Ensemble Montreal councillors must sit around trying to think up new issues to pick at. Now two of them are bringing up the issue of air quality in the metro. It sounds like they haven’t even inquired of the STM whether anything like this is already being done, and – even better – they bring up the question of metal particles in the air in the London Tube – a system with metal wheels and iron tracks.
Updates from September, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
A man walking along St-Hubert last week got hit in the face with construction debris, and he has since died. CBC says police are investigating: it’s alleged that workers were cutting paving stones with no barrier to protect passersby from flying fragments.
JaneyB
Terrible. Doesn’t surprise me though. The precautions for travaux here are negligible at best. I now tend to just assume it will be half-assed and sometimes turn around and take another route. RIP M. Gaudreau.
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Kate
There’s still a 20-meter hill of snow in the St-Michel quarry, used as a snow dump. It’s dark gray now.
Also mentions that the city’s going to use drones to oversee its snow dumps and figure out where the snow trucks ought to be directed as the winter progresses.
(Been noticing for some time, by the way, that Metro is doing a good job of finding city stories nobody else does. I hope they can go on doing it.)
mare
In the Saint-Michel quarry there also used to be an enormous mountain of compost with lots of plastic in it. Only on close inspection I found out it was not compost, but a mountain of used sandbags, some still intact, others with shredded plastic.
I guess when the water level went down the city collected them.A few weeks ago they acquired a new machine (it was parked outside and the paint was still shiny ) to separate the plastic from the sand and now there are two mountains of clean sand, and the plastic bags are hopefully recycled.
mare
That’s in the complexe environmental Saint Michel, not in the quarry where they dump the snow.
Chris
That “clean” sand is probably still full of microplastic particles.
Kate
So are we all, Chris.
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Kate
The judge in the Plateau softball hearing has put it off for a few months to have time to study the issues in the case. That link is to a Twitter posting by CJAD’s Shuyee Lee.
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Kate
There were power failures in Old Montreal on Friday morning: power was shut off because of a gas leak caused by a vehicle collision.
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Kate
A woman was snatched from outside her workplace in Verdun on Thursday and, at gunpoint, forced to drive her attacker to Dix30, where she got away from him with a ruse. The suspect has been rounded up. Except for mentioning that she had encountered this man in the course of her job, there’s nothing said here about his possible motivations.
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Kate
Even though the operators of Golf de L’Île-des-Sœurs have made a mockery of what a public golf course should be, and broken several rules laid out in the emphyteutic lease, the operator is openly mocking the borough mayor and his attempt to end his deal with them.
dwgs
Sounds like the golf course’s lawyers were much sharper than anyone on municipal side.
Matt D
Someone should vandalize the shit out of that golf course
Uatu
Welp I guess it’s time to cut off the water and electricity, erm, I mean do some infrastructure work as well as repair the road to and from the site
Ian
Well… maybe the borough should have looked at the lease more carefully. I mean the guy is right, the difference between a private and a public golf course is very specific. It doesn’t look like he’s broken any rules, and typical of the city when enough complaints are made they start posturing but if the law doesn’t back them up, they need to shut up.
I mean don’t get me wrong, Guillaume is clearly a grade A asshole, but the city has no business harassing a private citizen complying with the law. Now if the laws are changed, that’s a whole different matter, and they obviously should be – but this guy would obviously have to be grandfathered in.
Clearly Verdun needs to be a little more careful in the future, especially with the redevelopment of Nun’s Island on the horizon.
Kate
Is Nuns’ island going to be redeveloped? Most of what’s there isn’t all that old.
Ian Rogers
I was hearing some talk on CBC radio about redesigning the area around the REM to accommodate contemporary urban planning, as a kind of direction the future might take for the area in general.
Faiz Imam
Yeah, the area next to the highway is currently older midrise office towers, and there is a large retail area. Both have acres of parking. All of that is gonna be replaced with the sort of new high density mixed use stuff we’ve argued about multiple times before.
But the residential areas farther away are NIMBY central, those houses are condos are not going anywhere, and that golf course is very unlikely to get build up. We should at least hope that it’ll get converted into an actually public park.
With the new station, that entire secluded area is only a rail+ short bus ride away. Could be pretty nice, but again, the locals bought those houses because they were secluded.
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Kate
I’m thrilled to report that the Quebec government is planning a season of strengthening French and may even reopen the charter of the French language, for example to add laws to punish immigrants who don’t take French classes, and impose language requirements on businesses with 49 employees or fewer. More punishments and heavier fines, that’s what a language needs to thrive.
Update: The CAQ wants to never communicate in English except with members of the “historically anglo” community. Don Macpherson ponders the implications.
Not sure I’d count. Born here to an anglo mother, who was born here to anglo parents (my mother’s dad, born in Griffintown, married a woman from England); this grandfather’s mother was born in Beauharnois in 1843 where her father, an immigrant from County Meath, was working on canal construction. She was married in 1865 to my great-grandfather John Ryan (b. 1837-ish in Tipperary) at Saint Patrick’s by Father Patrick Dowd himself. On the other hand, my father, alas, was an immigrant, from an Irish enclave in Lancashire, so maybe I will not be considered historical after all.
Jack
The new minister is girding his loins to defend the pathetic state of the French majority’s control over the lives of others. He has already changed the name of his Ministry to make sure that diversity and inclusion are for others, not nous.
https://www.facebook.com/xavier.camus.9Ian
That is a subtle yet very important distinction. Good observation, Jack.
Jack
This from the most important public intellectual in Quebec. “Et rééquilibrer le financement des institutions universitaires et hospitalières, qui désavantage structurellement les francophones.”
Cut funding to Hospitals and University’s built brick by brick by non members of the french majority, this will make me feel bigger in the pants. Sorry too much caffeine.
https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2019/09/05/reprendre-la-bataille-du-francaisIan
…and in many cases, most obviously in the example of the Jewish General, specifically because they weren’t allowed to integrate into the French mainstream.
Kate
This is Jack’s link, for those who don’t Facebook:
jeather
Yes, as I will bang on forever, the first Jewish immigrants here came from eastern Europe, not England — but the Catholic/French schools wouldn’t let them attend and the Protestant/English would, to some extent (there were quotas at McGill until the 60s). Blame yourselves for the Jewish community being English.
Ian
Same thing happened to the Italians and the Greeks.
dwgs
The Italians adapted better because they were able to attend French (Catholic) schools. Even if people in the Greek community wanted to send their kids to school in French they couldn’t because Orthodoxy.
JaneyB
I sense some Supreme Court rulings ahead. Some parts of the original Bill 101 were struck down by them and cannot be snuck back in using the notwithstanding clause.
dhomas
My parents came here from Italy. They and my aunts and uncles could have sent their kids to French school. Many of them chose English for at least two reasons: 1) they thought English was of greater value should they want to move elsewhere in North America (a lot of people came through Montreal, but had plans to either move to the ROC or the US) and they thought they would not learn English if not exposed to it in school; 2) French is similar enough to Italian that they figured their kids would “pick it up”, like many of them did. But it was a choice, as far as my parents told me; no one forced the Italians into English schools.
Kate
dwgs and dhomas: when I was writing for Openfile I went to interview a woman who lives near Jean-Talon market. I can’t remember what the hook was to the story, but this woman’s got an Italian surname and is about third-generation here, speaks English like any anglo. She told me that when her grandparents first took her dad to the nearby French school as a little kid, the nuns turned him away because they were not francophone, so he was enrolled in English school instead and the whole family has tended toward the anglo side ever since. The fact of them all being Catholics together wasn’t in the picture.
That can’t have been unusual. I tend to read the local obituaries on weekends and in Montreal the break of Italian surnames posted seems to be about 75-25 on the anglo side. (I haven’t been keeping count and this may not be exact, but it’s close.)
qatzelok
You can say what you want about Quebecois wanting to preserve the culture, but this has had a strong impact on other cultural communities here as well. Italian Montrealers still often have a distinct “Italianness” that other immigrant Italians have long lost in other cities in N.A..
The first Toronto Italian I met when I was a teenager, spoke like a WASP and ate Velveeta sandwiches on white bread.
Bill 101 may have actually have prevented this kind of thing here.
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Kate
Deloitte has turned in a very favourable study of Montreal’s transit situation and its future.
ant6n
Well, Montreal perhaps has a bright transit future, if the only thing you care about is the dollar-amount being spent, not what it’s being spent on…
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Kate
Here are some notes on the travails of driving this weekend. Among other things, the outbound Jacques-Cartier will be closed all weekend.
EmilyG 23:44 on 2019-09-06 Permalink
Sorry about the air quality in the metro, fellow riders – I’ve been having digestive problems lately. :/
Seriously, though, I haven’t heard of a whole lot of people complaining about metro air quality.
Kate 05:47 on 2019-09-07 Permalink
Often, when the train opens its doors at Berri-UQÀM, you can smell pizza. But that’s been true for years and I haven’t heard of any particular health issues connected with pizza particles.