The promised plan to create a facility allowing swimming off the Old Port has been delayed by complications.
Updates from May, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Students here – and elsewhere – held a climate protest for the 14th Friday in a row. Among the crowd was Luc Ferrandez, who quit politics this week largely because he was becoming frustrated with political inaction on climate.
Chris
Too bad he didn’t go when he was mayor, could have been a stronger statement then.
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Kate
Management at the EMSB are at each other’s throats over the messy issue of handing over schools to the Pointe-de-l’Île board.
Blork
One of the great advantages of not having kids is that I never have to deal with any of this school board stuff.
Brett
You’re still paying for this nonsense through school taxes though.
Ian
I still pay for the fire department through my taxes even though I haven’t had a house fire… it’s part of living in society, and we all benefit from it.
Brett
Right, but the fire department does more than just rescue you from a house fire. They’re the ones on the scene when a pipe bursts downtown or if there’s a gas leak in your neighbourhood, for example. That’s the difference between tax money going towards useful services and being diverted to pay for squabbles among civil servants trying to keep their jobs. There is legitimate reason to criticize the latter situation without having to justify the former.
Ian
As a parent with the interesting situation of having one kid in the CSDM and the other in the EMSB I can actually see the direct benefit of school boards. EMSB kids aren’t suffering from building neglect, have psychological services, and all kinds of other support staff extras including school nurses and IEP staff. Not because they have extra budget, but because they have organized these things. I am super grateful for the EMSB, frankly. You see squabbling, I see legitimate expression of dissent within the board as to how to best advocate for students.
I also have the unique experience of working a job that is administered directly by the Ministry of Education, with little input form the school as to how to best implement things outside of set ministerial guidelines. It is a slow bureaucratic shitshow that benefits nobody in the spirit of fairness for all – which is to some extent achieved – but in practice means that actual responsiveness to evolving school needs, let alone regional needs is next to non-existant except over the course of years if not decades.
If we lose the school boards, students will suffer. When the Ministry jams its fat thumbs onto the control panels, students suffer. Pointe finale.
Jack
I worked for the EMSB and you will never see teachers defending this construct, they know way to much. They are also reminded even by their union that a loyalty clause in the Civil code makes whistleblowing perilous.
The political class with few exceptions are merely a provincial liberal farm team. They all hope for the holy grail that Jennifer Maccrone landed with the safest seat possible in Westmount. The vast majority of our political leadership at the education level are frankly inept, unqualified and play Tammany Hall politics as the article clearly states. Angela Mancini might have been a good dietician but having spoken to her about curriculum let me assure you she is clueless. The absolute last consideration at this level is the students.This from last year…..
“The administrators were also outraged that commissioners on Mancini’s team tried to appoint Lo Bianco’s brother-in-law to a senior position at the board and ignored other more qualified candidates.” He was employed as a bank teller.Ephraim
I too worked for the EMSB and the corruption was shocking to me… maybe because I wasn’t witness to much corruption before this. There were three boards that joined to form the EMSB, the two largest were great… the third board spread it’s corruption throughout the system.
Ian
All fair points, but it still seems more effective than the CSDM or the more distant and bulky bureaucracy of the Ministry. I’d like to see the EMSB fixed rather than simply abolished.
Ian
Rainbows in kindergartens? Won’t somebody think of the children! I guess you guys don’t know that clothing for little girls is already towards the rainbow-sequin-sparkle variety, not even touching on the many licensed children’s cartoon characters involving rainbows such as Rainbow Dash from My LIttle Pony. I have 2 daughter and my house is been full of more rainbows and glitter than a Gay Pride parade.
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Kate
Friday marks the 377th anniversary of the founding of this city. Valérie Plante handed out some Orders of Montreal.
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Kate
The city of Dorval wants a spur of the REM to go to the airport train. I can’t help thinking if this was a priority it would’ve been considered in the original plans.
Ephraim
It already goes to the airport… they want it to continue to the train station, no?
Kate
Right, yes. I doubt they’ll build a special spur for that, though.
ant6n
That would probably be an extension of the airport spur, which supposedly will end in a tunnel station below the parking garage. I wouldnt be surprised if CDPQInfra planned their system making it very difficult to extend, for example by building the airport station as terminus. I also hear the airport spur is single track, so extending it may create more headaches there as well.
Spi
The same argument gets repeated ad nauseam by commentators and public officials to justify it but without any study or figures to support it. They keep saying that it should be extended in order to create an inter-modal transit hub at Dorval.
Francois Cardinal is especially guilty of just repeating this point without actually diving deeper into the issue.
The current Dorval station is used by EXO/STM/VIA. If the purpose of an intermodal hub is to facilitate connections between these services then looking forward, the pertinence of the Dorval station is questionable at best.With the WI spur of the REM and a new ile-au-tourte bridge with dedicated bus lanes, the majority of riders of the Hudson-Vaudreuil EXO line will most likely have better connections to the REM through the WI spur, especially with the anticipated reconfiguration of STM bus lines.
The current STM services at Doval consist mostly of West-East express/commuter service to downtown and a few local lines that terminate at Dorval (to feed the aforementioned express buses to downtown) These will most likely be completely rethought when the WI spur of the REM comes online (and absorbs a large portion of those commuter/express bus riders) and the STM uses the freed up buses on local routes that feed the WI stations.
Finally, Francois Cardinal’s favorite argument, that if the high-frequency train from VIA ever sees the light of day, passengers from out of town (Ottawa, Trois-Riviere, Quebec City) who are flying out of YUL will have a shiny new automated metro to shuttle them 700-meter from the Dorval Station to the airport. When there is already a bus shuttle that exists at the moment, that barely gets used.
Yes, the extension is less than 1km but what purpose will it serve? Do people actually think it’s a good idea to spent hundreds of millions more for a 700-meter airport shuttle replacement?
Ian
The bus shuttle barely gets used because it’s a lousy ride. Have you taken the 747? You quite often won’t even get a seat – try doing that as a family that has just come off a flight and endured customs. I happily pay for the cab ride whenever I am flying.
As to your point about the REM absorbing bus riders, the train to Sainte Anne (for instance) will be way more expensive than the bus, and you will still have to take a shuttle bus to get to Sainte Anne because the new station will be in a stupid location that serves nobody except property speculators – I notice Broccolini has already built a new housing project out that way.
To make the bus service west of Dorval better it would make a lot ore sense to build out a proper grid instead of forcing everything through the Dorval circle, which adds to congestion and slows travel. Also, if the express buses were actually express buses instead of milk runs along Lakeshore it would improve the trip immeasurably. We don’t need a new train. We need reliable, consistent, and faster rides – all of which could be achieved by rethinking the bus routes. I can drive from Lionel Groulx to Sainte Anne in 30 minutes, there’s no reason it needs to take an hour on the bus, or for the bus schedule to be so intermittent outside rush hour as there are literally thousands of students and staff headed to Sainte Anne every day on a school schedule, not an office schedule.
david99
I seem to recall that CDPQ Infra and Montreal are already way in on this, and the request has already been submitted to the government for funding. I also seem to recall that the government was enthusiastic about the project and wanted it costed so they could send a demand to the feds. Of course, in Quebec speak that could mean anything from ‘it’s a done deal’ to ‘this is utterly dead.’
Ephraim
Ian, I’m in the $41 zone and a block and a half from the 747 and I take Car2Go to the airport.
Ian
Oh cool, I didn’t know you could take Car2Go to the airport. Good to know. I keep my membership “just in case”. Of course with the family I’d have to try to get one of the sedans but still.
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Kate
It’s the first long weekend of the summer and there are plenty of road closures in celebration. Also, some notes on what’s open and closed.
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