Montreal firefighters will soon be able to administer naloxone to anyone suffering from opioid overdose.
Updates from June, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Place des Nations, a brutalist relic of Expo 67, is to be spiffed up, or at least that’s the idea. Fixing it up has been floated before and never carried out.
I’ve walked around in the space, and while it has promise, it isn’t nearly as large as the drawings shown in the article suggest with their ant-sized people.
Max
This is a worthy project. PdN was ground-zero for country-celebrating days during Expo 67, site of the first Jazz Fest in 1980, and home to a bunch of stoner-rock outdoor shows in the late 1970s. The wooden parts are likely beyond salvaging by now. The concrete parts should be good for another couple of decades with a bit of freshening up.
Mr.Chinaski
It really is that large, the renders are true. Kate, you didn’t feel the scope because of all the scafolding and the vegetation but it can hold thousands of people.
http://archivesdemontreal.com/documents/2017/09/1_VM94-EXd281-028.jpg
http://footage.framepool.com/shotimg/698673222-lester-b-pearson-barrette-place-des-nations-expo-1967.jpg?offset=1
https://live.staticflickr.com/62/178207558_5a7f55799c.jpg
http://expo67.ncf.ca/place_des-nations_activity-expo67-edit.jpgKate
Mr.Chinaski, there wasn’t any scaffolding when I went there, although there was greenery. The whole space just felt more intimate than what I see in your pictures (thanks for the links!).
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Kate
A tenants’ group says the housing shortage is inspiring some landlords to post openly discriminatory for-rent ads with no consequences.
The vacancy rate is estimated at 1.8% right now in greater Montreal, and it’s no better in the suburbs than in town.
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Kate
We’re fortunate to have few homicides here, but even so, when first reported there’s often not much detail. It’s in retrospect, during trials, that details sometimes come out. This story of a man killed over a gold chain he was wearing, two years ago, is one of those. One assailant has pleaded guilty to manslaughter and the other to being an accessory, and the latter will be out of jail within a year. The former hasn’t yet been sentenced.
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Kate
CTV says the new configuration of the Camillien-Houde is annoying some drivers because the new traffic lights don’t seem to apply to cyclists. This is clearly because a cyclist cannot make a U‑turn on a downslope and kill somebody, but I don’t think that occurs to them.
Blork
/hmm. If they plan on keeping that configuration I hope they improve the signaling. That one tiny red/green light is hardly visible. Chaos will ensue.
walkerp
Ah once again, pure objective journalism from CTV. No pro-car bias there.
And no byline. Who writes these stories?
You could just as easily write the exact same story neutrally “New Traffic light configuration implemented on Camillien-Houde”
You really trying to tell me there is no influence from the top about these kinds of stories?jeather
Why would the cyclists need to stop? They’ve got, as far as I can tell, separate lanes so they’re not sharing the lane with the cars. It’s like being upset the pedestrians get to keep walking.
Blork
@walkerp, I think there is something more insidious happening. 20-some years ago, the various news outlets started emphasizing (in their promotions) how they try to “go behind the story” and all that stuff about the “people behind the news” and blah blah blah. Basically they were actively and openly subverting the tradition of fact-based news that focused on the issue in favour of a more emotion-based approach. (You see this more with local news than national news, but not entirely.)
The idea was to make news more appealing by focusing on people and emotions. In other words, turning all news into fluff and entertainment that’s supposed to make us feel more engaged because of the emotional effect.
From that POV, the story is not that the new traffic light configuration was implemented on Camillien-Houde; the story is “how it affected people” (oh the warm and fuzzies!) In this case it appears to have angered some people, and that’s the story. If those drivers had stood there applauding the light, that would have been the story.
It’s easy to think that there is some big car boas conspiracy behind all the pro-car news, but I’m pretty sure it’s just so-called news going after the biggest displays of emotion. And over time, they have learned that anger gets the highest level of engagement.
…and that, to me, is far worse, because it implicates the entire news industry in re-toning the news to make it “appealing” and “engaging” instead of informative.
Kevin
@walkerp
One person wrote it while two others gathered information (one at the mountain, another talking to officials in another part of town) so it got the ‘staff’ designation. One person is still working on this so the byline may change.The point of a headline is to entice people to read it. As I write this A/B testing is showing that a headline mentioning only the new configuration is not doing well, while a headline about driver anger is getting people to read the article. If that changes, the headline will be changed.
@Blork
I’d argue that emotion is a hook to get people interested in the facts.
Framing an article around how an issue affects people and how it makes them feel has always been important. Look at Studs Terkel (born in 1912!) and his body of work.It’s all about people.
Joey
What’s the purpose of the one-way stretch? Has the road been made too narrow to allow two lanes of traffic? Or is there a more insidious objective (i.e., we were forced to keep the road open, so we’re going to make it as inconvenient as possible for drivers)?
Kate
They want to slow drivers down, I think. It’s that simple.
Blork
@Kevin, I think the emotion as a hook to get people interested in the facts was the original intention, but like most things it has evolved and morphed into something unrecognizable. On one side you have the suits barking for more eyeball-drawing headlines, and on the other side you have young wet-behind-the-ears journalists who see that emotion-tugging stories are the ones that win prizes and get attention. Result: journalism that more and more takes its cues from lifestyle blogs and the like.
walkerp
So why not interview some bikers? I bet your A/B testing would prefer “Cyclists ecstatic over priority light on Mont-Royal!”
Yes, I understand and abhor the long-term trend of selling emotional satisfaction instead of helpful intormation, but it is the editors who slant it one way or another and you have to start questioning why CTV is consistently generating copy that presents any change as a threat to the lifestyle of car drivers.
Kevin
@walkerp
As I said, a reporter was still working on the story and it has been updated.
I’m sorry to inform you the cyclists don’t like it much either.Kevin
@blork
I am sorry to say that doesn’t sound like anywhere I have ever worked.Blork
@Kevin: I can only report on what I observe from the audience’s POV. I hope I’m wrong.
Uatu
CTV 6pm news knows their audience: cranky old people who still listen to cjad, read the printed Gazette and still use snail mail. So nothing new. Just ignore ’em. Their newscast is irrelevant anyways…
CE
Growing up, I used to watch the CTV Atlantic (ATV) newscast and it was first rate. Nobody watched Global or CBC. A couple years after moving here, I was in a house with a TV and caught the CTV Montreal news. They had some cranky old guy (he was some kind of higher up in the organization) who ranted about the Turcot rebuild and some of alternative plans being floated. He suggested that the alternative plans, many of which were drawn up by highly respected urbanists, would include “tofu stands for cyclists.” This man was so ridiculous and so unnecessarily vindictive that I never watched a CTV Montreal newscast ever again.
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Kate
Sud-Ouest borough is planning a solstice festival that, while it includes St-Jean, doesn’t put the national day first and foremost. “La controverse a résonné jusqu’à l’hôtel de ville de Montréal.” I saw responses to this story on Twitter before I saw the story itself, so it’s clearly today’s teapot tempest.
Update: The mayor herself has stepped in and chivvied Sud-Ouest into line.
steph
Abandoning ‘Saint-Jean’ is simply an attempt to be more secular. Why are the pure-laines outraged?
Brett
They want it to say ‘fête nationale’
Kate
Ingrid Peritz reports that the festival has been quickly rebranded “la St-Jean dans le Sud‑Ouest.” The PDF of the borough’s printed bulletin still has “le festival du solstice d’été” as does this webpage, and Peritz talks to a borough rep who explains – fruitlessly – that the saint’s festival was a Christianization of the old pagan observation of the solstice anyway, a bit of folkloric history that cuts no ice here.
But Brett, you know that while the holiday is often referred to as the Fête nationale, it’s still very commonly called la Saint-Jean.
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Kate
The main building of east-end Maisonneuve-Rosemont hospital is to be completely demolished and rebuilt. This is the building currently shored up with metal mesh so nobody gets brained with a brick dropping off the crumbling façade.
Ephraim 13:08 on 2019-06-14 Permalink
Soon? How many dead people are we waiting for, before we give them life saving equipment… what’s the acceptable number, Mr. Bureaucrat?
Kate 20:21 on 2019-06-14 Permalink
Urgences-Santé could use it, Ephraim. I think this is just part of the ongoing struggle to allow people with less intensive medical training to apply certain techniques or remedies.
I see they also all had to get training.