A new beach has come into existence on the far eastern end of the island, but you can’t swim from there. I wonder how they’ll keep people out of the river on really hot days.
Updates from June, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Quebec doesn’t give out public holidays for any old thing, François Legault said Monday while blowing off the possibility of having a holiday on National Indigenous Peoples day, adding that we already get too many days off here.
Now get back to work.
DeWolf
You know, moving back here from Hong Kong (that hyper-capitalist epicentre of neoliberalism), I was taken aback at how few holidays we have. I had never considered it before. Hong Kong has 16 public holidays. Quebec has eight – nine if you’re lucky enough to get both Good Friday and Easter Monday off.
GC
« On en a, toute proportion gardée, déjà beaucoup »
In proportion to whom? We have one less day off than a number of other provinces, for example.
Mark Côté
I’m still bitter that Quebec didn’t follow Ontario with regards to family day years back. February is the most dreary month with nary a stat holiday until Easter.
JP
Agreed. There is definitely a day off missing in February. Something about the way this was shut down without even a “we’ll think about it”/”we’ll study it” really bugs me.
Meezly
We always go on about how Montreal/QC has better work/life balance compared to provinces with a more Protestant-oriented work ethic. So why are politicians so stingy about public holidays? And the ready dismissal of having one for Nat’l Indigenous Peoples Day at this time. Speaks volumes about the kind of politician Legault is.
Joey
Agreed we need another day off in winter. Not surprised Legault wouldn’t even entertain the idea (essentially a stat holiday is a transfer of wealth from capital to labour). As far as a day off for National Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I think I am persuaded by the argument that, given how far we are from meaningful reconciliation, it’s premature to be giving ourselves a day off… Maybe a working day where everyone’s wages are transferred to Indigenous organizations would be more appropriate.
Kate
The only argument I can see against not giving National Indigenous Peoples’ Day off as a stat holiday is that it’s June 21, and we already have June 24 and July 1 as holidays. Clustering 3 of our sparse stat holidays together wouldn’t be ideal (and shortly before the construction holiday, too, which isn’t off for everyone, but is for a lot of folks not only in construction but also related trades).
We really do need a winter holiday. It’s a long grim stretch from New Year’s to Easter, especially the years when Easter falls late.
Daisy
Not only do we not get Family Day off, but we also don’t get Remembrance Day. So I really don’t get this argument of already having too many days off.
EG
People might argue that the day chosen for Indigenous Day is too close to two days that are already holidays in Quebec (I know there was some discussion about this when a date was first going to be chosen.)
Daisy
Maybe it would be a sign of reconciliation if the colonizers moved their own holidays to accommodate National Indigenous Peoples’ Day. In the case of the Fete nationale it would also serve to break the Catholic, St. Jean Baptiste connection.
GC
That’s an interesting argument. Considering how much the CAQ loves to tout how “secular” we are while promoting things like Bill 21, you’d think we’d want to break those connections.
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Kate
A truck driver accused of armed sex attacks is being sought by police. An attack is described in Dorval, but presumably his job means he could turn up anywhere.
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Kate
They send us these severe thunderstorm watches and we get a few sprinkles. I want the big crash and boom to clear the humid air mass.
MarcG
It looks like there’s a lot more coming down the road… https://www.wunderground.com/wundermap?lat=56.130&lon=-106.346&zoom=4&radar=1&wxstn=0
Blork
I get “severe thunderstorm watch” notifications for Outremont send to my Apple Watch. I should note that I never asked for this, nor have I ever searched for an Outremont-specific weather forecast. Also, my watch is the only place where these notifications show up. (Filed under “mysteries of the 21st Century.”)
jeather
I finally figured out how to stop getting notifications for Westmount AND Sud-Ouest AND Ville-Marie. It’s fine! Any single one of those is good, I do not need THREE notifications for every weather event. I still don’t know how it decided I regularly wanted them all.
MarcG
Maybe you two accidentally purchased severe thunderstorm watches instead of regular ones?
walkerp
We got a huge dump here in mile end. Very satisfying. No thunder and lightning though.
walkerp
ooh yikes sounds like the alert wasn’t exaggerating for the people of Mascouche!
Kate
walkerp’s not kidding. A tornado touched down in Mascouche late Monday morning, and one man is dead.
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Kate
CDPQ Infra is promising “adjustments” in the REM de l’Est project by autumn, including generously refraining from destroying Morgan Park in Maisonneuve, which had been in their plans.
Kevin
Went along Highway 40 this weekend and whoever looked at that concrete behemoth and thought that should run along Rene Levesque hates the city.
qatzelok
…or just really doesn’t care about anything except personal profit.
dhomas
Insert “Porque no los dos?” GIF.
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Kate
As we saw earlier this month, the corner of Berri and Ontario, where cyclists pick up a lot of momentum just as they reach the intersection, is a hazardous spot. La Presse says there’s been 30 bike accidents there over the last decade, despite attempts to control motor traffic at that corner.
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Kate
Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery is looking a bit ragged; workers say it’s because the cemetery is understaffed.
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Kate
CTV has some odd coverage of the opening of a branch of the REV bike lane system in Sud‑Ouest borough. The item runs like this:
1. The bike path opened and cyclists are happy
2. Denis Coderre will be re-elected and get rid of it anyway (with a tone of inevitability)
3. Some businesses on St-Denis, kilometres away from the story at hand, don’t like the loss of parking spots
Is this what’s called balanced reporting?
Admittedly Metro, which covered a few details CTV missed, also evokes the possibility the REV may be short-lived if Coderre comes back and reclaims more space for the car.
One of the angles Metro covers is that the city engineers’ strike had delayed the REV opening. Engineers also showed up for the presser about the city’s St-Jean plans.
jeather
They added bike lanes to St-Jacques (good) but left the parking lanes (bad) and then after about a week they just closed the bike lanes for, as far as I can tell, no reason.
DeWolf
Wow, sorry CTV, but that’s a really shoddy piece of work. “Critics say…” followed by quote from a single shopowner who makes a couple of ludicrous claims.
First she claims that she receives a dozen calls from clients every week who say they can’t shop at her place because they can’t find parking. I’m on St-Denis almost every day and there is always, always parking available. Both on-street and in the large off-street lot at Drolet/Marie-Anne.
And then she speaks on behalf of the fire department saying that fire trucks can’t turn onto St-Denis because they get stuck in traffic! I’ve seen multiple emergency vehicles travel down St-Denis without a problem. It’s frankly irresponsible for CTV to include that quote without actually running it by the fire department to verify it’s true.
walkerp
Note the constant car ads on the CTV website. Coincidence?
DeWolf
Something that just came to mind: Last fall, one of the loudest critics of the REV was the owner of Maisonnette, a restaurant on St-Denis. He made all the usual claims that the bike path would destroy the street, put him out of business, and he even indulged in some goofy theatrics like offering discounts to any “cyclist” who dined at his restaurant and vocally expressed their support for the REV. Thing is, it was all for show, because his restaurant was already going belly-up. It closed permanently weeks before REV construction even started. He was taking the piss the whole time. Basically a real-life internet troll.
There are legitimate issues with the REV, as with any public works project. But some people just like seeing their name in the paper and some people are looking for something or somebody to blame for their business that is failing either because of the pandemic or because it no longer meets the needs of the market.
Jonathan
I never considered calling a store that is too difficult to reach to let them know I am shopping somewhere else. I wonder how many other stores have received *dozens* of *calls* from people driving around saying they are no longer planning on visiting the store.
su
I was on the REV last week. There is parking all along, adjacent to the path. The bike traffic lights are an excellent solution to bike vs. car incidents. I did not see any cyclists blasting through the bike red!
Blork
Yeah, there are parking places, for sure. Some were removed to fit the road and sidewalk changes, but it’s not like there was some wholesale removal of parking spots. My only complaint was that (in typical Quebec fashion) the indications are confusing and illegible, at least in some places. This is based on my one experience maybe six weeks ago when I pulled into an available space on St-Denis and then was completely unable to determine whether or not it was a legitimate parking space. I don’t remember the details, but it was very ambiguous and frustrating.
DeWolf
My personal gripes:
The ambiguous parking signage that Blork mentioned, which leads many people to park in areas where they infringe on the bike path
The lack of consistent traffic signals. Some intersections have a solid red arrow to prevent cars from turning right when cyclists have priority, while others have a green arrow (straight) followed by a solid green (turns allowed) which is sometimes ignored by drivers who then cut off or ram straight into cyclists (it’s happened).
But that hardly outweighs the benefits, which is a generally harmonious co-existence between pedestrians, cyclists and drivers in a street that is now so much more pleasant to visit.
su
I think what is being complained about, is specifically the loss of Double Parking spots which are not really parking spaces anyway.
qatzelok
Kate, I’ve been circling around for two hours looking for a place to park a comment in this thread.
I may be forced to start commenting on the Laval City Weblog.
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Kate
Eighty-four percent of the SPVM live outside the city they patrol. Does this matter? Opinions differ. It’s mentioned that ten years ago it was revealed that only 20% of our cops and firefighters actually lived in the city.
dwgs
The situation is similar with the city works crews and yes, it matters. You want those people to feel as though they are a part of the community, it makes a difference.
jeather
It does matter, but I once looked it up and we can’t actually have residency requirements. This is not uncommon for police officers in all sorts of cities that don’t have residency requirements. A somewhat less obvious problem with this is that shifts are chosen to minimize commute time and not to fit community needs best. Plus of course the problem noted here before that they get free parking (illegally untaxed) for their personal vehicles.
Ephraim
@jeather – I’ve been trying to get a real answer to the question of if it’s in fact illegally untaxed. If it is, and Revenu Quebec doesn’t go after it, they are also guilty of tax evasion. Wouldn’t that be delightful, finding that RQ is knowingly allowing the Montreal police to evade taxes? Wouldn’t every newspaper in town delight in that? And that RQ is actually implicated in it?
Kate
I wouldn’t hold my breath. They’ve probably already written themselves a loophole.
Blork
I’m not convinced it matters. We don’t live in a Norman Rockwell painting, and ideas about “belonging to the community” are highly romantic but not very useful when it comes to police training. After all, if a cop lives in Rosemont but serves in Station 20 downtown or in Saint-Henri, do they really feel like they’re part of that community more than someone who lives in Laval or Brossard? I highly doubt it.
Somewhat related: there’s a pilot program starting up in Longueuil in which they are training a group of officers in “community policing,” which goes against the trend of “bigger guns, bigger vehicles” (etc.) that we’ve been seeing. The idea is to train those officers in gentler forms of intervention, and to spend time in the community AS PART OF the community and to foster a connection with it in both directions (cops feeling closer to the community; community feeling closer to the cops). It sounds like a really excellent plan, but it has (and should have) nothing to do with the officer’s postal code.
Here’s a video story about it from Global: https://globalnews.ca/video/7949457/longueuil-police-force-takes-on-new-approach-to-policing
jeather
My understanding is that if you’re working in, say, Ville Marie, you probably should have it on your R1 in the benefits field, but if you’re working in an area where street parking is fairly easy to get, it’s probably not worth anything.) I would bet that this is true of many public servants and a lot of companies as well, though, it’s not unique to the police.
I think there’s something to living in the city vs a far off suburb. (I grant that I don’t really have an issue with someone living in Laval or Brossard, I’m thinking further away.)
Jack
I would hazard a guess that a majority of our police live in Mascouche, Terrebonne and Blainville. Places that do not have sidewalks. Happily the PQ has a plan to help our police “cope” with diversity.
https://www.lapresse.ca/affaires/economie/2021-06-21/penurie-de-main-d-oeuvre/le-pq-propose-d-envoyer-50-des-immigrants-en-region.phpEphraim
@jeather – The city can’t remove the snow without a cost…. there is always a cost to parking. (Which is why at one job, we all had to chip in for the parking, because their doing it would have violated our unionized pay.
jeather
There is a cost to parking, but if street parking is free and fairly easily available, the value of your free lot is probably minimal, even if the company has to pay for snow removal.
Jonathan
I saw a tweet from Ted Rutland that had an article from 1990 that announced a new community program for cops in Longueuil, almost exactly the same wording.
20 years later and nothing has changed. Hell, 200 years later and nothing has changed
Chris
Cops have enemies. I can also understand (some of) them not wanting the people in the neighbourhood they patrol to see them in their local park, local stores, etc. in their off-work time.
MarcG
Imagine being such an asshole that you’re afraid to live near the people you work with.
walkerp
“Cops have enemies” is a pretty bald indictment that they are not peace officers but organized crime with state power.
JS 18:58 on 2021-06-21 Permalink
There’s many small parks with safe-looking access to the safe-looking water way out east along Gouin that I’ve noted for future reference while biking.
Last summer during the heat wave it was too hot and humid to countenance these forty-five minute limits in the water at the public beaches I’d heard about so I had recourse to secret spots along the St, Lawrence Seaway that I had come across biking that I had always thought about but never actually swam in. It worked: I chilled in peace, and I lived to brag about it and made all the sweathogs jealous with my selfies.
I’ve noticed public pools open the past couple of weeks, but are they open at full capacity? I don’t know that I’d feel comfortable with all these virus people around me in a pool just yet, but my secret spots are far, and so are those places along Gouin.
Ant6n 19:23 on 2021-06-21 Permalink
I just got the email that the big splash well happen again, in ten cities this year. I remember a couple years back I went during the election year and a bunch of PM people went there… did they actually create more places where one can go into the water?
Kate 19:27 on 2021-06-21 Permalink
They made a beach in Verdun where you can go in the river.
Ant6n 19:32 on 2021-06-21 Permalink
Oh true. Still, I wish there were more. A city the size of Montreal could perhaps use 30.
Kate 20:51 on 2021-06-21 Permalink
It’s a big job because you have to get some land, create a beach from nothing in most cases and – the thing keeping the east-end beach from functioning as an actual beach – make sure the water in the area is going to be sanitary, at least most of the time.
Mark Côté 21:02 on 2021-06-21 Permalink
Not full capacity it seems. The web page for a nearby pool says “Maximum capacity is restricted according to sanitary measures.”