The story about Dawson College theatre teacher Winston Sutton and his alleged bad behaviour around women has been all over regular and social media, but the school says he’s no longer working there. A young woman writes on Medium about the toxic atmosphere in the CEGEP’s drama department.
Updates from September, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
CTV has an ultra brief piece on cycle delivery and how it will continue year‑round (seasonal amnesia?), but there’s not much more to the story. I’d like to see a more detailed piece about the cycle delivery service – who’s using it, what it’s like on a delivery trip, can anyone really haul 500 lbs. on a bike and so on.
DeWolf
I get coffee from a couple of local roasters that deliver by bicycle. if I’m not mistaken they continue delivering in the winter. Based on the last time I saw the delivery person they use an electric assist cargo bike so it’s not particularly challenging except in the iciest of conditions.
j2
I’m also curious what it means that the city started it and how that relates the owner they cite.
There are different retailers in Montreal that specialize in cargo bikes, and I know I’ve seen a bike trailer collective (“borrow me!” on a trailer parked in a known location) near de Courcelles and St Jacques, so this makes a lot of sense.
E-bikes (and e-scooters) won’t solve all accessibility issues but they do solve a lot of them for different use cases.
jeather
I also get coffee by bike. I don’t know which delivery company does them. I did have a friend who moved by bike once, apparently it went just fine, though I cannot imagine how.
Ian
e-bikes have become super common in NYC over the last few years – the cops don’t like them and they’re technically not street legal there so they get fined fairly often – but pretty much all food delivery in Manhattan is done that way now.
jaddle
You can haul a lot on a well-fitted-out bike. A few weeks ago, in New Brunswick, I saw someone coming back from the river with a canoe behind him! The Westmount Independent (https://westmountindependent.com/) had a great picture on the cover last week of a of a mover with an enormous load on a trailer. If you aren’t going up steep hills, it’s really not too hard to pull a trailer.
MarcG
Surely somebody in Westmount has a few bucks they can throw at that HTML 1.0 website?
Michael Black
Why? It’s only used to distribute the pdf. 20 years ago there were endless webpages that were “good” if you judged how they looked, but lousy if you were looking for content. Groups were intimidated by the idea of making webpages, so they handed it off to third parties who made nice webpages but didn’t know the group so couldn’t make useful pages. It feeds itself, everyone has glossy pages so that sets the standard, and thus everyone demands them, and dismisses simple pages even wherecontent is king.
The Suburban has some or all content as webpages, but each week’s edition is presented as the paper edition, some weird system that’s used elsewhere. I find that really hard to use, so I revert to the webpages, but it’s easy to miss contents. The Indepent trumps that despite the difference in webpages.
MarcG
I hear you, Michael, I’m just surprised that the fancy neighbourhood doesn’t have a fancy website and felt like taking the piss.
Tim S.
The luxury is that the fancy neighbourhood has any kind of local news. The NDG sister publication was killed off a couple of years ago.
Taylor
Hi internet forum! I’m a bike courier here in Montreal – heading into my 5th winter on the job. I work for a company called Chasseurs Courrier that does large cargo deliveries like the ones this piece mentioned (however, we ourselves don’t use e-bikes or e-cargo bikes – pedal power only!) Not sure exactly what this website is, I stumbled upon it searching for something else on the internet, but I’m happy to answer any questions people might have about bike deliveries.
Kate
Hi Taylor. This blog moves fairly fast and you’ve posted to a five-day-old thread, but maybe I can ask:
1. How many days in an average winter are you simply off the road? I can’t imagine there aren’t ice stormy days or post-blizzard days when getting a bike out at all, let alone a cargo bike, is virtually impossible.
2. What is your delivery day like? How much stuff to do you lug, and how far? I know that’s a huge question.
3. Have you been involved in any accidents?
Thank you. If you reply here, I will link it up to the top so people can see your responses.
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Kate
A dozen people with businesses on Bellechasse have written a letter to the mayor complaining about the Réseau express vélo (REV) planned for their street.
This is such bullshit.
Do you know Bellechasse at all? I’ve walked and cycled along parts of it, and have just gone along it on Streetview to remind myself what it’s like. It is not a commercial street. For blocks and blocks it’s just sort of nothing much – duplexes, small apartment buildings, a few parks and schools. You’re lucky to spot a dépanneur on a corner.
Whoever got up this letter would have had to drive for blocks – I’m willing to bet they neither walked nor cycled – to find a dozen businesses, let alone a dozen businesses whose owners could be talked into signing a complaint.
Ab so lute bullshit.
mare
Well, I currently am or have been a client of at least 10 business on Bellechasse, so your Google Streetview trip was very cursory. Two deps, a dog groomer, a pizza place, a bike shop, two garages, a coop-café, a laundromat and a hair dresser. And then there’s also a gym and dance school, another garage, another hairdresser, a Hindu temple and many other places in blocks further away from me.
At the moment they’re also doing major roadwork, started after the REV was made (water and electric /fibre conduits) so the situation is even worse. I love the bike path, but I can also understand they’re annoyed and worried, especially after many months of lockdown.
mare
4400 citizens complaining about parking? Of course people are complaining about parking, there’s never enough of it, especially in the winter during street cleaning. Signing a petition is cheap.
Another annoying thing is that those 4400 people now use the ruelles to circle around until they’ve found that elusive parking spot, because Bellechasse is a one way street now. Getting around by car is objectively more complicated, there are not many places were both the North-South and East-West streets are one-way, and it requires some readjustments to your mental map. For example if I want to get from the front of my house to the house of my neighbours in the adjacent street I’d have to drive between 6 to 10 minutes including two traffic lights. One minute by bike, 2 by foot.
Ian
That’s my regular morning bike ride, I go from one end to the other. There aren’t tons of businesses but there are enough to complain, 800 parking spots removed is a lot regardless of how you slice it. The Dairy Queen has it’s own parking but if I recall correctly it’s certainly one of the few businesses on Bellechasse that does. Besides the strip by st Hubert I imagine most business on bellechasse would be locals or drivers since there’s no bus or metro nearby for most of the street.
It seems kind of hand wavey to dismiss the concerns of people that are actually there.
DeWolf
Bellechasse is the east-west street in Rosemont with the smallest number of businesses by far. Bélanger, Saint-Zotique, Beaubien and Rosemont all have plenty of shops and various other mitigating factors that make them less appealing for the REV. So totally either you scrap the idea of having a safe cycling route or you deal with the fact that some people will be inconvenienced.
Remember when entire neighbourhoods were torn down to build highways? Now we’re talking about a bicycle highway that sacrifices 800 parking spots on a *six kilometre* stretch of road with thousands more parking spots on cross streets. Rosemont isn’t exactly downtown. Maybe all the parking spots are taken in the middle of the night, but I certainly see no shortage of places to park when I pass through.
Ian
Smallest number perhaps but it doesn’t mean they aren’t there, and haven’t been there for decades as an integral part of the neighbourhood. Like I said, if you live there it probably matters to you more. I’m sure the residents of lower Westmount were none too pleased that half their neighbourhood got razed for the VME. I’m none too pleased that happened either, especially now that that the the VME was falling apart so badly the neighbourhood got screwed up for 10 years repairing it and is still screwed up even now.
…but that doesn’t mean that somehow we need to enact a 4 lane “bike highway” (your words) on Rosemont to get revenge. That’s a really weird way of looking at things. Let’s be real here, none of this really has to do with bicycles. Removing residential parking is to make it less convenient to own cars, because those in charge feel that there are too many cars and can’t think of any way to reduce the number of on-island cars other than with punitive infrastructure. PM is all stick and no carrot in this and many other ways. I think to some extent this “punitive progressiveness” frame of mind is endemic to Quebec politics, not unlike how the OLF thinks the best way to promote the French language is to suppress other languages.
In any case, I stick by what I said – if it’s not your neighbourhood, it seems kind of hand wavey to dismiss the concerns of people that are actually there.
ant6n
Wait, so the REV is not an carrot to encourage bicycling?
DeWolf
Ian, I’m not sure how you got the idea that I think the REV is some kind of revenge against highways. My point is that it’s 2020 and we can make significant, eco-friendly infrastructure improvements without major disruption – instead of losing a neighbourhood, some people have to walk a little bit further to their cars.
I’m not sure how you can say “none of this really has to do with bicycles.” That’s your own weird idea that this is some kind of calculated attempt to punish Rosemont drivers. The REV was conceived as a way to encourage cycling through international best-practice cycling infrastructure. That means it needs to fulfil certain basic criteria: it has to be protected from cars, it needs to be wide enough for faster riders to pass slower ones, and there need to be two unidirectional lanes because the bidirectional ones (eg Rachel) are notoriously dangerous and prone to overcrowding. That’s the basis by which parking was removed, because east of Papineau, Bellechasse becomes quite narrow.
So what’s your solution? Give up on promoting cycling to anyone who isn’t comfortable riding 30km/h in mixed traffic? More half-measures like the janky bidirectional paths that Montreal has relied on for so long? Reduce the REV lanes by half to accommodate a row of parked cars at the expense of cyclist safety?
We’re in the middle of a climate crisis. That may sound like a cliché at this point but it means we’re at a crossroads: either we give up and forget about active mobility, and consider cycling some kind of eccentric hobby like in so many other North American cities, or we put the necessary infrastructure in place to bring the cycling modal share up to 20, 30 or 40 percent in central neighbourhoods, so we have a chance of reducing carbon emissions and improving public health.
Ian
Cycling is great if you are fit and relatively close to wherever you have to go and never have to carry much.
That said, I don’t really care about a world-class bike path. What I suggest to get rid of cars is simply make them unnecessary by having a world class public transit system. If I wanted to get to Bellechasse and St-Michel, for instance, it would take 42 minutes by public transit – or a 15 minute drive. I could also bike there in 20 minutes, but I’ll tell you what I won’t be doing when it’s -20 out and I have a delivery to make.
And that’s just Bellechasse. There is no reason that if I want to go north of the 40 an into VSL by transit it should take me an hour… but it does. it takes a full hour and a half to get to Ste Anne by transit at best.The annoying part is that I have reasons to need to go to those places – but I do. And I know I’m not the only one.
The thing is that there may be this world class bike path on Bellechasse, but that’s not going to make people ride their bikes as tehir main means of transportation more unless they live right in that area, are healthy, and the weather is good. Getting rid of 800 parking spaces is great optics but climate crisis or no for somebody with limited mobility that relies on public transit it’s no better than greenwashing – the only way that it actually makes the city better in any meaningful way is by reducing the number of cars -which is admittedly desirable but in no way improves our urban infrastructure as those roads are still there for things like delivery trucks and buses and even bikes – and if there is no improved public transit to go along with making it hard to have a car, it’s insulting to expect people to simply accept it.
The thing that I suspect a lot of the bike-infrastructure-solves-everything folks don’t get – for those of us who are neither pro bike nor pro car, you’re not helping by insisting that all the city’s efforts go into bikes and traffic slowing corridors and the like – you also have to figure out how to help people get around. God forbid anyone out there dare work more than 10 km from where they live or ever have to get that far for an appointment or have stroller-age children or be ill or have limited mobility or need a walker or be blind… stay home, losers. This city isn’t for you.
I know the city only has limited control over public transit but it’s pathetic and unreliable. You can build a bike path from here to Mars and it won’t solve that core problem – but everyone gets to go around patting each other on the back for doing a great job? Ridiculous.
DeWolf
Ian, literally nobody is suggesting that bike infrastructure solves everything, or that cycling is a panacea. Who on earth suggests building bike infrastructure at the expense of improving public transit? You make it seem as if transit is being compromised but it has been improved in tandem with active transportation investments. Cycling is just one part of active mobility. Before the pandemic, buses were finally becoming reliable once again, and the metro was operating at frequencies I’ve never seen before.
And improvements in cycling infrastructure almost always come in conjunction with improvements in the pedestrian environment. I know you grumble about corner bulb-outs but they exist specifically to make it safer to cross the street while also adding greenery that makes streets more pleasant to walk down. The planted medians that have been built on Clark and Rachel make it infinitely more pleasant to walk down both of those streets. The REV on Saint-Denis is being accompanied by mid-block crosswalks and pedestrian islands in the middle of the road that make it easier to cross.
As for the bit about only young, fit people being able to ride bikes – that’s easily disproven by looking at who is actually cycling around Montreal. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but the number of cyclists in Montreal has exploded over the past 10 years in direct response to the improvement in cycling infrastructure, and cyclists are more diverse than ever before. I’m out every day and I see way more kids than I used to, and no shortage of grey-haired, pot-bellied people riding bikes at their own pace. And there are plenty of people on mobility scooters and in electric wheelchairs who seem happy about the new REV and other protected bike lanes.
I don’t really get how you can be so sweepingly dismissive about bike infrastructure if you’re concerned about alternative transportation. It’s not the only tool in the kit, but it’s an important one.
Ian
I think you’re missing my point – I’m not suggesting transit instead of bikes, but rather that there needs to be a focus on transit, too.
There are lots of older folks riding bikes, but not people who are infirm. Can you imagine trying to ride a motorized wheelchair to a hospital appointment at St. Mary’s? I am happy that you are healthy enough and close enough to whatever you need to get to that you can get by with biking, but be aware that predicating your urban planning on the notion that there is nobody old or infirm anywhere in town is seriously problematic given the notion of universal accessibility that the city has been working towards for decades.
Also worth noting I worked in the garment business for many years, in light manufacturing, and I was literally the only person in the whole factory employing hundreds of people that bicycled to work. I’m not saying bicycling is a bit classist but I don’t see bike racks at the manufacturing plants so I get a feeling there are a lot of assumptions about how the world is by some of the readers of this blog.
I’m not pretending that I know what all the solutions are – but bicycling is not the only solution, and it appears to be the only idea (for different reasons) that Projet has.
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Kate
NDG-CDN mayor Sue Montgomery says the city has known for a long time that the intersection of Decarie and de Maisonneuve is dangerous, but has put off doing anything about it.
Ian
…and nothing will as long as Montgomery is there. It’s rather telling that her old PM colleagues circled the wagons to vote against the Terrebonne bike path simply to make Montgomery look bad. I wonder what Arsenault & McQueen would have to say about how essential bike infrastructure is, as a core PM platform.
Why, one might almost suspect that ll this has nothing to do with bike infrastructure or urban planning at all and is just politics.
dwgs
I have sent McQueen two emails about the dangers of cycling through that intersectionj over the last few years, it’s been an issue since before I moved to the neighbourhood over 20 years ago.
Michael Black
I thought Peter McQueen was the voice of danger at that intersection. I’m pretty sure he was the one campaigning for improvements before the hospital was finished, maybe even before he was elected?
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Kate
Groundhogs – which we saw recently are thriving this year because of a shortage of foxes – have been digging up bones at Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery.
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Kate
La Presse journalists talked to a variety of people with businesses or interests downtown – hotels, restaurants, retail – about the state of the area. Closures are expected.
SMD
Great dossier in Le Devoir, too, with haunting B&W photographs of deserted streets and boardrooms.
Ian
you got your a tag but forgot your href – what’s the link?
Ian
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Kate
The Journal notes that, with new mask enforcement indoors, the party is on the sidewalk outside of bars.
MarcG
The first photo looks like everyone wet their pants and the one of Sergakis really has him looking like Palpatine from Star Wars.
bpmpost@yahoo.ca
Being Anglo, can’t help but think how ‘fêtards’ rhymes with…
Kate
MarcG: he really does.
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Kate
Park Ex housing advocates held a demonstration Saturday to demand more social housing. With the federal Liberals putting a basic social income front and centre in their upcoming debate, it may be the moment to make more demands like this.
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Kate
Le Devoir visits the monastère des Hospitalières, the cloister of the nuns that used to look after patients at Hôtel-Dieu. Fifty nuns remain, average age 85. With a brief photo essay of views the public seldom sees.
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Kate
It’s 20 years since the murderous attack on journalist Michel Auger in the parking lot of the Journal de Montréal building on Frontenac. Auger knew it was Mom Boucher who ordered the hit after he’d written extensively on the biker wars, and police think they know the man who actually carried it out, but he’s never been arrested, although QMI says police are still watching him. Auger survived six bullets and is now retired.
QMI’s Stéphane Alarie says it was a stupid move by the Hells because it energized police to crack down on bikers in a campaign from which they’ve never quite recovered.
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Kate
Police have arrested a suspect in three bank robberies and a jewelry store holdup over the last week.
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Kate
Police responding to a noise complaint at 2 a.m. Sunday at the Clock Tower were fired at, one policeman was shot and police returned fire, wounding four. The BEI is investigating; the condition of the various victims has not been made public.
MarcG
Crazy. I wonder if it’ll turn out to be somehow related to the anti-mask rally.
Ian
I was wondering the same thing! Now that we have no tourists, what kind of rowdy out-of-towners with contempt for public safety might there be in the Old Port, after all?
EmilyG 15:27 on 2020-09-14 Permalink
As for the “no longer working there,” this post clarifies it (Facebook post but should be visible to everyone)
https://www.facebook.com/kayleigh.choiniere/posts/10160438327874966
Ian 18:25 on 2020-09-14 Permalink
Ugh brutal. It is hard to get rid of teachers once they get permanence. Like, basically unless they commit an actual crime. At my CEGEP we got a notice last September that it is now officially illegal for teaching staff to have sexual relations with any registered student.
Ian 18:28 on 2020-09-14 Permalink
addendum: and by illegal I mean against formal school policy – although I am fairly sure committing the kinds of crimes the police would get called in for would be grounds for dismissal too in most cases.