Aaron Derfel’s latest shows that the city’s Covid progress is steady but potentially fragile; we’re containing here, but a couple of big gatherings or parties could set it off here again.
Updates from July, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Two drivers caught minutes apart on the new bridge – the implication is a street race – were clocked at 175 km/h in an 80 km/h zone. Upshot: $1500 tickets and lose your licence for a week. For some people that’s chump change and a good story at a party.
JP
I’ve been seeing and hearing a lot of cars driving extremely fast and just seeing generally bad driving behaviour. I wouldn’t mind seeing more speed bumps in residential sectors.
Yesterday, at a four-stop-sign intersection, a car stopped, but as we were crossing started driving at us, albeit not speeding toward us. It was still disconcerting. My mom is older and can’t walk as fast as me. Nevertheless, I turned around and he also stopped his car once he was past us. Not sure who started the verbal altercation, but we definitely yelled expletives at each other. I’m still not clear on what we did wrong to deserve his wrath.
I’m still mad about it. I’m actually worried about going for a walk in my neighbourhood now in case he recognizes me and starts a fight…not too many brown people in this section of Ahuntsic. I don’t think I’d recognize him at all, but he might recognize me.
And, I agree with you, Kate. A week and $1500 is really not much of a punishment or deterrent for some. I think you should lose your license for a couple of months at least. If you need it to go to work, too bad. You should have thought about that before.
Eprhaim
Some countries use the day-fine system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine where you are fined half your disposable income per day. Finland is sort of famous for this, but day fines only apply if you exceed the limit by 20 km/h. Others, like Switzerland, can lay criminal charges if you exceed the speed limit excessively, usually at least 40 km/h above the posted limit.
To me, criminal charges seem excessive, but day-fines, or fines multiplied by the size of the engine or value of the car should be something we can talk about when speeding over 40km/h above the posted limit. The article says that they were lost 14 points. The maximum ticket (before fees) where you lose 14 points is $990 for first offence and $1485 for fourth offence and above. SAAQ has a PDF with all the fines listed.
dwgs
If you lose 14 demerit points your insurance costs go up significantly as well.
Joey
So as I understand it the technology exists to regulate a car’s maximum speed. Is there any reason why car companies should not be regulated to cap speed at, say, 130 km/h? I get that sometimes there are legit-seeming excuses to drive above the speed limit, and there are spots where speed limits seem artificially low, fine. But is there any reason why a car should be able to exceed the posted speed limit by 50%? Not to take responsibility away from drivers, but governments/regulators are being negligent by pretending such things don’t exist. Wikipedia tells me that my electric Nissan Leaf has its speed capped at 145 km/h to prevent rapid loss of range caused by excessive battery use, so it can be done if there’s an incentive to do so – why “saving lives” isn’t an acceptable reason is beyond me.
JaneyB
Ontario is very severe about this and we should take a page out of their book:
6 demerit points, immediate 7 day vehicle impoundment (and costs), up to 2 year licence suspension (effective immediately), fines between $2,000 – $10,000, jail up to 6 months, and 100% + Insurance increase (which is already very high since ON has an all-private car insurance system). That’s from a first offence. Good. Incredibly, in 2019, more than 600 people were charged!@ JP: You did nothing wrong to deserve his wrath. That’s your mind trying to make sense of a scary situation. The guy was a jerk and you just happened to be in the way. It is perfectly reasonable for you to be angry at him.
mare
The GPS navigation system—standard in almost all new cars—knows what the speed limit is (it uses this to calculate arrival times). As far as I know there’s no jurisdiction in the world However where this information is used to limit the speed drivers can go.
In Europe there are speed cameras everywhere, both on highways and, combined with red light cameras, at many intersections. Maximum speed enforcement is a task the cops don’t spend much time of their time on, and fines go into provincial coffers, so city cops don’t have a quota.
Because of our demerit point system and because Quebec only has rear number plates this is really hard and expensive to implement here, plus there are laws that speed traps have to be advertised.
It’s technically and legally complicated, expensive, and I think the police brotherhood is against ii too, even though traffic stops aren’t their favourite pastime. Not much incentive to change the status quo.Uatu
@joey- the bullshit excuse for it is that the driver might need access to high speed in case of emergency. A load of crap IMHO
Kate
Joey, cars are sold partly on fantasy – look at all the commercials showing fast driving on open empty roads – and one of the fantasies is you can make the car go as fast as you like. It would work against this fantasy to have to add in small print “Car has been maxed out at 130 km/h”.
Dhomas
I had a similar experience as JP just last week. A driver in a pickup truck overtook another car on a residential street by driving through the bike lane, because the first driver had the audacity of driving the speed limit of 30. The speed limit is 30 because it’s next to a park. There was a kid on a scooter walking his dog in the bike lane. I was walking toward the park with my 3 kids, and I yelled at the driver, who had his window open, “t’es pressé?! C’t’une zone de 30! Y a des enfants qui jouent!”. I got a nice middle finger and cursing as a response. The finger stayed out until he turned the corner on a very long block and the stream of expletives only ceased when he was out of earshot. Some people are just assholes…
I also noticed a lot more street racing and excessive speed, both on city streets and on the highway. It flared up while there was no one on the roads at the beginning of the pandemic, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten back to normal since then.
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Kate
Via Rail will be temporarily laying off a thousand workers and the south shore’s RTL transit commission will be cutting services and beginning layoffs in September.
The feds just brought in their biggest ever deficit at $343 billion. CERB is costing $73B and the emergency wage subsidy $82B according to the numbers here. Comparisons are made to both the Great Depression and the cost of World War II.
JaneyB
These are frightening times. No question. At this point, I’m trying to limit my exposure to economic news as much as to medical news and covid vectors. I notice the papers are already starting to add some climate crisis news to that already malefic cocktail. All real but I will be listening to radio dramas instead while I focus hard on doing my tiny bit to keep the economy humming and my neighbours healthy. Can’t do that from under my blankets. Thankfully, every other country is staggering with the same problems so maybe we’ll get some international coordination on this…after November, of course. Shit has happened before and societies recovered.
Kate
This is the thing, JaneyB. The whole world is facing this problem. The debt is amounts owed to each other. It seems far-fetched, but if Joe owes $20 to Fred, and Fred owes $20 to Jane, and Jane owes $20 to Joe, they should be able to scrub out the debt because it’s self-cancelling. There must be a lot of this debt that could be forgiven in this way if it could only be sorted out.
The problem would be that bankers want to get their cut, so they would put up a lot of obfuscation to make sure it couldn’t happen.
Raymond LUtz
J’acquiesce à ces sages paroles… But just one point: “Shit has happened before and societies recovered.”. Shit like wars, economic depressions, pandemic… yes, societies recovered. But we can’t recover from the coming runaway climate and systemic global ecosystems collapses. The first shoe to drop: ice free arctic summer (in 10 years?). Then, every thing will go south real fast.
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Kate
Plateau borough has plans to preserve certain old signs including St-Viateur Bagel, Cinéma L’Amour, Les Verres stérilisés, J. Omer Roy, H. Lalonde & Frère and Chez Ménick.
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Kate
The SPVM has unveiled its new policy on street checks. The five reasons given here suggest cops will still have considerable latitude. To prevent a crime, to collect information, to identify someone they’re looking for, suggests a wide range of possible excuses. The SPVM has ruled out banning the checks generally.
Every time they try to change their ways, the SPVM gets back to relying on the judgement of individual cops, and look where this has brought us.
Eprhaim
With bodycams…. maybe. Without bodycams… just too open to abuse. There still is no official policy to deal with cell phones… and no policy to tell people their rights when stopped…. like that they can film and they can lock their phones.
Jack
It is so obvious that our police force is simply going to play “rope a dope”. They will just wait this out has they have done before. Late 80’s early 90’s starting with Anthony Griffin’s murder to the murder of Marcellus Francois, the same new approach was bandied about, it is all the same B.S.
Until the Police force looks like Montreal’s and not Blainville’s, nothing will happen.
One key element is Yvan Francouer, who frankly has more power than the chief. In 2007 the Unions magazine described the problem with racial profiling thus,
“Évidemment, quand on parle de profilage racial, moi je ramène le monde à une autre réalité : le profilage criminel. C’est normal de faire du profilage criminel. J’ai donné l’exemple tout à l’heure d’un quartier qui serait d’une seule ethnie. Si je m’en vais à Acton Vale à côté, y a-t il quel- qu’un qui va m’accuser d’arrêter seulement des blancs francophones ? C’est ça le profilage criminel : on fait le profil de ceux qui causent les problèmes puis on les arrête. Et ce n’est pas du profilage racial.”
I truly believe that is the mentality that still exists as tone death and crazy as it sounds.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/montreal-police-release-letter-denouncing-brotherhood-president-comments-1.5630427
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Kate
A man of Haitian origin who works for Lafarge in St-Laurent ended his shift to find a noose hanging over his parking space, last month. Item mentions that several nooses were also found on construction sites in Toronto around the same time. Not mentioned is the widely reported incident in the U.S. in which Bubba Wallace, the only Black driver in NASCAR, found a noose hanging in his assigned area at a track: Donald Trump called it a hoax and demanded Wallace apologize.
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Kate
The site of the Maison Radio-Canada was sold off for $42 million in 2017. Now the new owner has gone on to sell off a quarter of the site for $114 million. Story explains why this might be so (it’s not quite alleged to have been shady).
Incidentally, I can’t make out why it’s considered an improvement for Radio-Canada to move from a building it owned, to a new expensive building it does not own and has to rent for $22 million a year.
walkerp
Even if it costs more over time, many orgs choose not to own property because it creates an entirely new and large amount of responsibilities, often which are not part of the core business. You basically have to create a real estate department, with responsbilities for maintenance, insurance, buying and selling, etc. Owned properties are also assets against whose value damages can be levied in civil suit, taxes etc.
Renting is sort of like outsourcing in this view.
Just speaking generally. CBC is so large and part of the government, so it seems to me that it would be preferable to own as well.
Spi
In what meaningful way is te CBC part of the government? That’s a very meaningful statement to make.
Of course QMI, bury’s the part about also getting a new building/studios on top of the $42M and being of a fixed lease for the new offices for decades to come.
Blork
CBC is a crown corporation, meaning it is funded by the government, and is ultimately accountable to it, but operates independently of it.
Douglas
Radio Canada got a crappy price because they mandated any developer to wait 3-4 years and continue renting the old building while the new building is being built and the zoning was still commercial. So the developer had to take the risk of going to the city and get the zoning changed.
Groupe Mach waited and went through the projet particulier process with the city to transform the zoning into residential. Meanwhile condo prices jumped 20% during those few years Groupe Mach waited. Once the zoning was granted the value skyrocketed. I think the zoning change alone would give that entire lot a 200-300M dollar value.
They could have retrofitted and moved into another existing office building. Sell the old building once its vacant.
Again… we see governments have no idea what they are doing real estate wise and get into bad deals.
Phil M
Owning a building is not without its own costs. Maybe not $20 million a year, but maintenance, security, property taxes add up. Not to mention that upgrading the old facilities to modern standards would have been incredibly expensive; easily $200+ million. In that respect, leasing might not be such a bad idea, and of course leasing an entire office building that was built to your specifications is gonna cost a premium.
As to the sale price, and it’s current value, as stated by Douglas, the site went from being commercially zoned to residential, and there is a housing crunch, so yes, it will appreciate in value. The developers are also putting in a ton of money to build these properties. It’s exactly the same as renovating houses for a profit. You buy something no one wants, put a lot of cash and work into it, and create something that people will pay top dollar for. It’s perfectly logical.
JaneyB
Maybe the govt needs an aggressive real estate arm to avoid getting suckered like this? (And yes, I’m thinking of UQAM’s insane real estate projects too eg Ilot Voyageur). A good example would be the Ontario Teacher’s Pension Fund, which hired the best, most enterprising money managers from the private sector to manage its assets. As a result it is one of the most successful pension funds in the world. Private enterprise thinking can be smart and lucrative, provided it has public oversight and regulation. Civil servants, though often wonderful, are out of their element in the world of real estate, imo.
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Kate
Bike theft has been a chronic problem here since I can remember, but a heightened demand, probably sparked by the urge to avoid public transit, seems to be driving a worse epidemic of bike thefts.
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Kate
We’re hardly out of the woods yet, but journalists are already writing accounts of how things played out at the earlier stages of the pandemic in Montreal. This one is the work of two L’actualité writers.
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Kate
The SPVM is expected to outline its new rules on street checks sometime Wednesday.
Also in the news at the moment is the teenage girl (Filipina) who was wrestled to the ground and handcuffed recently, and a man (originally from Cameroon) who was pepper-sprayed in his rental car after clipping a yellow.
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Kate
The mayor didn’t consult François Legault before ordaining the mask in indoor spaces in Montreal. In fact, she saw no need to ask permission. The way Le Devoir sees it, Montreal is shaming other towns by leading in this matter.
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