Ted Rutland’s got an important piece here on money for police and what he calls a manufactured moral panic over gun crime.
Updates from October, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Emergency sirens on various industrial installations will be tested on Saturday. A time isn’t given here but there’s a Youtube sample of what it should sound like.
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Kate
A Park Ex landlord has been ordered to pay a tenant $12,000 after she lived for several years with bedbugs and other vermin.
MarcG
That’s a measly $250/month refund. A friend of mine has had to deal with slumlords over the past decade of apartment life and it’s degrading and exhausting.
JaneyB
Nice but not enough – plus the owner’s a jerk. I really hope there’s a lawyer out there who will help her take this to a civil lawsuit. That owner probably won’t pay and he is clearly trying to drive her out. If she doesn’t sue him, it would be nice if someone would offer her a decent apartment somewhere so she can live out her days in a de-plastified environment.
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Kate
Both Plante and Coderre are promising free public transit for the elderly, i.e. those 65 and over.
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Kate
A Gofundme collection has amassed more than enough cash to send the body of the cyclist killed this week on Park Avenue home to Italy.
Random death is a terrible thing, but it’s especially regrettable for this city to kill a young man who came here for advanced studies and research only to get sent home in a box.
We should not wait for someone to get killed to speak up about locations we feel to be dangerous: we get used to coping with these urban hotspots and taking them in stride, but we’ve got to make more noise and elect better people.
CE
I’ve been saying for a while that if I get killed on my bike, I hope it’s on a street or at an intersection that needs some kind of rethink to make it safer. The only time we ever get fast and concrete action is after someone dies, rarely before it happens.
Robert H
@CE
Encore, un sacrifice. Malheureusement, il faut trop souvent une tragédie pour que de réels progrès soient réalisés. Mais veuillez ne vous arrêtez pas. Continuez à rouler, mais rouler prudemment. Je pense que la situation s’ameliorera pour nous, les cyclistes, mais criss que c’est dur a gagner. Ça fait couler trop de sang.Meezly
In 2014, my coworkers witnessed Salim Aoudia being hit and dragged by a transport truck on the corner of Wellington and Nazareth while he was cycling. He was an engineering student who was about to get married, and his body was flown back to Algeria.
They did improve that intersection with better lights and clearer demarcations for pedestrians, though not so much for bikes, however. I think bikes are still expected to use the De La Commune bike path.
It does seem that this city waits for a death to happen to really do anything about a problematic intersection.
Kate
Meezly, I remember blogging about that incident. It must have been traumatic even to witness such a thing.
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Kate
At least two candidates from Ralliement pour Montréal have refused to join up with Mouvement Montréal now that the two parties have been merged. Mouvement’s declaration of bilingualism seems to be a sticking point.
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Kate
The ARTM has decided to reduce fares and create new options in view of more people working from home at least some of the time, and some of the fares will be valid across the entire metropolitan area.
ant6n
The tram3 10 tickets for 45$ sound useful. I wonder whether that includes the trains
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Kate
As part of his program of returning this city to the 20th century, Denis Coderre wants to restore the statue of John A. Macdonald.
Coderre also thinks compromise is possible over the question whether buildings can be taller than the mountain. Coderre means: if I get back in power, of course they will be taller. That’s the compromise.
MarcG
Wow, really reaching for the boomer vote with the JAM move.
Daniel D
Coderre mimicking the Boris Johnson school of culture-war wedge issue politics by making it about statues. How original.
MarcG
Does anyone have any demographic data on the 40% of people who actually turn up to vote?
Ephraim
Do we really need the ghost of Jean Drapeau running the city again?
SMD
And this after attending the Day of Truth and Reconciliation event and taking a picture with a First Nations chief… in front of the Macdonald statue (https://twitter.com/DenisCoderre/status/1443668885299945478). Hypocrisy, Denis Coderre is thy name.
Kate
Ephraim, some folks would certainly still vote for Jean Drapeau if his name were on the ticket. In fact, I wish they’d put him on, as an experiment.
Daniel D: Our politicians clearly read the news from the UK and France, since so much of what they do and say are mimicked from one or the other.
SMD: It’s appalling timing. I wonder whether he knew he was turning the knife in the wound, or if he would care, even if he understood.
Jeff
Hmm.. Do I want a mayor who manages private interests and serves the people, or one who manages the people and serves private interests?
Kate
Jeff, I don’t even know what you mean here. All mayors (and city administrations) have to find a balance between the needs of the populace and the greedy clutchings of private interests.
The distinction I find myself making between Plante and Coderre is between a mayor who believes in making the city more livable for its residents, and one who wants to be a big shot via making the city “brille à l’international.” I so totally do not get the latter idea. If someone feels glum because they don’t live in a bigger shinier city, they’re perfectly free to find a way to go live in Paris or New York or Tokyo. It seems to me a weird thing to dwell on. When you’re going about your life, do you think a lot about how embarrassing it is that you live in an alpha-minus city? Or that you don’t live among Dubai or Singapore-style tall buildings?
Daniel D
Not sure what Coderre thinks might be wrong with being an alpha-minus city. Montreal is up there with other amazing cities such as San Fransisco, Seoul and Zürich, to name but a few from that link.
Robert H
Alpha-Minus! Je croyait que Montréal serait beta. Mordecai Richler avait raison quand il disait que Montréal est le seul endroit où il fait bon vivre au Canada (Lui qui avait plein de raisons de la détester!). Bien sûr, j’aimerais que la métropole brille à l’international, mais c’est loin d’être ma préoccupation première. Si vous trouvez que votre ville est un endroit merveilleux où vivre, vous ne vous souciez pas de ce que le reste du monde pense. Je sais déjà bien que Montréal n’est pas le paradis. Mais pour moi, la ville reste, comme vous le dites Kate, «L’Île des Rêves».
Kevin
@Robert H
J’ai rencontré M. Richler plusieurs fois et il adorait la ville et Quebec: il destestait les politiciens cons, intolerant, et sensible. S’il etait encore vivant, c’est certain qu’il aurait ecrit plusieurs polemiques contre PL 21 et 96.Robert H
@Kevin
J’aurais adoré le rencontrer. Vous etiez vraiment chanceux!ant6n
Maybe b+?
JaneyB
One of my favourite things about Montreal is that people here do not care even a bit what other people think about the city. They love-hate it with a big bear hug and sloppy kisses. Who cares who’s looking 🙂
Robert H
@JaneyB: Ça y est!
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Kate
Weekend driving crises include the closure of the inbound La Fontaine tunnel and lots more obstacles.
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Kate
Some landlords are running for office and that has some people worried about conflicts of interest.
mare
Many (former) politicians in Montreal were in real estate development, and had huge conflicts of interest (and a network of buddies to do favours for). Developers are the kind of people that like the power of being a politician. Why has that never been an issue?
MarcG
List of provincial and federal reps who are landlords: https://readpassage.com/politician-landlords/
dhomas
I don’t know. Should being a landlord disqualify someone from running for office? I’ve considered running for office. I’m a landlord. I’m also just a regular guy who works a regular job, but who wanted to own his own home. I am a landlord because a single family dwelling on island was too expensive without some rental revenue to help defray the cost of my mortgage. To me, being on island, close to a metro and walkable/bikeable services was more important than having a house all to myself (otherwise, I would be in Laval).
I also think that tenants should be protected from predatory landlords. That said, I think it is difficult to do when the rules apply to all types of landlords. There are landlords like my 75 year old parents who live in their home and haven’t raised rent in years because they “have good tenants”. And there are landlords who own multiple properties and use them as their primary source of revenue. These commercial landlords are the ones that are generally problematic, operating slums or renovicting tenants. To avoid targeting the smaller, “regular folk” landlords, separate the two. For example, if you are a “propriétaire occupant”, you can ask a tenant to leave to put in a family member. (as is the case today for ALL landlords). If you are a commercial landlord, make it much more difficult (or almost impossible) to displace a tenant. The fact that all landlords are treated equally benefits the commercial landlords and harms the “propriétaire occupant”, because the government doesn’t want to be seen as too harsh on the latter.
Jeff
@dhomas As you say, you became a landlord because you wanted to own your home and housing was too expensive. As a politician, to solve this problem, you would have to work towards making housing more accessible, perhaps with new taxes/restrictions, both of which would cool the housing market, and slow the growth in value of your own real estate. That’s a conflict of interest. I don’t know what you’d do. You seem like a nice guy, and I don’t think you should be disqualified from running, but I don’t think any land-owner in Montreal would take on the issue of sky-rocketing land values as a politician. They would most likely spend public money, or in Plante’s case, get developers to spend their money, on stop-gap measures instead of enacting the systemic change needed to curb real-estate speculation.
Jonathan
Plante is a landlord. I don’t think there’s any problem with having a plex that you live in and rent out the apartments. I think it’s more of a conflict of interest if you are a major landlord that forms the basis of your income.
This should be made apparent and let the people decide. In power, you would have to give someone the dossier and treat it carefully since there is a conflict of interest.
dhomas
@Jeff: I’m not sure the fact that I (or, more specifically, my wife) wanted a single family home and we couldn’t afford one is a problem we should be solving. Maybe it SHOULD be prohibitively expensive to own a single-family, detached house in Montreal. We should be building up density with multi-family housing, not encouraging suburbs/sprawl within the city. And that should probably be done by zoning things appropriately to disallow new detached homes from even getting built for the ultra-rich to bid on. Make all new housing developments have density as a main requirement, with walkable services (groceries, shopping, schools, etc) as a close second.
As for the conflict of interest spin, do I want my house to gain in value? Of course I do. But I would hardly call it a conflict of interest for me to run for office unless I’m specifically doing things to increase the value of my single property. Otherwise, everything can be a conflict of interest. Someone who sells balloons could be a conflict of interest if they decide to throw a city-wide celebration and choose their own company as the exclusive balloon provider.
It starts to veer into the absurd.
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Kate
Throughput at the airport is at 35% of pre-pandemic levels and they don’t expect a return to “normal” till the end of 2024.
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