Some may remember a news story last month about small record stores being fined ridiculous amounts for staying open past official retail hours. This is about to change, although it’s not made clear here how the restriction on retail hours, decreed by the province, will be dealt with, nor whether the stores will be able to escape the high fines the Quebec inspectors levied on them.
Updates from January, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
This photo has already gone around a bit, but I wanted to blog it: a shot of the depth of the excavation that will connect the REM to Édouard-Montpetit metro station.
mare
Those elevators better work. ALL THE TIME.
Robert H
Vraiment saisissante. Cela me rappelle de monter dans le métro à Washington DC. Ce qui m’a frappé, c’est la profondeur des stations, chacune un puits de mine.
@mare: An understatement, pun intended.
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Kate
City hall has declined to adopt a definition of antisemitism that has been found controversial. Inevitably Lionel Perez and Marvin Rotrand are enacting outrage, Perez even saying the decision sends a message of hate.
Note that neither Calgary nor Vancouver have adopted the definition either.
I’m getting tired of the politics of extremes in our time. Nobody really thinks city hall is a nest of antisemites, and it cheapens the seriousness of the real existence of antisemitism to play a game pretending it is.
Ian
When I see people trying to define antisemitism in this way I often feel uncomfortable.
It ties in very much to an extremely specific view of what Israel is, who it is for, and what it is that even excludes a lot of Jews. It’s intellectually disingenuous and manipulative.Worse, it leads to situations like the JDL harassing the “wrong” kind of Jews in the streets, threatening to cut the “sideburns” and trim the beards of Hassidim.
https://twitter.com/RadicalStreets/status/1221942753245966337
No one group should get to define who is a “good” Jew and call everyone else antisemitic… the relationship between pro-Israel and white power orgs is very disconcerting,
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Kate
A dog that’s been a hot potato since it attacked and injured six people in summer 2018 will be euthanized, Anne-France Goldwater having finally given up on her crusade to preserve its life.
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Kate
Both the orange and green lines took a dive Tuesday morning, but are back to normal as I post.
jeather
Irritatingly, the stm twitter accounts were useless for this. I don’t know why they bother having them. (I was on around 8:20 when they said service was resuming; the first tweet was at 8:52.)
Blork
Yeah, I spent a glorious 30 minutes adrift at Berri/UQAM, during which my headphone batteries died.
jeather
Green line down again this evening!
Blork
I KNOW!!! And slowdown on the Orange line. FFS!
Daniel
It’s a source of regular frustration to turn up to the station and find things are down with no prior reporting on their Twitter accounts. Of course, if people are informed of shutdowns, they could plan alternate routes or delay their journeys, and take some of the load of the system. It seems common sense to me for the STM to want to keep their customers informed, similar to how things work in London for the TfL.
I’ve no idea why the STM don’t reliably report their outages. The only reason I can think of (besides incompetence) is it makes their service stats look better, but that’s dreadful customer service.
John B
They only claim to report outages of 10 minutes or more on Twitter, (which is an improvement – I think it used to be 20 minutes). Having knowledge before heading out would be great, but it’s clearly not a priority for the STM, (see also: iBus).
denpanosekai
yep today sucked.
Joey
I haven’t taken the Metro as a commuter since, I don’t know, 2005? When one of the lines is down, is there any kind of indication outside the station to give people a chance to find an alternate route without going down to platform level?
JaneyB
@Joey. Nope. Nothing outside the station because…nothing inside the station either. STM likes to keep an element of mystery to commutes.
Joey
Thanks JaneyB. I can understand why they would hedge if the delay seems relatively short, but talk about low-hanging fruit…
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Kate
Pierrefonds-Roxboro wants guarantees from Montreal on flooding, after the feds dished out $50 million to help. Unfortunately, that won’t pay for a time machine to go back and tell people not to build houses on wetlands and flood plains.
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Kate
The Craig pumping station, a curious little stone building under the Jacques-Cartier bridge, looks to be on its way out after decades of neglect led to the demolition of its chimney recently.
nau
Not on topic, but that old typhoid hospital building by Lucien-L’Allier metro that burned is being demolished. Looks like they’re keeping the facade on three sides. As I mentioned in the old thread, there’s a large space behind that building. Now, post-fire, maybe they will expand the footprint of the building, making the development more lucrative.
Janet
In 2016, a large part of the block where I live was destroyed by fire (https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/police-investigating-arson-in-old-montreal). The developer of a new condo project had been obliged to preserve the façade of the greystone building on Wellington. The day following the fire, the façade was demolished, though Dinu Bumbaru was publicly calling for its preservation. Now the entire space is taken up by a fancy new condo building, with no need to incorporate any historic elements.
Not far away, in what has become a commercial street in Griffintown, I see another huge excavation where there had previously been a flower store that was sold. Next door to that was a carwash, which conveniently burned to the ground a few months ago (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/fire-griffintown-1.5076473). Now that entire space is being developed as condos.
How can one not see a pattern in these fires? Why are the developments allowed to proceed (often bigger and better) afterwards? (I see that some readers did express a certain scepticism regarding the Peel Street fire back in March.)
It might be interesting to keep a running tally of such fires.Kate
Janet, it’s not a bad idea to have a list of areas where people mysteriously profited from destruction, but I don’t think that can be applied to the Craig building, which is sort of marooned on a traffic island in a spot where I don’t think anyone will want to build condos.
Although you never know. That area will change radically once the Molson buildings are demolished.
Janet
You’re right, Kate. I was replying to Nau’s not-on-topic comment — thereby hijacking the thread.
Ian
“Mystery” fires are very common. Walk down any residential street in Mile End, if the building is built more recently than 1920 chances are that was a “mysterious” fire. People don’t remember how common those were but even in the early 1990s I wasn’t able to get fire insurance for my apartment on St. Larry at St Joe as the entire neighbourhood had been blacklisted by the insurance industry for having too many fires within too short a space of time.
Anthony van Osch
Regarding the Craig Pumping Station and its impending demolition, the city says they can’t safe it. I was just in Dresden, Germany and compared to the restoration of that city, whose centre was obliterated by WWII firebombing, Montreal’s excuses are patently ridiculous
Ian
Maybe they felt there was more point to rebuilding the city centre of one of the most beautiful cities in Germany than an antique pumping station out in the east end Montreal hidden under bridge.
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Kate
Owners of downtown condos have been fined by their condo syndicate for running their properties as Airbnbs.
Blork
Not just owners; also the long-term tenants. The condos were leased to people who then turned around and Airbnb’d them. Both parties held responsible.
Ephraim
Why is RQ not doing their job. The fine is $2.5K per day and $5K per day corporate. We need this money to pay off the deficit.
jeather
One owner was fined, but not the other; I’m not sure why.
Blork
@jeather, it could be that one owner was shown to know what was going on and to enable it (thus fined) but the other owner was unaware.
jeather
Sure, or one owner was in the process of eviction, or one owner was renting to their sibling who rented out. I couldn’t find the court judgement to see.
Ephraim
@jeather Likely not published yet. But there are at least 2 other judgement in the system where the strata has won against the condo owner. (And a slate of judgments at the rental board where people lost their apartments for doing STR without notifying the landlord.)
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Kate
The STM has suspended Gleason Frenette, head of its maintenance union. No specific problem is mentioned, but (and this is starting to sound like a refrain) intimidation and “verbal violence” are alluded to.
Chris
Words are not violence. Words can be hurtful, etc. but they aren’t violence. This modern phrasing diminishes real violence.
Ian
Huh interesting, I was wondering if thee was anyone left who wasn’t aware of the seriousness of bullying and intimidation as forms of mental abuse, but now I know. FWIW it also falls under federal laws against criminal harassment. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-264.html
Chris
Ian, not sure your point there. Those things are bad to be sure, but aren’t violence either. Not everything bad is violent.
Ian 21:55 on 2020-01-28 Permalink
PM has already made self-congratulatory posts on Facebook but have admitted thy can’t do anything about existing fines. All they did for the hours thing was change the zoning, it’s an easy workaround they should have enacted on Mile End’s commercial streets decades ago, as it would have avoided all this unpleasantness. I guess the PM crowd aren’t into records.