out later – sometimes much later – that it never happened, or only a fraction of the generous sums of money cited were ever spent on the thing promised.
Chris
Steve Q, Quebec doesn’t “need” money from Ottawa, provinces have the power of taxation, they can raise their own money if they want/need to. But of course passing the buck is easier.
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Kate
Popular St-Henri eatery Grumman78 decided to close for Valentine’s Day because so many people make reservations then either cancel or simply fail to show.
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Kate
The STM is at the Labour Administrative Tribunal trying to make a case that the only reason there aren’t enough functioning buses is because the maintenance union is throwing a snit. The union has a counterweight of other explanations topped by a shortage of mechanics.
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Kate
Since Andy Riga left the transit beat at the Gazette the writers have clearly been advised to be more negative about the STM’s progress. Currently they’re chipping at the plan to invest in hybrid buses.
DeWolf
It’s interesting that the article focuses on study of hybrid buses in Hong Kong that found their performance was not particularly impressive when dealing with hills, hot weather and congestion. Fair enough, but what the article doesn’t mention is that:
Hong Kong is very hilly. Montreal is pancake flat by comparison, even factoring in Mount Royal.
Traffic in central parts of HK is exponentially more congested than Montreal. Average speeds are very low throughout the day and there is a lot of stop-and-go. I can’t think of a single bus route in Montreal that would face similar conditions over such a long period of time.
Hong Kong is very hot. By Montreal standards, it’s summer there for 10 months a year, and in the actual dog days of summer, we’re talking about weeks and weeks of 33 degree days, which is probably closer to 40 degrees on the pavement of a congested road. Air conditioning needs to work really, really hard there. Again, Montreal just can’t compare, even if it’s a particularly hot summer like in 2018.
tl;dr, this particular study was very useful for Hong Kong, given its particular environmental conditions, but perhaps not so much for Montreal.
Ian
@DeWolf Considering that vehicles are even less fuel efficient in cold weather I’m not convinced by this line of reasoning
Raymond Lutz
Un journal qui écrit “he said he approached the Quebec government several times over the years in an attempt to sell the idea of buses fuelled with renewable natural gas , but his sales pitches have fallen on deaf ears.” ne vaut pas le papier sur lequel il est imprimé… RENEWABLE NATURAL GAS! Quels cons.
Kevin
@Raymond Lutz
Renewable natural gas comes from compost and garbage dumps.They used to just flare it off, and I remember going near landfills as a kid and seeing the flames shooting into the sky.
EmilyG
Chris
Kevin, I don’t think I’d call garbage dumps renewable either. For compost, I guess that fair enough, but it’s a tiny fraction of where gas comes from, and there are better uses for compost anyway.
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Kate
Valérie Plante is asking Quebec City for hundreds of millions of dollars for work needing to be done in Montreal.
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Kate
The Journal reports briefly on a fire in the presbytery of a disused church on Crémazie, without noting that it had already had a pretty serious fire last month.
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Kate
Jonathan Montpetit on why Quebec and Canada see SNC-Lavalin differently.
Chris
Wait, isn’t Quebec part of Canada? 🙂
Kate
Well, let’s say, why the Quebec and Canadian establishments see it differently.
Patrick
Paul Wells has a wonderfully snarky column this week on the avalanche of commentators who defend the kid-gloves approach to big companies like SNC. But he sees it as a Canadian problem, not just a Quebec one.
https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/canada-the-show/Ian
It’s a subtle distinction but this is one instance where federal/ Quebec or Quebec/ROC is a useful description… But let’s not devolve into a self-policing precise definition community. We all knew what Kate meant by that. she was hardly dogwhistling.
Of course Quebec wants SNC Lavalin to succeed, like Bombardier and others. Realistically when companies shift multinationally we risk things like Pascals getting bought out then collapsing because the parent company had issues. Pascal was way better than Rona, better positioned, then whoops dead.Chris
Ian, hence my smiley! 🙂
david100
Yeah, I have friends who work at SNC-Lavalin, and any sort of project that tanks Quebec’s super firm in a permanent way is not cool in my book. Obviously, Toronto types are trying to steal more work from Montreal, and it should be seen that way, regardless of what we all know about how it works in Montreal.
That said, there have been discussions on this blog even about about how there’s a real question about whether certain institutional norms have made it so that Quebec simply doesn’t have the engineering know how that it once did. Ie. in a context where the best leave to Canada or the US, that perhaps the ones hired onto local firms are funneled into a system the de-emphasizes good work in favor of patronage/tricked contracts which, in turn, leaves Quebec sort of with an inferior class of engineers and project managers.
Personally, I think that SNC-Lavalin employs some of the best engineers in the entire world. But anyone who saw how the new McGill hospital went down could be forgiven for having that Charles Bronson feeling of loading the pistol and walking out into the rainy midnight to settle score.
So, basically, I think Kate is completely right. In Canada, this is a Quebec problem. In Quebec, this is a Liberal problem, with maybe a weak-willed PQ in the face of Stephen Harper footing the bill situation. And the question of whether they do bribes in other countries? Like Bombardier, who cares if it means Quebec jobs?
david100
Bah, should have re-read that before posting, but the point is there.
Would only add that it’s a real shame that our bidding system is so vulnerable to these scams.
Jack
From Well’s, boy this really is a Quebec inc. problem.” And it’s true that SNC-Lavalin’s largest shareholder is the Quebec public-service pension fund, whose pet project is a light-rail network, whose main construction contractor is SNC-Lavalin. And it’s true that the head of the pension fund pushed hard for the federal government to set up an Infrastructure Bank whose only investment to date, announced on the day before a beleaguered provincial government launched an election campaign, was in the light-rail network promoted by the pension fund that is SNC’s biggest investor and which, in turn, is the rail project’s biggest contractor.”
Kevin
If SNC-Lavalin is no longer allowed to compete, employees will quit and form their own, smaller firms.
It’s been done before, and it’s how SNC-Lavalin acquired key divisions.
For example, its mining division was acquired by purchasing a mining firm that had been created by people laid off from another company.
Chris
Along the same line as Kevin: people often make the mistake of thinking that if a company goes bankrupt that all value is lost. But the workers don’t vanish, the factories don’t vanish, the inventory doesn’t disappear. Something new can rise from the ashes.
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