The city is extending the state of emergency due to flooding, although the Galipeault bridge has reopened.
Updates from May, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Martin Patriquin steps up to defend Luc Ferrandez’ recent screed about general environmental mismanagement by government, although with faint damns.
Chris
A good read. (Notable though that he doesn’t blame capitalism/consumerism at all in his last paragraph.)
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Kate
The city will be borrowing $1.7 billion to invest in metro infrastructure
david100
Interesting that in the account I read, I didn’t take away that the city would be borrowing this amount, as opposed to budget lining it.
This is obviously a very good thing for the metro, which has been falling apart, in a lot of cases literally.
A thing I think we can take away from this is that Montreal knows about REM integration, including fares, and has modeled demand sufficiently to spit out a number on needed cars, stations, etc. This is pretty interesting, and I guess they see an increase in passenger numbers coming.
Like, with what we assume here, should mean integration/cost at the level to ensure a steady rise in metro ridership.
So, now we need to go further: Trudeau should commit to fundimg the pink line, an orange line extension to the REM, the yellow line to McGill station, and the REM extension down into Dorval or at least the Dorval station. Would leave Montreal far below a major European or Chinese city in terms of rapid transit, obviously, but would create the sort of system that the city needs and deserves.
Robert H
N’oubliez pas la ligne bleu. On attend depuis des lustres. Je me demande si je vivrai assez longtemps…
Kate
david100, “donne l’autorisation à quatre règlements d’emprunt” in the lede. Maybe I don’t understand municipal financing?
Robert H: it’s long past time for that blue line extension.
david100
No, I’m not saying they’re wrong about funding source, I’m saying that where I read about it the funding was a sort of second thought.
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Kate
The city plans to reorganize how the Camillien-Houde works, but – in response to public opprobrium – refrain from reimposing the ban on driving over the mountain.
walkerp
Can we see CTV’s methodology that led to their conclusions here? This feels a lot like the auto lobby and car extremists (with the backing of CTV and its advertising department that depends signficantly on car commercials) generating some propaganda.
Joey
Tough week for Luc Ferrandez.
@Walkerp presumably you can read the OCPM report yourself… not sure about the “auto lobby and car extremists” – I think PM grossly underestimated many Montrealers’ affection for that drive.
Faiz Imam
I never really understood what PMs militancy around this was about. In terms of street design there’s a wide range of options that solves the problem without blocking the road.
For example some road bumps, or textured road surfaces like bricks would require people to slow down enough that using it as a shortcut would no longer be rational.
Or else just set the speed limit to 30kmh and let the speed cops loose to make their money.
Blocking it off always baffled me. Just make it hostile enough that going around would be faster/ less painful, and problem solved.
Ian
“auto lobby and car extremists” aside, maybe blocking an entire public thoroughfare for the nearly exclusive use of a small contingent of well-heeled lycra warriors didn’t have the excellent optics PM anticipated. Even some effort to make the route walkable would have been better than what was there last summer, making it more for the population at large. Also worth noting, let’s be honest, those elite bicyclists aren’t exactly beloved – they are so self-involved they got banned from the cemetery for making a nuisance of themselves.
In any case, put a turnpike down the entire median and you will both prevent u-turns and slow all forms of traffic, problem solved.
Joey
Instead of these reasonable ideas they just built some really ugly-looking bleachers ‾\_(ツ)_/‾
Clearly for Ferrandez and co. the end goal was always about banning cars from Camillien-Houde.
Ephraim
Let’s be realistic, there was no real reason to close it… there is a real reason to reorganize how traffic goes on that road and both a protected bike lane and a pedestrian lane along with a narrowing is what it needed. There should have been no way for a car to do a U-turn in the first place…. But it has needed a protected bike lane for a LONG time.
Kevin
@walkerp
There is no connection between the newsroom and the advertising department. Period. They do not even work in the same building.Your implications are extremely insulting. And I think that says a lot more about how you operate than any journalist I know. Shame on you.
If you want to know where the conclusions come from you simply need to look at the report.
100 pages documenting the entire process and public consultations with extensive footnotes. Oh so many footnotes that list hundreds if not thousands of names including many that I recognized from all walks of life in this city.
Reading all of that it was extremely obvious that the people did not like this plan. It was sprung on them without warning and it did not achieve the goals it set out for itself.
At one point the report mentions the duelling petitions and it says the number of opponents was five times greater than the number of supporters.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. The commission itself said months ago that most of the people at the public hearings did not like the plan.
The only thing surprising is The many suggestions that people had, including ones of been made on this blog, that would actually improve safety and security and that were never even considered by the city administration.
Let it be a lesson to politicians: voters do you not know your platform and they do not support everything you believe in. All they are doing is choosing someone they like a little more than the other guy
qatzelok
@Kevin: “There is no connection between the newsroom and the advertising department.”
Oh yes there is. A huge one. If the advertising department doesn’t bring in enough money, the newsroom starts getting pink slips, as in “your services are no longer needed.”
Chris
Kevin, I’m sure most journalists are mighty fine people (and I’m glad we have them!), and for sure there is at least a partial firewall between the newsroom and advertising, but… let’s not pretend that “Cui bono?” and “follow the money” don’t apply to the corporate media too. They apply universally.
Kevin
@qatzelok
And the sun shines and the sky is sometimes blue.@Chris
There is no contact between sales and the news division. None. At. All.People who think advertisers have some say in content have watched too many bad movies.
Kevin
@qatzelok
I’m sorry, I gave you a flippant response. Forgive me.Yout statement applies equally well to almost everyone with a job, from people who scrub toilets to stockbrokers.
However it would apply less to many journalists in Canada because of CRTC regulations. There are news divisions in private companies which have never turned a profit let alone broken even.
Uatu
Eh. Mitsumi was made an official face of the Superhospital along with Jean Béliveau. Cjad ran Heath Matters, an infomercial for the muhc that sounded like a talk show. Maybe there isn’t a direct link between sales and the news dept., but it made any reporting regarding the Superhospital suspect. I noticed that anytime negative news about the project came up, CTV News at 6 always ran a feel good story to counter it. In fact when mitz interviewed retiring CEO Norman Rinfret all the questions were softballs. No asking tough questions about how the executive committee was conned and how no one including Rinfret was held to account for their ignorance or even why he got a 10 percent raise after admitting he had no idea about the corruption. I expected a lot more journalism from the citys’ most popular Anglo TV and radio media. Instead they came across as shills….
Chris
Kevin, direct contact is not necessary. I assume you’ve read Manufacturing Consent, yes?
walkerp
Please, that article didn’t even have a byline. CTV trades in emotion and the journalists that work there know their core audience is angry suburban anglophones, so they are going to skew their articles towards that audience to get the most attention. And their editors know where their bread is buttered. Be insulted. Please don’t pretend that CTV is some objective information-sharing organization. It is part of a much larger advertising machine and cars are one of their biggest source of revenue.
The car lobby got out in huge numbers to fight this. I bet most of the people who signed the petition have never even driven over the mountain. They are very close in behaviour to the NRA where any time they see something that may restrict even the slightest right to drive wherever and whenever they want, they mobilize en masse.
The main failure here is not the project itself, but the way it was implemented without consultation. There are already loads of west islanders who hate Ferrandez because of “Parking” so they were super excited to get all freaked out about this.
The reason the road needs to go is simply because it is a mountain, the entire thing should be public with vehicle access to get to it, but not through it. There is no need for a road right through it.
We are trying to evolve beyond fossil fuels, right? Crazy to me how many people reflexively continue to fight for car use and then attack any initiative to curb it as a minority of fancy elites.
Kevin
@walkerp
Well there’s obviously no point in having a conversation with you. May you someday experience the enlightenment of learning.
Goodbye.@chris
Manufacturing consent is a great starting point for a discussion about mass media in the US in the ’80s.
But it’s written from the point of view of outsiders who are unaware of what happens in newsrooms and how they operate, and a lot has changed in news in the past 40 years.It may be hard to comprehend, but the people in the newsroom are the ones with the lowest awareness of ads. I couldn’t tell you about a single ad that runs on my station, even on the weeks when I’m producing the evening news. The ads are literally blacked out in the control room! When I’m watching newscasts on the in-house system they are once again blacked out.
So pray tell, how are advertisers influencing what I do?
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Kate
The St-Laurent ecocentre has been forced to close because its operator, Mélimax, was blacklisted for illegal dumping. Now a second ecocentre is in a squeeze because Melimax’s replacement is not up to speed.
It’s dispiriting to find out that the items you’ve carefully hung onto, rather than throwing out with the trash, then brought to an ecocentre for supposed proper disposal, were possibly just chucked into a field or forest somewhere.
dwgs
And as of yesterday the Lasalle one has been closed for an ‘indefinite’ period.
Kate
Yep, both are now closed. Taken together, Lasalle and St-Laurent represent a considerable chunk of western Montreal and include a lot of industrial plants. Let’s hope the city can find a solution, but it’s looking more and more like recycling is not viable when nobody wants to buy or deal with the growing heaps of material.
dwgs
My worry isn’t so much for the recycling as what will happen with all the household and renovation waste that usually goes there. We’re going to see a lot more paint cans, old tires, drywall, bags of old plaster etc. dumped in the lanes.
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Kate
A juvenile couple who cold-bloodedly plotted to steal an ounce of pot from an acquaintance, then killed him in a forested part of Nuns’ Island, pleaded guilty this week. The girl will serve 30 months; the boy, now 18, may be sentenced as an adult.
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Kate
The new Champlain bridge won’t be ready for the start of June as promised. Interesting that they started by announcing the estimated start of the deconstruction of the old bridge before mentioning this. It’s called burying the lede.
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