Tony Accurso and some of his companies have been fined millions for tax fraud.
Updates from October, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
A Reddit user who tracks local weather records notes “Today is Montreal’s first -10 windchill of the season, which is the earliest since 1976-10-26. Typical first is November 17. Record earliest is 1974-10-19; latest 2009-12-08.”
Halloween weather Saturday seems likely to be dead-on average.
JP
I think we almost reached 25 degrees Celsius last Friday, so that’s a dip of 35 degrees…(if we’re factoring in humidex and wind chill temps)!!
Raymond Lutz
As predicted by Paul Beckwith more than a year ago “Arctic sea-ice loss is shifting the jet stream center of rotation to Greenland’s center”. So we’ll see more fckd up swings between moderate temperatures and arctic colds. And crop failures, and food price explosion… yadda yadda yadda
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Kate
Developer Prével has proposed a $750-million development project for Ville-Marie, in the area of the old Molson brewery and Maison Radio-Canada and an area called the îlot des Portes Sainte‑Marie, which is explained in this PDF.
david422
They’ve been trying to get that site active for years now, ever since word came down that Molson was shutting the brewery. Personally, I wouldn’t want to live there – the bridge, bad transit, nothing to do, and the glacial cold sweeping in off the river for 4 months of the year.
Prevel has just completed a massive (I want to say ~2000 units in 5-6 buildings) project in the faubourg des récollets, called 21st Arrondissement. So, they have experience and ability to deliver on something like this, which is critical, obviously. It’s also nice to see that their design game continues to improve.
A 6 year time horizon might seem ambitious, given everything else going up – ahem, the Rad-Can tower projects – but Prevel did 21st Arrondissement as a mix of 2/3 condo and 1/3 rental apartment, and if they do the same, then 6 years seems about right.
Kate
It might be kind of bleak now, but maybe in 20 years (as DeWolf recently remarked here about Griffintown), there will be real neighbourhood there.
david422
Yeah, it’ll improve. But that old area between Viger Square and the water has all been rebuilt now, and it’s pretty uninteresting. That’s sort of what I predict here. Which is fine, we need sleeper suburbs as dense and close to the job centers and city amenities as possible.
Griffintown is much better and will continue to improve – they’ve been dumping in a lot of commercial spaces, and some other spaces still remain. It’ll take decades, but Griffintown will end up like the Concordia ghetto is today – run down towers dating to the same 10 year period, mostly rental units (due to condo to apartment conversions, absentee landlords, etc), and all sorts of shops and restaurants. The ETS ghetto they’ll call it. Will be very cool.
Kate
You’re right about the Faubourg Québec, as it’s called. It has to be ten years ago at least that I walked around there and felt vaguely disturbed that it was totally a dormitory. Not so much as a dépanneur on a corner. It was the image I had in mind when the redevelopment of Griffintown began, and I was afraid the same lack of imagination would happen there: a developer’s desire to park people in small condos, assuming they can drive out to get anything they need, don’t need any social hubs or services nearby.
I wonder whether the conditions of the pandemic may have taught us that it actually is better to have some things within reach – a dep, a fruiterie and/or a bakery, a café, maybe a pharmacy. Places you can get sustenance and basic supplies (and maybe a little human interaction) even if they’re not full-scale grocery stores. The city’s got to zone that kind of thing in, never let a Faubourg Quebec happen again.
DeWolf
This isn’t actually the Molson brewery site, David, this is the big empty lot on Ste-Catherine between de Lorimier and Parthenais. The first phase is already under construction under the name Esplanade Cartier.
Personally I think this particular project looks interesting because it has a mix of different building types and heights. It’s meant to have a lot of small alleys and streets that may create some good pedestrian spaces. And it’s only 150 metres from Papineau metro.
david224
I know exactly where this is. But you’re right that they mention the Molson site in the second part of that article.
DeWolf
I was a bit confused by your quip about “bad transit” and “nothing to do” considering the site is a three-minute walk from Papineau metro and the Village.
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Kate
The jobless rate in Montreal is double that in Laval and the Montérégie. Not surprisingly, the city had more of the kinds of jobs that were nuked by the pandemic, jobs connected with tourism and entertainment for example.
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Kate
Now that we’re past the 50-year anniversary of the October Crisis, we’re getting deep into the 25‑year anniversary of the 1995 referendum and how Montreal was the main battlefield, as this piece puts it. There’s some examination of nationalist conscience, with the new PQ guy militating for another referendum, but CTV’s question whether anything has changed since 1995 seems odd to me. The answer, unusually, is yes.
Don Macpherson waves a red rag with a story about the rejected ballots which were a scandal at the time.
More pieces: Jack Jedwab on the narrow victory for the No side.
Kevin
Don and JF Lisee got into it on twitter, with both of them half-remembering the Gold report.
In the end, Judge Gold determined that dozens of officials rejected an unusually large number of “No” votes, but he could not prove there was a conspiracy to do so.
25 years later, I think the referendum result we got was the best possible result we could have had.
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Kate
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case from the City of Montreal, which doesn’t want to pay a bill of $825,000 from a firm involved in the old water meters scandal.
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Kate
Some notes from CTV on weekend traffic problems.
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Kate
The St-Denis branch of Pizzaiolle, which was in the chrome diner building near Laurier metro, has closed for good, the owners blaming not only the pandemic but the construction of the REV.
DeWolf
The owner cites “les changements de vocation de la rue Saint-Denis” but doesn’t mention the REV specifically. I pass by there all the time and the restaurant was shuttered well before the REV construction had even started. Seems like TVA is taking liberties with the facts (surprising, I know).
Jack
I stubbed my toe yesterday, thanks Valerie.
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Kate
Laval has turned down the SPVM idea of merging their police force with Montreal’s and Longueuil’s.
I think eventually this must happen, because the entire urban area is basically a city that hasn’t come to terms with itself, but there will be resistance – some of it for good reasons – so it won’t happen for awhile.
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Kate
Radio-Canada says Projet Montréal has lost half its membership since 2017. That can sound drastic, but it may simply mean people letting their membership lapse between elections.
david422
I think there’s basically only one way to run Montreal effectively, call it the “iron law,” which is to be a strong mayor who’s highly visible on 4-5 major and undivisive files that capture the public imagination, and then spends the rest of the time fixing pot-holes and basically managing the status quo. Taking any position on any divisive hot button issue is a loser, and any progressive change on these files should be done incrementally.
How does this play out in practice? The major files are obvious: think about Tremblay’s QdS. It costs a lot of money, but that’s the only real line of attack. Perfect. Coderre’s Bonaventure freeway demolition is the same. No manufactured loss in traffic volumes, and a nice shiny new park. Plante had one of these in the pink line, but inexplicably blew it.
More than any other single issue, Coderre was brought down by the electric grand prix thing – this was a ‘public imagination’ misjudgment, wherein the cost turned it into a hot button issue. This happened to Plante with the street closure plan on the Mount.
I think there’s some sort of internal tension in the party where you’ve got a bunch of activists who have a lot of ideas and want to get stuff done, but the people immediately surrounding Plante understand the “iron law” of running Montreal, and want to obey it. Basically, she has to wrangle or replace caucus members who won’t get onside with how Montreal just wants to be run. It’s tough being on top.
david422
And, unfortunately, it’s probably too late for Plante to change much up. That Camillien Houde thing was so damaging precisely because it distilled and catalyzed an opinion about her priorities, much in the same way that the electric grand prix did for Coderre’s autocratic and profligate rule.
She won’t be getting a covid boost, and she can’t even really propose a big new project to distract everyone, because she doesn’t have the credibility, and city revenues are about to collapse. Coderre, when he announced a big project, you knew that it would happen – which was part of the problem – and he had the political connections to get matching funds. So not Plante’s in a position where she’s dropped the popular high profile stuff, kept the hot button stuff, and the smaller bore stuff – which they’ve done very well – may not be enough to see her returned to office.
And she’s managing a caucus that wants to be a lot more active (ie. hot button).
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Kate
The man whom police shot dead on Thursday morning in NDG was, it emerges, Black.
François Legault needs to look at this incident, even meditate on it. What is systemic racism and why is it so difficult to see? A cop is faced with a disturbed person: the split-second decision – the only safe thing to do is shoot him dead – is where the problem lies. It’s there in plain sight, in a sadly long list including Anthony Griffin, Alain Magloire and Pierre Coriolan and this man on Thursday morning.
What do the police do when it’s a white guy, or a woman, off their head and raving, with or without a potential weapon? We don’t hear so much about them getting blown away.
Sue Montgomery is angry that this happened on her patch.
Update: and now the police brotherhood is angry that Sue Montgomery is angry.
Meezly
The link doesn’t work, FYI.
Meezly
I would really like Legault and borough mayors to take a look at SF’s example: https://www.npr.org/2020/10/19/924146486/removing-cops-from-behavioral-crisis-calls-we-need-to-change-the-model
Blork
Regarding Legault’s denial of systemic racism, I see two possibilities:
Either he is extremely stupid and prescriptive and refuses to see systemic racism simply because there is no explicit POLICY written down in the SYSTEM that says “shoot black people but don’t shoot white people” …
…or there is something else going on, such as a reluctance to admit to something that could open the door to lawsuits and whatnot.
I don’t think he’s quite that stupid, so it’s gotta be that other thing, in which case no amount of reasoning or explanation will make a difference.
Kate
Meezly, thanks for the correction. Miscoded. Fixed.
Meezly
Blork, I had very similar questions, and Jack’s explanation in this thread helped explain a lot (at least to me): https://mtlcityweblog.com/2020/10/05/covid-app-given-quebec-nod/#comment-150411
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