Aéroports de Montréal says it needs more money – lots more money. In trying to figure out exactly what ADM is, I read in Wikipedia that it’s a “non‑profit private enterprise that does not issue share capital or receive government funding.”
Updates from November, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Having received a report that its Michel-Chartrand park holds five times as many deer as it can sustain without damage, Longueuil is making up its mind to thin the herd starting next year, by capturing and slaughtering some.
Update: CBC says 60 animals will be culled.
Second update: Anne-France Goldwater to the rescue!
MarcG
Unfortunately it seems like the park doesn’t have BBQ installations. Seriously, though, from the sky it looks like a really great park, mostly trails through the woods, no wonder the deer are enjoying it.
qatzelok
I wonder if the deer have conversations about how they consume *Five Michel Chartrand Parks* worth of leaves each year, and how that’s just not sustainable.
Blork
@MarcG, I go for an hour-long walk in that park several times a week, and it is a really great park. Several different grades of path (some for pedestrians and bikes, some pedestrian only, which in winter are ski trails). Lots of wildlife: deer, raccoons, skunks, foxes, owls, birds galore, etc.
Unfortunately it has been ravaged in recent years. A combination of the deer overpopulation, last year’s huge bloom of gypsy moth caterpillars, and — worst of all — the Asian ash beetle, have left much of it looking like a scrappy second-rate pile of scrub instead of the lush forest it once was. They’re currently in the process of taking down something like 20,000 trees because of that damn beetle.
A few years ago, a summertime walk through that park was green and lush with a full canopy overhead blocking out the sky. Now, in some parts of the park, it’s grey standing deadwood with only a bit of green, with sky showing through like it’s winter even in summer. Fortunately it’s not all that bad, but in some places you see as much or more standing deadwood than living trees.
…it’s still nice though.
CE
Blork, have you spent much time in the Boisé Du Tremblay? I haven’t been but it looks like a nice forest not far from the city.
Blork
CE, yes, I go there sometimes too. It’s nice, but there’s really only the one path, which is linear, versus the loops in M-Chartrand. The Tremblay path is quite well built-up and maintained, with a lot of it being elevated boardwalk above the forest floor. Oddly, I’ve never seen any deer there, nor any other wildlife aside from a few birds. It too has suffered a lot from the Asian ash beetle, with many dead trees visible.
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Kate
Aref Salem, leader of what the media persist in calling the official opposition at city hall, has named the councillors in what they’re also now calling his shadow cabinet.
(There is no official opposition in city council, and no cabinet. It’s not a Parliament.)
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Kate
The first detected cases of Omicron Covid landed at Trudeau before going on to Ottawa. They’re reported to have been two travellers from Nigeria.
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Kate
The Journal’s Louis-Philippe Messier is doing a nice casual series for the Journal, Montréal Tout‑Terrain, on Monday looking at three new kinds of fast food that have arrived in town. Some previous instalments, not all of which I’ve blogged, are listed here.
Blork
So I guess the race is on to see which will kill you first; COVID-19 or your diet. (Although the Mokili stuff looks good and not particularly homicidal…)
Kate
Mokili is in my neighbourhood. I’ve tried several of their sauces. The Berbere is exceptionally good and I also like the Mafé, a peanut sauce from west Africa, and the Kuku Paka, a coconut‑based curry sauce from Kenya. Haven’t actually ordered a whole dinner there yet. They have limited hours, not always open when I happen to go past.
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Kate
MétéoMedia is predicting a mild but stormy winter in the Montreal area because of La Niña. Snow up till winter, but then one of those icky winters hovering around freezing, with lots of ice, according to this prediction.
walkerp
Bummer! I had heard earlier that we were supposed to be getting tons of snow. Not a great start that we already have an icefest after the first minor snowfall.
Kate
Well, long-range forecasting is still a bit of a tossup.
Blork
…so is short-range. :-/
Kate
Blork, not recently. (Did I already post about this?) When I was a kid it was a standard item for comedians to talk about how unreliable the weather forecasting was, but the short-term stuff now is pretty dead on. But you don’t hear it much any more except occasionally from old folks ( 🙂 ) because it’s no longer true.
The only beef I have with Environment Canada is a tendency to catastrophize unnecessarily. But that may be policy – better to warn people of possible storms than to soft-pedal the warning and have people get steamed because you didn’t make enough fuss.
MarcG
Pro tip: When there’s a weather warning on the GC website (https://weather.gc.ca/city/pages/qc-147_metric_e.html) click on the link and read the detailed text – whoever writes it has a sense of humour.
Joey
The worst offenders are newspapers, who will write a headline like “Massive snowstorm headed for Quebec this week” over a story describing 2 cm projected in Montreal and a storm in Sept-Iles.
The golden rule for softball planning is never trust a forecast that’s more than 36 hours out. The silver rule is Jeanne-Mance Park is its own microclimate.
Mark
Meteomedia’s website has fully subscribed to the click-bait school of web promotion. Their titles are always sensationalist, but in a non informative manner., designed to get you to click futher on their site and generate ad revenue. “La tempête sera memorable, details ici” “L’hiver nous présente plusieurs suprises”. “Des conséqences historiques de la vague de chaleur”. In the end, nothing in the article ever matches the gravity or the feeling of the lead. In a few years, I half expect them to write “Nous avons les prévisions méteo que le gouvernement ne veux pas partager avec vous!”.
The pre-internet Meteomedia TV channel was actually really helpful back in the day, but it’s amazing that they have been able to keep that going on the air for so long. Even my mom who was born before WW2 doesn’t watch it anymore, but I guess they still have some audiences.
maggie rose
I like Weather Underground’s forecast, set to Montreal. I can further change the location to zone in on even more accurate local micro-climates. Local weather stations occasionally go down, but always come back up. I find their radar map’s graphics better suited to non-meteorologists than GC. I can move it, zoom in or out, and change the speed of rain/snow cloud movements. The 10-day forecast is handy too. I use both, but for daily use, it’s a bit more fun and, dare I say, accurate. Less doom-mongering too, just weather. It does give the same severe weather alerts as GC, but I prefer to read them at GC due to them not wrapping around the text for that. https://www.wunderground.com/weather/ca/montreal/IMONTREA59
carswell
Another fan of the Weather Underground. Their 10-day forecast is the most information-dense graphic for laypeople I’ve ever encountered online or in print. Wonderful to have all that information available at a glance.
mare
I’m still very happy with Dark Sky. The app doesn’t support Canada, but the website does, albeit unofficially. And you need to edit the end of the URL so the units are metric.
But no ads, and lots of info (various maps, history, humidity etc) and very accurate predictions, also long term. I was fully expecting the website to go dark after the company was bought by Apple a few years ago, but no, it’s still there. I made a shortcut on my home screen and it’s better (and cheaper) than any app.
Blork
I use Darksky (web site) without needing to tweak the URL to get Metric. It is scary accurate (most of the time) WRT precipitation. It will say “light rain starting in 12 minutes” and 12 minutes later it will start to rain.
Ian
There’s a unit selector dropdown next to the language dopdown in the upper right.
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Kate
The promise of 250 new cops was something of a ploy as most of the new hires will replace officers who are retiring.
Update: Plante is already facing an accusation of breaking a campaign promise.
paulg
I’m ok with this. The idea of more aggressive & uneducated people with guns on the streets (I’m referring to the police and not the public), doesn’t seem like an intelligent way to fight gun violence IMO
steph
It’s a shame they’re not capitalizing on the retirements to reduce their numbers instead. It just looks like Radio-Canada is trying to drum up drama where it isn’t.
Jonathan
Thank god. This is one promise I did not support one bit
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Kate
Two La Presse writers lay out a theory of territorial feuding to explain the three murders of teenagers this year. Can you really attack a rival gang by killing an uninvolved young person who happens to live on the same street? That’s the idea.
Ephraim 20:59 on 2021-11-29 Permalink
Fancy language for we pay management all the extra profit, so we don’t make a profit. But anything you give us, will disappear forever.