Updates from November, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Kate 21:24 on 2019-11-20 Permalink | Reply  

    Mayor Plante hailed the sizable Montreal contingent in the new federal cabinet on Wednesday: Pablo Rodriguez, Marc Miller, Mélanie Joly, Steven Guilbeault, David Lametti and Marc Garneau were all elevated. Some eyebrows have been raised over Guilbeault, who made his name at Equiterre, getting Canadian Heritage instead of the Environment portfolio that many expected.

     
    • Michael Black 22:07 on 2019-11-20 Permalink

      Walkingeaglenews reports that “some guy” has been appointed “Indigenous Services Minister”.

    • Kate 22:18 on 2019-11-20 Permalink

      There’s a minister of Crown-Indigenous relations (Carolyn Bennett, apparently picking up the same job she had before the election), a minister of Indigenous services (Marc Miller) and a minister of Northern Affairs (Dan Vandal). Vandal’s Wikipedia page says he’s Métis. There’s nothing on Bennett’s or Miller’s pages alluding to any Indigenous ancestry.

      Here’s the complete list.

      We also now have a “minister of middle class prosperity”!

  • Kate 13:44 on 2019-11-20 Permalink | Reply  

    Not for the first time and, likely, not the last, discussions are held about how to make the city less hostile to the homeless.

     
    • SMD 14:28 on 2019-11-20 Permalink

      This is all well and good, but it frustrates me how the link is never made between homelessness and the evicting of precarious populations from working-class neighbourhoods. Where does the city think homeless people come from? Often from neighbourhoods like mine, where they were able to live simply and cheaply until speculators and developers made their homes their playground. My neighbour got renovicted from his long-term home this spring. He slept in various garages and parks all through the summer, often coming to my place for a meal and a shower. Despite our best efforts, we couldn’t find a place he could afford in our rapidly-gentrifying neighbourhood (and there’s a decade wait for social housing). The last time I saw him he said he had a good lead on a place further north, and I really hope he found a roof before the snow fell. Like the director of the Old Brewery Mission said earlier this year, evictions of the working class are “generators of homelessness.”

    • Ephraim 21:05 on 2019-11-20 Permalink

      It’s not from the neighbourhoods, it was a function of getting rid of rooming houses without thinking about replacing them. The problem is that rooming houses are difficult to manage… and they aren’t usually profitable to manage. We need help in this area. This is the part of housing that needs fixing

    • Filp 21:25 on 2019-11-20 Permalink

      Couple that with drug addiction and mental issues, and homelessness becomes way more complicated than high rent. I mean, often when someone can’t afford their rent, plan B isn’t to sleep in the metro station. It’s to move further away. At least for the chronically homeless, who are the most visible, it is doubtful they ended up in that situation from a purely monetary perspective. If your unresolved mental issues mean you can’t hold a job, low rent won’t cut it. And with drug addiction, the money you get probably isn’t going directly to rent anyway.

      It can be debated whether deinstitutionalisation was a mistake, but certainly what came after was not properly organized. We went from abusive services to inadequate services

    • Michael Black 22:05 on 2019-11-20 Permalink

      I’m not sure that’s quite right. One big problem is that you can’t tell what state someone was in when they became homeless, and what is the result of their situation. However someone lands in the situation, it can be devastating. You pretty much lose everything, making it really hard to come back even under good conditions. And the wear and tear of being homeless can drag people down even further. So is someone doing drugs or drinking because that brought them there, or because living homeless causes them to kill the pain?

      I’m not sure it’s that important why someone ends up homeless. Maybe it can preempt some from landing there, though I’m not sure that’s seen as too important. But there are many barriers to coming back. Drinking and drugs don’t help, but I think other issues are bigger.

      Michael

    • Ephraim 07:45 on 2019-11-21 Permalink

      We already know that getting someone into stable housing is the first step to solving most of the problems. The federal government is housing first. The problem is that in the 1980s we had this movement away from rooming houses and that was affordable housing for singles. We have shared housing, but that needs stability and cooperation. And some people just want their own place, even if they can’t afford it. We need rooming houses and/or microhomes. But a rooming house is tough. The person who owns them and runs them just isn’t equipped or taught how to deal with people who aren’t sober… and they flock to that accommodation. I lived near one and the guy who ran it kicked out anyone who wasn’t sober, because he just couldn’t deal with it and it’s effects on others.

      It’s a tough problem without a quick solution.And we already know that you can’t create sobriety until after you have stability. But you also have to want to be sober.

    • david10000 20:08 on 2019-11-21 Permalink

      Micro apartments are absolutely necessary. I lived in one for a year off Park Lafontaine for a year and it was heaven – nothing to clean, nothing to do maintain, lived spare.

      Here again, zoning in Montreal is creating all sorts of problems.

      Change the zoning on the Plateau, and on a typical triplex lot, you could have 70 people living there instead of 7. Rinse/repeat, and rents start to drop, or at least rate of increase does. As long as Montreal has jobs and universities, and Canada allows immigration, people will continue moving to Montreal. We need to build in the areas people want to live.

  • Kate 13:34 on 2019-11-20 Permalink | Reply  

    The city hopes to repair 25,000 potholes by Christmas, with the proviso that the weather allows.

     
    • Ephraim 07:47 on 2019-11-21 Permalink

      Is it really “repair” and not simply “patch” because there is nothing really comprehensive about the way the city deals with this. I’ve seen at least one suburban city that has specialized machinery to actually repave the whole area… not simply dump in asphalt and then run a steam roller over it.

  • Kate 09:17 on 2019-11-20 Permalink | Reply  

    Irish-Montrealer and tireless self-promoter Donovan King weighs in on CBC against naming the Griffintown REM station for Bernard Landry, although his position is carefully stated against Landry’s anti-immigrant views, not his politics – and I’m not sure you’ve been able to call the city’s old Irish working class “immigrants” since about 1850.

     
    • qatzelok 10:56 on 2019-11-20 Permalink

      Landry’s family were Acadian refugees who settled in Quebec in 1770. So he’s not must less “immigrant” than many starving Irish refugees were.

    • david100 20:12 on 2019-11-21 Permalink

      Yeah, his family has only been here for 250 years.

      Also, Landry wasn’t anti-immigrant at all. Not really clear to me why anglos are always promoting this idea that [insert PQ leader] is anti-immigrant because they’re anti-Canada. The don’t believe in your political project (Canada), that doesn’t mean that they want to establish Dachau up in Chicoutimi and force people to wear maple leaves on their chests in public.

  • Kate 09:13 on 2019-11-20 Permalink | Reply  

    TVA says that downtown is suffering from a 22% commercial vacancy rate for street-level business, blamed on lengthy construction on Ste-Catherine Street.

     
    • Kate 09:04 on 2019-11-20 Permalink | Reply  

      Anglo groups excluded from official hearings on Bill 40, the school board law, have been holding their own hearings under the banner APPELE-Quebec – the Alliance for the Promotion of Public English-language Education. Not surprisingly, I haven’t found any mention of this group or its “hearings” on the franco media side.

       
      • Jack 13:11 on 2019-11-20 Permalink

        Look I dont have any truck or trade with CAQ, but APPELE_Quebec is a perfect example of “astroturfing”. For the most part its a creation of the Provincial Liberal Party, QESBA and QCGN.
        Who are the self appointed spokespeople for all things Anglo. In my mind it is disingenuous to see people speaking for the english speaking community when ultimately their talking about is a paycheque or a groups funding. From what I can figure out the QESBA ( English Schools Boards Associations) has 6 employees and in 2018 this was their budget for salaries $ 532,600. How much is Russell Copeman’s salary?
        Check out the CTV piece and the declarations of Russell Copeman and Benoit Roberge. What makes more sense?

      • Jack 13:12 on 2019-11-20 Permalink

        Sorry I was referring to the Global piece.

    • Kate 09:00 on 2019-11-20 Permalink | Reply  

      Relevant but depressing tale of another renoviction process, this one a rooming house on Notre-Dame in St-Henri.

       
      • Roman 09:18 on 2019-11-20 Permalink

        And what to do when buildings truly require major renos? So many buildings in St Henri are in a decrepit state. Some haven’t been renovated in 50 years with faulty foundations, leaking roofs.

      • SKB 09:22 on 2019-11-20 Permalink

        Sure. But that isn’t what we are talking about here.

      • Spi 10:39 on 2019-11-20 Permalink

        This is just a consequence of the current system. Essentially building a bubble of unaffordability, a few lucky ones get to enjoy the benefits for a few decades and then one by one the lagging revenue potential is going to be exploited when the building is sold.

        It’s only going to get worse as boomers age into retirement and sell their rental properties as a retirement fund and new owners who paid ridiculous multiples will have to find a way to make it work.

      • MarcG 11:03 on 2019-11-20 Permalink

        A proposal: you can’t own a building unless you live in it.

      • SMD 13:21 on 2019-11-20 Permalink

        With you all the way, @MarcG.

        Québec Solidaire has proposed a moratorium on renovictions in sectors where the housing vacancy rate is less than 3%. We should be talking about this much more.

      • Spi 14:31 on 2019-11-20 Permalink

        In theory that’s nice but you’ll end up with probably worse and more cases of discrimination. It’s one thing to rent a unit to a stranger it’s another thing to have that stranger as a neighbour.

        I’ve seen multiple instances where an entire triplex that’s been split up into 2 3 1/2 on each floor is occupied exclusively by single women, that doesn’t just happen by coincidence. People have a narrow window for what makes for a good tenant and an even narrower one for what makes for a good neighbour.

      • Tim 10:29 on 2019-11-21 Permalink

        The biggest problem here is the original owner was permitted to let their building fall into a state of disrepair so bad that the building had to be condemned. Why wasn’t a lien put on that building so that the city could have claimed some of the money from the sale?

    • Kate 08:53 on 2019-11-20 Permalink | Reply  

      The STM plans to shell out $66 million for 20 electric bendy buses for the Pie-IX rapid bus lane. The article also lists costs like additional parts and training for a kind of bus the STM has never operated before.

       
      • Kate 08:48 on 2019-11-20 Permalink | Reply  

        QMI talks with a man who grew up at Blue Bonnets where his father worked with the horses, as consultations begin about how to proceed with the development of the site, a rare open space in the heart of the island.

         
        c
        Compose new post
        j
        Next post/Next comment
        k
        Previous post/Previous comment
        r
        Reply
        e
        Edit
        o
        Show/Hide comments
        t
        Go to top
        l
        Go to login
        h
        Show/Hide help
        shift + esc
        Cancel