The education minister has just announced that two EMSB schools will be transferred to Pointe‑de‑l’Île board.
Updates from June, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
A brand new U.S. Navy ship is stuck in the Port of Montreal after brushing up against the Rosaire Desgagnés on an attempt to leave port. I learned a new word, allide – to impact a stationary object.
Ian
Ooh, good word!
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Kate
Sentencing is under way for the driver in the mistaken shooting death of Angelo d’Onofrio in north-end Hillside Café three years ago. The shooter himself got a life sentence; the judge says here that no evidence proved that the driver knew his passenger planned to carry out a killing. I suppose he thought they were just going for coffee?
Ian
Maybe it was a kind of informal gig economy arrangement. /s
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Kate
The roof of the Olympic stadium is tearing worse than expected, requiring two annual inspections rather than one before the new roof goes on, in 2024 – in theory.
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Kate
A Le Devoir writer gives us a detailed look at how the JUMP scooters work.
Ian
I’ve been noticing a lot of them illegally locked up to random street furniture around my neighbourhood today.
Kate
I don’t know why they couldn’t see that coming, Ian.
CE
I think anything from JUMP in Montreal is just biked (for now). Lime is set to launch their scooters any time now.
Kevin
Kate
Nobody in Quebec has ever seen anything like this coming.Corruption? Bad construction? People obeying the letter of the law about twisting the spirit until it cries in the obeying the letter of the law about twisting the spirit until it cries? Inconceivable !
Ian
I do not think that word means what you think it means 😉
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Kate
A piece on Deadspin linked on Twitter caught my eye, about the desperation of the Tampa Bay baseball team owner to round up some team support, somewhere, somehow.
A Radio-Canada piece suggests calling the team the Guinea Pigs.
Please tell me we’re not going to build a whole stadium for a venture into half ownership of a failing baseball franchise.
steph
Kate, they’re gonna sell it to us as a ‘soft transfer’ with the idea that it’ll be a full transfer coming soon.
Josh
Bronfman said yesterday he’s not interested in public funding of a stadium (though he would like to discuss public support presumably in an adjacent infrastructure sort of sense). Scoff at that if you will (and we know you will!), but at least make mention of some of the facts that don’t support your take on all this, Kate.
Ian
Okay so he doesn’t want money for the stadium, just for all the infrastructure it requires. Gotcha.
EVERY DIME should come out of Bronfman. The public shouldn’t get involved ANY of this. We have way bigger fish to fry than satisfying the fantasies of some clutch of rich fatcats that like baseball. There is TON of infrastructure we don’t even have time to fix let alone helping build a playground for Richie Rich and his pals.
Kate
Josh, if you follow my blog you know what I’m going to say now: that’s a chimera. It’s impossible to build a huge stadium without the city chipping in for infrastructure, security and transit. I found this interesting item late last year about how Quebec was into “partnering” on a new ballpark – news to me, but not to the website where it was posted.
Here’s another piece from our very own Gazette a year ago about how money for a new roof for the Olympic stadium wouldn’t sit well with baseball fans because it would take funds that “should” go to a new ballpark and spend it on the old O. But wait, we weren’t going to use public funds on a new ballpark, right? Right?
Then there’s the constant demands for tax cuts. The Bell Centre doesn’t pay anything like as much tax as it should, and Joey Saputo played poor mouth for a tax break on his soccer stadium last year even though city valuation of that land had conveniently gone down 25% at the same time everyone else was facing valuation hikes. I don’t know what kind of tax break the Alouettes get for playing on a field that belongs to McGill, but I bet it’s tasty too.
And that’s leaving aside the fact that once there’s a team here, with one foot in the door, you know they can always threaten to leave again, blackmailing the city and the province against the unpopularity of a choice to pull the plug.
Major league sports are a mechanism for moving public money into private pockets, Josh. The rest is bread and circuses for the masses.
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Kate
Radio-Canada and CBC both report Thursday on a right-wing media outlet, run by two onetime McGill students, right from Montreal. Critic Nora Loreto thinks the CBC calling them a “blurred line” between journalism and pamphleteering is a bit on the soft-pedaling side. At a quick glance – I’m not sending them clicks – they’re mostly parroting boring and pointless criticisms of Justin Trudeau right now. There are legit criticisms to be made of Trudeau, but you won’t find them on a platform like that one.
Chris
hmm, well, they’re more transparent than all the underground shills/bots on social media.
qatzelok
The kind of ineffective and sophomoric “criticism” of Trudeau and other state actors, actually helps promote our boring and visionless elite by glamming them with faint barbs (daming with faint praise in reverse).
It’s yet another hegemony strategy.
Ian
Sadly, I fear that Trudeau et al are incapable of such subtlety, and it’s really just a couple of overconfident noobs playing at legitimacy with recycled meme-logic. Such is the state of the current political landscape.
Up next: Asymmetric warfare or just stupidity? News at 11.
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Kate
Thieves made off with a truck containing at least a million bucks Wednesday night in Dollard‑des‑Ormeaux.
Ian
Wow, that’s nearly enough to redo a quarter of a block of sidewalks.
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Kate
There are several paramedics whose beat is the metro system, although this isn’t very well known unless you’ve needed their aid. Metro interviewed a couple of them about what it is they do.
I would’ve liked to hear about how often they have to administer naloxone, but the item doesn’t get so specific about the treatments they give.
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Kate
A long power failure hit the west end Wednesday afternoon, pulling the plug on parts of Hampstead, Côte St-Luc, NDG and Montreal West for several hours. It was something that went wrong at a substation and nothing to do with the thunderstorm that came through a bit later.
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Kate
There will be traffic complications for the second of our long weekends.
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Kate
Donovan King, who’s worked up the story of Mary Gallagher into his own claim to fame in recent years, with embellishments about ghosts, wants the city to formally commemorate the woman murdered 140 years ago. This piece gets the actor’s shtick about the ghosts mixed up with a real intention to preserve the Black Rock as a memorial, but the CBC should be more canny about giving self-promoters a platform. As one of the Irish Montrealers who might have an opinion, I think we can do better than a “headless ghost” as a symbol.
Jack
From a fellow Irish Montrealer, we can do better. Nominees?
Kate
Do we need to commemorate a person? I’m happy there’s still a shamrock on the flag and I’ll be pleased if they can figure out the future of the Black Rock without moving it very far (the discovery of buried bodies was the whole point in placing it where it is now).
Jack
I understand your point , people like personifications. Therefore i nominate Kate and Anna McGarrigle.
Ian
At least it’s not some frickin’ leprechaun.
Kate
Jack, Anna McGarrigle is still alive, and I’m hesitant at the idea of making a mascot of someone still living.
The Wikipedia list of Quebec people of Irish descent is interesting, reminding us that a lot of folks here have had a spark of green in them: Claude Ryan and Pierre-Marc Johnson have family names that reveal it, but I only just now learned that Louis Saint-Laurent was of half Irish ancestry, as was Patapouf himself. Not that I’d put him up as a significant leprechaun…
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Kate
I know the mayor is putting a good face on it but I have my doubts a tram line is really what Valérie Plante had in mind initially for the pink line.
Norman Bates
How many realize, however, that a 1976 Metro plan actually envisaged a Blue Line western extension which included four additional stations west of the current Snowdon terminus through NDG, Montreal West, Ville St. Pierre and potentially even further to Lachine proper as well as a Blue Line extension from the existing St. Michel terminus with seven more stations added to eventually terminate within Montreal North? (see link below with sidebar map).
https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/m/Montreal_Metro.htm
Clearly such an all-inclusive and conveniently-forgotten configuration of that unwisely-shelved 1976 Blue Line plan would be significantly less-costly than Mayor Plante’s original Pink Line idea which essentially came out of nowhere prior to the recent municipal election.
steph
The pink line plans offered a solution to the north-south congested orange line (Mtl-Nord / Mt-Royal / McGill). The original blue line plans were far from ‘all-inclusive” in this respect. A tram to Lachine ignores the north-south problem as well.
Blork
I think one of the main ideas behind the Pink line was to relieve pressure on the Orange line. Currently, that area of Rosemont, Petite-Patrie (etc.) feeds people into the Orange line via bus connections to Rosemont, Beaubien and other stations. The Pink line would cut most of that.
The Blue line western extension, on the other hand would feed more people into the Orange line. Most would be on the west end of the line, which is less congested, but the problem remains that the only way to get Blue line passengers downtown is via the Orange line.
Tim
Blork, won’t the REM allow people to get downtown from Edouard Montpetit station?
Kate
Tim, it will, in theory. It would partly depend on the fare structure. Would I pay an extra $3 (or whatever) to get downtown a little faster from Edouard Montpetit if I could avoid that by getting off at Cote-des-Neiges and taking the 165? If I had a seat on the metro would I choose instead to change transit methods and end up standing on a crowded REM train? Would I prefer to ride through a dark tunnel than over the mountain?
Hard to say till we see this stuff all working together, and how people actually use it.
steph
Chances are the three merged REM branches will be beyond capacity (for the tracks) and many people won’t even be able to ride the REM through the tunnel. I’m looking forward to see how they manage that issue without laying more tracks through the tunnel. – And add the Train de L’Est into into that volume somehow as well.
Ian 21:26 on 2019-06-27 Permalink
Well attrition is one way to get rid of the English school boards, I suppose.