A man who’d lived in his Verdun apartment for 40 years killed himself after getting a renoviction notice.
Updates from May, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
It’s the 379th anniversary of the founding of Montreal as a European-style settlement by Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve and Jeanne Mance. Cheers.
Ant6n
I feel like some sort of expensive celebration is in order. Maybe our mayor unelect can organize something.
Kate
I can put a small granite stump in my back yard!
thomas
To have a proper anniversary celebration don’t we first have to figure out how to say it in Latin?
jeather
They’re replacing the manhole covers!
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Kate
Radio-Canada says the premier will announce soon that terrasses will be allowed to open as of May 28.
Update: TVA also says Tuesday’s 5 pm presser will announce the end of the curfew on the same day.
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Kate
I don’t know how Valérie Plante feels about this, but reading that the Quebec economy minister turned to ex-mayor Denis Coderre to try to pull strings over the Grand Prix would have irked me to hell and back, in her shoes.
Update: OK, this is how she feels about it. But she’d be wise to say less: he’s going to troll her hard between now and November.
David887
That’s a hell of a quote from Vincent Marissal:.
«S’il redevient maire, il ne pourra pas se comporter comme ça. T’as pas à faire des petits deals avec tes amis de la F1», dit-il.
Marissal taking a neutral position on Coderre’s potential return (and likelihood thereof, by implication) is yet another indication that morale and/or expectations are running pretty low on the PM side.
DeWolf
I wouldn’t call that a neutral position at all…? It’s a potshot. He’s all but calling Coderre corrupt.
david879
Its neutral on his potential reelection (“if he becomes mayor again, he can’t act like he did last time”) rather than slinging campaign invective, say ‘with how he acted last time, he shouldn’t be mayor.’ The way the language is used there suggests Marissal is looking at the race as an observer, rather than a partisan. If Plante hasn’t got the Marissals into full partisan mode at this stage, it doesn’t auger well.
Kate
david, I agree with DeWolf. That is not a neutral remark by Marissal.
walkerp
David wants desperately to convince himself and others that Plante isn’t going to get re‑elected.
David2222
^ Oh yeah, that’s my plan. Thanks for your valuable contribution.
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Kate
City shelters say they can attest to having helped 300 people stop being homeless, in some cases with the help of a federal program called Bienvenue. Unfortunately, at the same time an even larger number have become homeless because of the pandemic.
Ephraim
The city has a list of all the vacant lots in the city. (Heck, you can look them up on the role. Like 2325 Ontario East. Maybe it’s time to expropriate for social housing. All you need is the space of a 20 sq m for each dwelling. Or they could use the space to make a rooming house, which the city also needs. Or they could lease the land to a REIT and use the money to provide social housing or write it into the contract and have them manage it.
Spi
How about the city starts by fixing the affordable housing units they have to leave empty because they aren’t in a livable condition?
Kate
Spi, earlier this month I blogged about how more than 500 social housing units were going to be renovated and put back into use because of $100 million from the federal government. The work’s expected to take 3 years but at least it’s happening.
Ephraim
@Spi – Which is one of the reasons that I don’t think the city should be running affordable housing, but instead let REITs run them and subsidize them… because they can’t maintain them properly. Never heard of a REIT that allows a building to go derelict… they have to answer to shareholders who want a return. Write a contract and let them take care of the buildings, since they have maintenance people on staff and know the exact percentages of costs.
@Kate – One of the buildings listed as an eyesore is owned by the CSM and just proves the point that school boards and some other government agencies don’t seem to be able to maintain buildings. That building has had scaffolding in front of it for years, wooden stairs and more. The city needs to change it’s permit charge for scaffolding on the public domain and raise the costs of it over time, exponentially, until the point where they can put a hypotec and seize the property. This will encourage owners to do the work quickly. The government needs to pass a law that allows the city to step in and do the work based on tender if the work goes undone within a certain amount of time.
Kevin
Ephraim
The CSDM was notorious for not maintaining buildings to the point where they had to tear down several—and others required complete gut jobs.Baril. Sophie Barat. Saint Gerard. The list is very long. Those fools were incompetent
Kate
I still think it’s a real shame about Baril. That was a handsome building.
Ephraim
@Kevin – I think if you did an audit of buildings, you would likely find out that many of the school boards didn’t do the proper building upkeep. They all play games with their budgets… steal from voc. ed., etc.
Cadichon
Expropriation is the least cost-effective way of buying land. The City has plenty of other options to acquire land for social housing, through its pre-emptive right or the 20-20-20 by-law. And under PM the City has resumed buying land for social housing.
Regarding the units in need of repair, the Office municipal d’habitation is actually quite good at maintaining its stock, the problem is they depend on Québec for renovation funds. There is a systemic underfunding of HLM maintenance in Montréal, due to provincial fund allocations being based on population size, and not on number of units to maintain.dwgs
You can add Ste Catherine de Sienne to the list of CSDM buildings that had to be demolished.
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Kate
You can now get vaccinated in your car at the airport.
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Kate
La Presse looks into new businesses that have opened downtown, grabbing vacant spots to start new restaurants and stores.
DeWolf
I’ve passed through downtown several times in recent weeks and it’s feeling much busier than it was at any point in 2020, except maybe the pre-Christmas rush when Ste-Catherine was seriously packed.
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Kate
A new mayoral candidate is in the news Monday: Marc-Antoine Desjardins says his Ralliement pour Montréal party – founded in January by Félix-Antoine Joli-Cœur – will present a slate of candidates soon. Desjardins ran in 2017 with Mélanie Joly’s party, and again in the byelection in 2019 for mayor of the Plateau, winning neither election.
A
He is quite active in many of the plateau Facebook groups, all he seems to do is complain but not offer any solutions to anything
Kate
He should join Ensemble. That’s all they do too.
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Kate
The PQ wants to get back to a number from 2011, it says, when 81% of us spoke French at home.
They want to do this by reducing immigration, being “more severe” with bilingual towns, and putting pressure on American video distribution services to have more French content.
But the thing here is that they want us speaking French at home. It is not enough that we speak French at work, in stores, in the street – we need to be French. And the only way to increase that number is to either import only native French speakers, or get French speakers to have more babies. Pushing women to have more babies is not a great look in our times – but you can hardly patrol which language people speak in their own homes. It’s a puzzle.
City hall opposition, seeing an opportunity to stir shit, has presented a petition signed by 18,000 people, to push the city to do more for French. This is, on the face of it, incredibly unwise: city hall, under all its changing administrations, has left language politics to the provincial government, and has concerned itself with running the city. It’s not elected to impose language laws nor should it, and if Denis Coderre succeeds in getting re-elected he may find himself in the inconvenient position of having to impose language laws on the kind of international big shots he most values.
Daniel
Every once in a while, some reasonable ideas emerge in all this. Pressure Netflix to have more French content? Sure. Why not. Offer more/better/cheaper French classes? Again, sure.
Reduce immigration? LOLZ. No. And the alarm bells ringing over the supposed decline of French at home? Eesh.
Some things seem like fine policy proposals. And then you have the parts that smack so clearly of the worst of identity politics.
steph
I’m just going to fill out the next census as monolingual french mother-tongue.
Kate
Daniel, I agree. Enrich the cultural scene here with more TV and video content in French, more live concerts and theatre when it becomes possible, support for more publishing in French – absolutely.
But it isn’t the city’s job to do this.
Ant6n
@Steph
That may also be shooting yourself in the foot. Once there very few anglos left on paper, they may decide minority protections aren’t necessary anymore. Basically there’s no winning.Kevin
They already believe that minority protections aren’t necessary, because they don’t admit to any difference between an anglo born and raised in Quebec and an American.
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Kate
The city was shaken by a 3.8-magnitude earthquake Monday morning at 7:03. I missed it, but I guess not everyone did.
MarcG
Wow, I had forgotten it entirely, like it was a dream, thanks!
steph
I heard Coderre was strongly against the earthquake and that when he’s mayor he won’t be as soft on earthquakes like PM.
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Kate
Mamadi Fara Camara, newly a father of twins, is still shaken up by his wrongful arrest in January and isn’t yet able to return to work. And despite promises made when he was released, his immigration status is not settled.
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