This November’s municipal election will be stretched over two weekends to allow for sanitary measures and get the vote out. Disabled people, including some elders, who can’t easily get to a polling place will be able to vote by mail, but the option isn’t going to be automatically extended to everyone 70 and over.
Updates from July, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The city has made a final offer to its professional union, which mostly comprises its engineers. They’ve had no new contract since the end of 2017.
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Kate
Quebec is chipping in $12 million (Radio-Canada says $13 million) to help rebuild tourism in Montreal. Like most such gestures, the money will likely evaporate in minutes and nobody will be able to say later what it was spent on.
David754
Exactly right, like a puff of smoke.
Relatedly, I’m curious is we have published figures about the return on tourism advertising. When traveling, I’ve often noticed tourism promotional campaigns and I always thought it was probably a great idea and very effective, but I’ve not seen any data. I’ve seen Visit Montreal and Visit Quebec posters in NYC, Boston, San Francisco and Paris, and I’ve seen it online a bunch too. I’ve always thought that Montreal and Quebec have this unique sort of appeal – charming, French-speaking, relatively close, sort of unknown – that would strongly appeal to some tourist demographics of those people knew about Montreal and Quebec. Curious if the data back that up that intuition.
Returning to this 12 million clams, my data-free sense is that it’s much better spent on advertising to white collar Americans in cosmopolitan cities than it is throwing it at a festival organizer or wherever it’ll end up.
Kate
Some of this is not quantifiable, which is the concept it’s difficult to get people to grasp when they’ve got a thing to sell: the cumulative effect of the recognition factor that’s summed up in the magical word “branding”. You can’t draw a clear line between “this ad” and “this purchase” most of the time, but over time, if you keep it up, people feel they know and understand your product, whether it’s dish detergent or the charms of a city.
Quebec’s got a problem, though. It’s got to sell itself as exotic, romantic, quasi-European and olde-worlde, to Americans, pushing pictures of the cute auberges and charming terrasses of Old Montreal and Vieux-Québec, while doing a 180° and selling Europeans on our wild unspoiled open spaces, provincial parks, whitewater rafting, winter sports. Which they do, but living here, I find it mildly funny.
Ephraim
Might as well have not bothered, anything that goes into Tourism Montreal disappears in golden parachutes and other patronizing friends of BoToMM… now renamed CCMM. And they only represent a minority of the tourism businesses in Montreal, because you have to PAY THEM for them to represent you..
JaneyB
It will be spent on clowns and maybe some acrobats. That’s ok. It’ll help me remember where I am as I de-cocoon from my house.
Uatu
These days you’ll probably get more publicity from travel vlogs on YouTube than from an official tourism Montreal ad campaign. The comment sections on Montreal videos are full of people who want to come here after watching videos that are on everything from transit to urban planning to food. Beats a “Montreal, a city, call it… ineptly promoted” campaign any day
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Kate
Here are some weekend driving notes from the Journal. Also from La Presse and from CTV.
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Kate
This is the second summer without public pianos but city hall says they will be back next year.
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Kate
CF Montreal has traded forward Erik Hurtado because he has refused to get vaccinated against Covid.
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Kate
Two young men were shot in Côte-des-Neiges early Friday, not fatally. Photo essay from the Journal.
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Kate
CTV purports here to have a solution for “nightmare” traffic on streets crossing Decarie, but is it maybe running more bus routes into the key areas? Even extending the blue line westward?
No, it’s removing parked cars.
If there’s anything city hall has learned – whether this administration or any other – is you treat parking spaces with kid gloves, or voters will turn on you with a vengeance. Creating more room for traffic to flow at the expense of angering a lot of residents is no solution.
su
There has been a population/ condo explosion in that area . Lots more condos going up on Decarie, as well as the Royalmount further upstream. Situation is no surprise. Why was no planning done?
Kate
We have a huge blind spot on this issue, for sure. If you allow for growing density, even with the trend to work from home – and a lot of jobs simply can’t be done from home, anyway – either you have to provide public transit, and solid reliable transit too, or you need to allow for traffic. But we don’t.
Ephraim
That’s why some cities have no overnight parking rules. You have to think about where you are going to put your car and not expect a spot. But the fault lies in the city that hasn’t mandated buildings need to have parking. And the city, for buildings like that, with parking, should charge the price of a second permit for the first permit, because each apartment should have had at least 1 parking spot.
jeather
The problem with streets crossing Decarie isn’t so much parked cars, it’s that Decarie is packed and you have a backup of people who want to turn left (and to a lesser extent right) onto Decarie that runs multiple blocks. This isn’t even a solution that would help (and many of those streets have limited parking during rush hour).
dwgs
jeather is correct, 100%.
qatzelok
“According to traffic analyst Rick Leckner,…”
I wonder where he did his PhD in Traffic Analysis. From the seat of his SUV?
Kate
Leckner has been around for decades. When I was a kid, my mother had CJAD radio on in the morning when I was getting ready for school, and Leckner did their traffic reports from a helicopter. It’s fair to say he understands traffic flow in the city; whether he really gets how it is at street level, I couldn’t say.
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Kate
The Village (which removed “gay” from its name recently) hasn’t thrived since the loss of tourism, and is orienting itself more toward the needs of local residents. As noted, it’s bound to become the local shopping street for buyers of the new condos being built around the old Radio-Canada site.
thomas
Who would buy a condo knowing they will face an elevated REM going by every 2 minutes?
Kate
Maybe if it was cut price and they needed to commute from Hochelaga to Brossard every day?
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Kate
Plateau borough is hiring people to try to smooth things out between the people who hang out at the corner of Milton and Park, and nearby residents and businesses.
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