Users of the Lachine marina that’s on the chopping block are claiming it brings in $10 million a year in benefits to the city, while a city spokesman says the figure doesn’t take into account the considerable sums it has to pay out to keep the thing running.
Updates from November, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Several hundred people demonstrated Saturday for protecting French; despite a claim made in a comment below, most of the people in Radio-Canada’s photo are wearing masks.
j2
I wonder more if these are the result of the radicalization techniques which led to Trumpism more than about the need to protect the French language. I’ll lean on some other stats posted in this blog to point out that mathematically it’s hard to show a loss.
(At this point it’s early in the infection, ah to have only hundreds infected.)
David72
The recent black rights matter stuff in the US has revived a Marxian analysis of power and race that has given new life to the french language militant portion of the separatist movement, for which this analysis isn’t new.
Wilton Guerrero
Settle down.
Marx was a materialist economist not a race theorist, black rights are not “stuff”, you are the one regularly stretching to invoke fashionable American terminology where it does not really fit.
Jack
“Marxian analysis” please, we are talking about a group of people who control every lever of political, economic power in Quebec, claiming that it’s not enough. These are all tropes used to create cohesion amongst the majority community, they are under attack…from Dawson.
Uatu
Yeah and even Dawson is run by a francophone
David72
People scoffing at the valence of the current Marxian analytical moment in the culture should literally pick up any history textbook currently being taught in our schools. Even back when I was in school, our history was heavily inflected with a decolonization paradigm, a functional and methodological primogenitor of the current, American-influenced round of ‘save french” activism. I know that most readers of this blog moved here from Canada or attended an English school way back, but this illiberal approach is hardly new. Back in the day it was more Franz Fanon than American, obviously, but from the whole speaking English as an act of aggression against the linguistic minority – you know, old stains but just as telling. The big difference is that the Americans have given a renewed legitimacy to this sort of analysis, when it had sort of faded.
Kate
“moved here from Canada” indeed.
Chris
Several of the BLM founders have declared themselves as Marxists. And Critical Theory draws from Western Marxism. So the Marxist angle is not out of nowhere. But I think it’s exaggerated. The run of the mill BLM supporter doesn’t represent the founders or hardcore elements; they won’t even know what Marxism and CRT are.
dwgs
Thank you for once again showing us the errors of our ways David8675309, we shall endeavour to be more perspicacious in the future.
david247
^ No prob.
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Kate
Total Covid deaths in Quebec passed the 7000 mark on Saturday, which also saw the highest number of new cases yet in 24 hours – 1480.
Montreal also saw its cumulative cases pass 50,000.
Kevin
Inconsistent messaging kills again.
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Kate
La Presse’s Mario Girard has a longish piece Saturday on rising homelessness in Montreal. A lot of things are touched on, but toward the end of the piece, Serge Lareault mentions the huge difference between offering someone a free hotel room for the night (and chucking him out first thing in the morning), and giving someone a home they can stay in, like most human beings, 24/7. The first is something you do in an emergency situation to keep a person from freezing on the street overnight. The second is harder, but it’s the real solution.
david211
There’s another solution, which Montreal had for basically its entire existence but which has declined massively due to a variety of city policies: flop houses. Used to be that a person could get him- or herself into a flophouse for a few bucks a night, without any real problem. If we’ve collectively decided that keeping “neighborhood character” is more important than affordable housing, we could at least suspend our little rules so that people aren’t actually sleeping in the streets.
You look at the variety of regulatory measures taken by the city (and in some cases, the province), such as minimum unit sizes, occupancy limits, identification requirements, payment options, hotel taxes, and zoning (the fundamental driver of the artificial land shortage which has just launched the cost of housing into the stratosphere) . . . and it’s hard not to conclude that we’re actually legislating homelessness.
(And the mode for bringing back flophouses would be the sort of conversion of old hotels we’ve already seen, with incentives/disincentives.)
david211
Then again, the activist position now seems to be that the homeless should be living in tents traffic medians and grown over lots – which is perfectly and somewhat elegantly consistent with the ‘don’t build more housing’ line of “progressive” politics.
Kate
Lareault doesn’t give a solution, he simply describes a need. And it’s not a flophouse either – it’s the need for someone to have continuity.
david211
A person who’s living on the streets doesn’t need to stay in a giant video-surveyed room at the old Vic where highly paid social workers babysit them, and they don’t need a tent and a nice patch of grass in the media on Rene-Levesque, they need a lockable room with a bed and a sink, with daily, weekly, or monthly rates. And that has been made, de facto, illegal in this town at any price-point that makes sense to a homeless person.
Tim
David*: what does a “highly paid” social worker make? I’m curious what you think amounts to high pay.
I don’t know anyone who gets into that field for pay.
david224
Highly paid vs. a flophouse manager.
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Kate
There will be a demonstration in defence of French on Saturday afternoon in Place Vauquelin.
La Presse solicited suggestions from readers on how to protect French.
TVA is running a piece by André Pratte on whether French is in decline in a climate where even questioning this can be politically dicey.
Daniel
The reader ideas on how to protect French was a fascinating read. For some of them, I nodded or shrugged. For some, my jaw-dropped — people seem to believe that Quebec could control the languages that people speak outside of Quebec? LOLZ. No.
It did make me wonder: How many of those suggestions were made by people who do not work or have not worked in an age or an industry where the rest of the world is a click (or at most, a phone call — quelle horreur!) away?
Kevin
I gave up after reading two suggestions to do things that are already done, and two suggestions that violate human rights.
Jack
The French language in Montreal is not in decline. More people speak French in Montreal then at anytime since the 1830’s. Montreal has never been an exclusively French speaking city. The only thing in decline is French origin Quebecers. If you say that in Quebec now you are excommunicated. The “decline” of French is a way for our political class to be elected in ridings where the idea of the other is a construction of Quebecor. This whole “debate” was started by a small group of conservative nationalists who have the megaphone of 70% of Quebec media. They have targeted English speaking institutions because there’s is a zero sum game. Dawson is led by a guy from La Tuque. McGill’s President is from St-Timothee both are “Pur Laine” yet they are not able to get that page turned. The signs I saw at the demo today all focussed on those two institutions.
Douglas
If you look at the pictures of the protest today. All white. No physical distancing.
Looks a lot like a Trump rally.
This is as much of a skin colour issue as it is a language issue.
Kate
I don’t think it’s narrowed down to skin colour but it is a form of xenophobia. There’s just no getting away from the fact that Quebec needs immigrants, and people from other countries are more likely to know English rather than French.
Also, the photos I’ve seen show a lot of masks.
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Kate
It’s not just Longueuil that has too many deer. Parks on the eastern and western ends of the island of Montreal are having their forests chewed up by a surplus of these animals.
dhomas
On Wednesday, I saw one on the side of Saint-Jean-Baptiste Boulevard in RDP, just chewing on a tree’s bark in a front yard. It’s a pretty busy street, though it was pretty early in the morning so not much traffic.
John B
Some well-meaning wildlife laws have come into force over the past generation-ish, and it means that people are generally not allowed to move or kill wildlife that appears in the city. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to apply to predators, (see: hand-wringing over coyotes early this year), so some non-predators have taken up residence in town, especially in the greener areas, (and with more urban greening in vogue the greener areas are expanding).
This is leading to some problems, for example too many deer in parks, or groundhogs eating their way through community gardens, and people aren’t allowed to do anything about it.
Kate
I can’t help thinking that in some places having free edible animals roaming around would be considered a bonus, not a disadvantage, although I have no idea how safe it would be to eat venison from deer that scavenge in the city, and you can’t safely hunt (with bullets or even crossbows) where people are also walking around in a park.
John B
Maybe there’s a way to use a trap on deer? There definitely is for smaller animals.
jaddle
It’s not so much too many deer as not enough wolves.
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Kate
Galeries d’Anjou mall was evacuated on Friday evening after someone let off tear gas following a brawl.
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Kate
The city’s plan to convert an old golf course into an extension to Bois d’Anjou park has been thwarted, and instead Anjou is going to get a new Costco.
mare
Well, and Bois d’Anjou was already such a great park. I went there once with our dogs because I had to drop someone off and Google really displayed it in large type. But there is no access to it. On one side it’s surrounded by the golf course and at the other side there’s a bunch of vague industrial buildings. I parked at the golf course and got immediately told that parking is for members only (this was on a morning Ain early spring, with still quite some snow on the ground. Not exactly golfing weather. So I drove around and couldn’t find another entrance so I parked on the street and then trespassed over the golf course anyway. I have to say it’s by far the most unimpressive city “nature” park there is. Rather tiny and there are no paths, you have to bushwhack your way into it.
At least a Costco has a parking lot, maybe the park will be easier accessible as well.
dhomas
I’m disappointed. But it’s not really news. It’s been known since at least February 2020 (unofficially by Costco employees) that this would be the site of the new Costco. It was supposed to open in October 2020, but was delayed because COVID.
Mike Chamberlain 22:28 on 2020-11-28 Permalink
The marina serves an important but unacknowledged function of keeping the river area safe, with a number of boats available at any time in case of an emergency. The waters nearby, including the Lachine Rapids, are treacherous. It seems like a good thing that boats are going back and forth in the area at all times.
Kate 22:57 on 2020-11-28 Permalink
Safe from what, though? Who is at risk, except the boaters themselves?
John B 10:40 on 2020-11-29 Permalink
I can imagine that all the kayakers and SUP’ers that are imagined in the new park will need to get towed out of the current from time-to-time.
Kate 11:15 on 2020-11-29 Permalink
That doesn’t argue for keeping the marina. I very much doubt the marina has people standing by for rescue operations. Let’s not pretend that in paying for the marina, the city has been ensuring river safety.
Mr.Chinaski 13:01 on 2020-11-29 Permalink
It’s a shit show on the current local Lachine facebook groups. That 10 million dollar number is full of lies anyway.
Faiz imam 12:55 on 2020-11-30 Permalink
Links please? I wanna see the drama.