Stephen Bronfman’s Groupe Baseball Montréal is already begging for public money for a stadium. All the people who’ve said “Fine, so long as it doesn’t take any public money” should hang their heads. If it’s allowed to happen, we will be the stooges.
Updates from March, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Valérie Plante has been reading Denis Coderre’s new book, and was surprised to find that he proposes a pink line very much like the one that was part of her own campaign platform in 2017.
She must also know it’s futile. This city has no power over its own public transit. It just has to lie back and think of England.
JaneyB
Yes and no. If voter turn out were more like 80% and not 30%, the mayor of Montreal would have more authority simply because ignoring them would create political risk for the province/feds. That won’t be happening any time soon but it would change the calculus despite cities having no real independence or much taxing power.
Mark Côté
Would it though? The CAQ got elected, as I recall, with only two east-end riding of Montreal going for them. The province, at least, can totally ignore Montreal with few political consequences.
steph
I keep thinking about the political benefit for the CAQ to allow Montreal to separate. They’d get their monopoly in the ROQ, and we could finally do our own thing. There’s a political alliance here in waiting that’s win/win.
ant6n
This particular government didn’t need much support from Montreal, but that’s not always true. It’s conceivable Montreal ridings could hold the balance of power. For example with Quebec Solidaire. But even for the Libs or the PQ, Montreal could given them the necessary ridings to gain power – I’d say it’s more important that more Montreal ridings turn into battlegrounds and stop voting always the same way.
dhomas
Who’s going to pay for everything if Montreal is gone from Quebec? Montreal is the economic engine of the province.
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Kate
The young victim of a knife attack in St-Michel Monday afternoon fled aboard an STM bus, then left the bus and collapsed. His assailant has disappeared. TVA adds that this is the fifth stabbing in town since Friday.
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Kate
The mayor has unveiled the city’s plan to boost the use of French, with the city hiring more francophones, promoting cultural works in French, and ensuring that newcomers are aware of the importance of French and the availability of language learning options.
I wasn’t aware that the city ever hired anyone who wasn’t a francophone, but I guess it looks good on paper.
dmdiem
That moment when the narrative bumps up uncomfortably against reality.
steph
I work for the provincial government, we do EVERYTHING in French. Even English speakers from the public are forced to exchange with us in french even if we’d both easily have the exchange in English.
This week we also got the propaganda from Legault about the need to ‘promote to protect French’. The literature reads that French unilingualism is a richness we shouldn’t lose. PUKE. The anti-intellectualism is such a shame. I understand that immigrants don’t have a leg to stand on against these politics, but as someone born and educated in English here in Quebec, it’s plainly a waste of resources to oppress my English. It’s weak to see it as “either be the oppressors or be oppressed”. I wish the policies weren’t rooted in low brow politics.
Does anyone know a support group I could join? A pro-anglophone, or a Montreal-Separatist cause I could invest myself in?
dmdiem
It’s the zero sum mentality I just don’t understand. If a francophone learns an English word, it doesn’t just magically erase a French word in their brain. There is every advantage to not only being bilingual, but multilingual. Europe doesn’t seem to have this problem. In fact the attitude there seems to be “You only speak 4 languages? What are you, stupid or something?” Our attitude here is, well, provincial.
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Kate
A lot of parties, some confined to a single borough, some intended to be city-wide, are getting launched toward the November election. Mario Girard has a column about all these parties, but is the question of giving boroughs more powers really uppermost in Montrealers’ minds this year?
NDG07
I don’t really want my borough to have more power as an end in itself, but it that’s the only way we can get our fair share of city spending on services and infrastructure then I’ll vote for a borough party. Cote-des-Neiges Notre-Dame-de-Grace has been shortchanged by the city for years and electing Projet Montreal at the borough level when they also controlled city hall didn’t seem to help. A lot of people don’t like Projet Montreal, but I think even more are progressive but feel let down by the current administration.
Ephraim
The problem with centralization is that sometimes what’s good for one area, isn’t for another. Just as one example… wheelie bins might work in Cartierville, but not Ville-Marie, where no one has a way to store them. Which might mean that it’s cheaper to collect garbage in Cartierville with driver-only garbage collection and impossible to do in Ville-Marie.
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Kate
CBC’s Jonathan Montpetit teases out the story behind the REM. His view is not going to surprise anyone who followed ant6n’s critiques throughout the process: Quebec simply bypassed the body set up to manage transit in the city and is doing what it wants. Although the project got started under the Liberals, the CAQ are running with it, and François Legault’s shameless reconfiguring of Quebec City’s proposed tram layout to serve more of his suburban voters shows us where the REM is going, even if it disfigures Montreal neighbourhoods for generations.
steph
The elevated 40, Decarie, or the destroyed Faubourg à m’lasse have all grossly disfigured Montreal. We recently had a chance to correct the gross spaghetti Turcot interchange – instead we replaced it with a new pile of spaghetti. I don’t think the REM going down Rene is anywhere near those aberrations.
what grosses me out about the REM is the financial and organizational monopoly we’re handing over to a private company. the REM will become one of the biggest money holes this city has ever taken on. And not through corruption (like all our other past failings), but through sheer incompetence and short-sightedness.
John B
Legally, if the ARTM is supposed to have the final word over transit planning on greater Montreal, how did the REM get through that, was it because it was organized while the ARTM was still being formed? If that’s the case can’t they just say “no” to the REM de l’est?
Can the city refuse planning permission or zoning for they pylons on Réné-Levesque? It would be hard to build an elevated train with no pylons.
Also, can Montreal go to court and get the “no transit development allowed” law overturned somehow? I don’t know the history of it, but it seems like a law specifically designed to let provincial politicians meddle for political gain.
That Legault asked CDPQ Infra about transit to the East and not the ARTM is pretty damning.
Finally, I’m still not convinced an elevated train down R-L would be so bad. We are conditioned here to not like elevated things because of the 40, but I’ve spent some time in Vancouver and where I’ve run into Skytrain infrastructure it doesn’t seem too bad. Vancouver is hilly, so sometimes the Skytrain tracks are quite high, and when that happens it does feel quite open and better than an “elevated” track close to the ground. Unfortunately we don’t have the hilliness here so we’ll end up with something mid-height. Still, R-L isn’t exactly beautiful, and I suspect that the REM won’t make it significantly worse. I’m not sure about further out though.
Kate
We get blasé about René-Lévesque, but it’s one of our main “big city” thoroughfares with major buildings along it. The REM will be a scar and an eyesore for generations if it’s allowed. Look at the concrete pylons in the photo in the original story above, imagine them going past St Patrick’s and the Chinatown gate, it’s just a crawling horror.
John B, it doesn’t matter what the law says. Montreal saying “hey, you can’t do that!” is like a couple of kids playing a game then trying to overrule an adult who says play time is over.
Uatu
After the last referendum cities like Montreal, Westmount, west Island all threatened to declare themselves independent and seperate from a separate Quebec. Quebec then made cities all provincial entities so that would never happen again. So there’s no way QC city will release it’s stranglehold on Montreal anytime soon
Su
I am wondering whether there is an ISDS clause creating government compliance on this PPP project. The CETA trade deal was going to include a clause stating that corporations can sue
Governments for inconvenient regulations. Not sure if that clause was finally included in CETA, but if it was it may affect “partnership” “stakeholder” schemes like REM.qatzelok
I wonder if people who spend their days driving and staring at screens… can still recognize good urbanism. Maybe not.
Perhaps the CDPQ sees our newfound blindness as an opportunity to build uglier for more profit.
ant6n
Definitely under EU law, this contract between government and CDPQInfra would not be possible without a bidding process. Only a municipally owned transit agency only operating within that municipality could get this kind of directly awarded contract – so the CDPQInfra-style contracts would only work with the STM or perhaps ARTM (if one is more lenient on the ownership).
And it makes sense: either the entity with a directly awarded contract is under direct control of government and has transit for that area as its main purpose, so “profit” would be directed towards that goal. Or you have entities that have different goals for the contract (like making profit for shareholders), in which case there should be a competitive bidding process to make sure that the public is paying market-rate, and the contract won’t allow the private entity to drain a bunch of funding away from the public.
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Kate
The Journal has a more detailed story about how a teenage girl was killed in a crash on the 40 on the weekend.
Additionally, CBC talked to some young women who knew the victim.
Tim S. 20:06 on 2021-03-22 Permalink
How out of touch do you have to be to look at the current state of the world, and say to yourself that this is the perfect time for an expensive vanity project that requires large crowds?
I’m also tempted to think that if he really wants CAQ support he should offer to build it in St-Jean. Maybe he can even get a REM extension thrown in. Or hey, here’s an idea, maybe some of the land around Mirabel airport.
Mr.Chinaski 15:06 on 2021-03-23 Permalink
Well, the stadium wouldn’t be finished until about 4 years from now if we would start tomorrow to build (if you look at how long it took for the latest MLB stadiums). So forget your crowd problem, there won’t be any by then.
Kevin 16:22 on 2021-03-23 Permalink
Legault claiming baseball players would pay income taxes which the province would then turn over to other companies to convince them to move here isn’t even the steamiest pile of BS he’s dumped in the past year, but it’s close.