A refuge for homeless indigenous people has opened downtown on St‑Dominique around the corner from St‑Norbert.
Updates from January, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The completion of the REM to the South Shore has been delayed till this autumn. All kinds of things are blamed: workers out sick, supply chain problems, the difficulty of recruiting specialized workers abroad…
ant6n
Remember when the BAPE had to be rushed through in like 45 days because this thing needed to be running by 2020. Oh they also couldn’t fix the flaws of the project (like sharing with AMT and VIA rail in Mont-Royal tunnel) because their time schedules was more important.
mare
They might also not *want* to open at the moment because it would be a (total fiasco) less successful with the current ridership numbers. And on top of that a flood of complaints when people find out that their favourite bus line stopped running and they suddenly have to transfer a few times. (Not sure if that exclusively clause will be implemented immediately after launch)
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Kate
La Presse describes an interesting move from the CAQ. The government has launched a new program of scholarship for studying secularity provided it promotes the model defined in the Loi sur la laïcité de l’État.
I don’t know that this is entirely a bad thing. It’s important for scholars to understand the world which is supporting them. If they understand they must present results that support the government’s view, this will mean they will design their studies in such a way that the correct results are produced quite naturally. This means they won’t waste their time trying to be contrary, and they will tend to circulate the ideologically correct views to their students.
Kevin
The ringing in my ears must be the applause from Bastien and Bock-Côté.
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Kate
Brutal cold is, as usual, accompanied by water main breaks especially, as the city spokesman says here, without so much snow to insulate them. Three water mains went blooie in recent hours.
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Kate
Quebec hit another record Friday morning, reaching 40,300 megawatts. Hydro’s asking us to turn down the thermostat. Usefully, CBC also mentions turning off heat in “rooms you are not using” which might be relevant if one had a lot of rooms one wasn’t using.
Blork
I suspect many people have rooms they’re not using. For example, if you only use your bedroom at night there’s no point in keeping it at 21C all day. Same for people who have a spare bedroom they’re not using, or only used at night as a man cave or whatever. Plenty of people have family rooms or basement rec-rooms that they only use in the evening, so those rooms don’t need to be toasty all day. We don’t all live in 800 sq ft open-concept glass castles in the sky ya know! 🙂
Kate
What about 700 sq.ft. 1920s railroad flats with no doors on the rooms?
steph
As a habit, I keep everything at 15C, and only turn up to 19C in the room I’m in. I hate it, I’m freezing.
Joey
The critical timeframes seem to be between 6 and 10 am & 5 and 9 pm – if you’re going to actively manage the heat in every room, do so then. HQ also encourages people to run major appliances (laundry, dishwasher, EV car charger) and take showers outside of those hours if possible. Sounds like during those peak periods HQ has to go and buy electricity on the spot market or something (god only knows what this jargon means)…
dhomas
@Joey They have to burn oil to make ends meet:
https://www.journaldequebec.com/2022/01/17/hydro-quebec-se-tourne-vers-une-rare-source-dalimentation-pour-repondre-a-la-demande-1Kate
dhomas, that is disheartening.
dhomas
@Kate I agree. On occasion, I’ll mention to colleagues outside of Canada that I drive an electric car. Sometimes, they’ll smugly say “you know, that’s not as green as you think. The electricity used to charge an EV is often made by burning coal, etc.” to which I respond that Quebec’s electrical grid is pretty much 100% renewable. When I read that article, it kinda took some shine off my argument.
Max
Let’s keep things in perspective, dhomas. China and the central US are each burning mountainfuls of coal on a daily basis. Hydro Quebec running one fossil fuel plant for a total of 18 hours this season (so far) is but one drop in our collective bucket of environmental abuse. You can hardly blame them for not wanting to operate with unused hydroelectric generating capacity 100.0% of the time.
Raymond Lutz
oup, oup, oup… pas si vite les gars: cf “Quantifying the hidden environmental cost of hydroelectric dams”
et extrait de The true costs of Hydro Quebec : “Emissions can vary a lot depending on the age of the dam and the amount of decomposing vegetation, but recent research shows that Canadian large-scale hydro projects have an ongoing carbon footprint which is approximately 40 percent that of electricity generated by burning natural gas. These emissions do not include the carbon footprint of dam construction”
Aussi: “Long considered a ‘clean’ energy source, hydropower can actually be bad for climate”
Max
Also, per this PDF, the Becancour plant burns natural gas, not the “mazout léger” the Journal claims.
Joey
Ste-Catherine and Metcalfe – wasn’t that infrastructure just completely rebuilt?
ant6n
“What about 700 sq.ft. 1920s railroad flats with no doors on the rooms?”
In our former Plateau apartment the living room in the front was connected to central corridor and to the kitchen in the back, all without doors. We hung up a large blanket in the opening between the living room and the corridor, and kept the corridor and the kitchen unheated, but the living room, bedroom and bathroom nice and warm (there was a baby). This way we only heated a bit more than half the apartment by area, and especially the hard to heat rooms (with doors to outside) stayed cold.
Raymond Lutz
Maybe the JDQ is right… Bécancour power station runs on General Electric 7FA turbines and they are multi-fuel, including liquid distillats. GE documentation.
Kate
ant6n, hanging up blankets means affixing some serious hardware to the walls. I don’t own this place and although have never been explicitly told not to make holes, I suspect it would not be well regarded by the landlords.
j2
I have a doorless bedroom and two screws and a curtain (with rod) plus a corridor are enough to have a 7°C difference between the heated room and the unheated room. Put in the door frame correctly the holes will be invisible once removed unless you’re above the level of the frame. During the rest of the time the curtain hides my jacket nook and the two rooms are within a degree of each other.
JaneyB
For the doorlessness problem: I use a café rod (tension rod) and a plastic painting sheet from the dollar store. I brace and twist the rod between the sides of the door or hall so that it stays put (no nails needed) and drape the sheet over it. You can use a door draft stopper to keep the bottom of the sheet stable on the floor. This lets me heat the room where I work and not the hallway and living room. Works like a charm. The plastic sheet could be something more elegant, I admit.
maggie rose
I’ve had a dollar store tension rod over my door-free kitchen for over 20 years. I draped some medium-weight cotton fabric over it, no need to sew. This also gives it a bit more air insulation too, being doubled up. Takes some yardage, as mine is not far from the floor. Even cotton makes a lot of difference. Muffles the frig noise too. Can be clipped open with what’s at hand. Let’s see if this image shows.
https://i.imgur.com/644kkEz.jpg?2Kate
Thanks, j2, JaneyB and maggie rose for your descriptions.
jeather
Do any of the tension rod plus piece of fabric people have cats? I see several problems.
ant6n
(we used a couple of sturdy nails, and sort of tension spanned the blankets so that there were exactly flush with the ground)
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Kate
The city is putting up $1.4 million to help soundproof show halls to counter the recent trend for people to move in near venues and then try to shut them down.
Honestly, if people can’t stand show noise or bagel smoke, let them move to the suburbs! We have a lot of them – there are a lot of options!
Joey
That’s serious money that seems unlikely to make a meaningful difference.
Bert
Could it be to buy ear-plugs for new neighbours?
qatzelok
Kate,what a heartless thing to say.
“Move to the suburbs.”
Kate
qatzelok, if people want total quiet in the evenings, and air tainted by nothing but the faint whiff of car exhaust, that’s where they need to go. They should not move into the Plateau or Mile End and expect the endless slumber of the suburbanite.
ant6n
Mmmh.
I grew up right smack in the middle of Berlin, and it was relatively quiet, and the air was good. When I moved to Montreal, quality of life was much poorer in comparison – but at the time in the inner city it was seemingly mostly students, who were okay roughing it. But there seems to be an attitude that the inner city is supposed to be loud, polluted and have a poor quality of life. To me that’s a kind of 80s view of decaying urbanism.
I’d like to think that a good quality of life is possible in the city. I understand there are some fairly specific conflicts at some fairly specific locations, but approaching them with a kind of knee jerk reaction akin to “anybody who wants quiet and good air should fuck off to suburbs” is unnecessary and ultimately anti-urban
The attitude is both against quality of life in cities and constructing a narrative that cities are inherently mono-cultural, and that eventually many (if not most) people will need to move to the suburbs.
Kate
There are degrees, ant6n. For example, some of downtown will always be noisy and it should be. Anyone choosing to live in a flat upstairs on St‑Laurent between Sherbrooke and Mont-Royal – at least in nonpandemic times and especially during the summer – is going to have some noise going on in the evenings. I don’t even know whether there are apartments along e.g. Crescent and Bishop downtown, and lower St‑Denis, but surely those must also be a little rackety on summer nights. It’s the nature of the city.
It behooves anyone moving into an urban location to suss it out before they decide whether the conditions suit them. Like, if someone in your household is sensitive to smoke, don’t move next door to a bagel bakery or a Portuguese chicken emporium. There are lots of parts of Montreal where you can live in an urban setting but not be subjected to noise or smoke, lots of good side streets all along the orange line, for example.
And then there are the suburbs. More of them every day.
qatzelok
Kate, I have been living in central Montréal neighborhoods for 40 years, and the only major, unrelenting noise that bothers everyone is car-related noise. Obviously, living next to clubs or garages means extra noise. But other cities have solved the noise problem – hundreds of years ago even. It’s like we’re not even trying.
I think in North America, we give waaaay too much to profit-making rent-seekers, and not enough to quality of life for all.
And accepting noisy, dirty, rent-impoverished cities as a given – as ant6n notes that we do – is a way of shooting your own society in the foot.
And after that shot to the foot, the neo-suburbanite is forced to drive his SUV everywhere and make lots of noise and cause lots of danger. Do you really want to create more suburban SUV drivers?
j2
I see your points but if the end result is the venues close, hello Divan Orange, then that’s a loss for Montreal also. (I know maybe DO isn’t that simple, an intermediate neighbour moved that changed the acoustics etc).
I think maybe the sentiment is the people who move right beside a venue and then close it should fuck off. Maybe there was a reason that property was cheaper and you deciding to increase the value because you outgrew the demographic hurts the neighbourhood.
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Kate
The old Champlain bridge is now halfway demolished but it must be damn cold working out on the river on days like this.
Ian
No, the dam is the other side out by Île de la Visitation. at the Champlain it’s bridge cold.
/dadjs
There’s no such thing as “too cold outside.” There is only “not knowing how to dress appropriately.”
MarcG
@js: Cute idea but pretty crass next to a story about a homeless person freezing to death.
Kate
Even the Environment Canada warning today says “Outdoor workers should take regularly scheduled breaks to warm up.”
Max
Not really bridge-related, but while browsing the JCCBI web site I noticed that the environmental mess underneath the Technoparc is being remediated since 2018. Some neat technology has been deployed there, including “deep soil mixing” to keep the top of the water table from leaching into the river. Cool beans!
If you browse the eastbound Bonaventure in Streetview you can see the 130-odd manhole covers over the pumping wells under the shoulder of the roadway. It’s surprising that such a major win for the environment has received so little publicity.
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Kate
François Legault held a presser Thursday to basically say he was not backing down on pandemic measures. A new study says that the real numbers for Covid are at least five times higher than reported because we no longer have access to PCR tests. Hospital admissions continue to rise and 98 deaths were counted in Quebec in one day, Thursday.
Update: The north end CIUSSS says it had to throw out 5,462 PCR tests because they could not be analyzed in time.
DeWolf
Hospital admissions have begun to decline, but the number of people being infected *after* being admitted to hospital is rising, as the article states. Which is an entirely different problem, because it means that community transmission seems to be finally decreasing but our health system is fucked.
With the election coming up this year, I’d like to see some realistic plans to actually increase Quebec’s hospital capacity. But with the CAQ seemingly coasting to victory, I’m not optimistic.
Tim S.
I’m not super optimistic either, but watching the press conference yesterday it really did seem like Legault and Dube were making the connections. People are angry at them that kids can’t play sports because we’ve wrecked our health care system. And by “we” I mean Jean Chretien, Paul Martin and Gaetan Barrette. Others too, of course, but I hope those three get their proper place in history.
qatzelok
“kids can’t play sports because we’ve wrecked our health care system”
Yes. Corruption at the top leads to very bad results for everyone else..
Kevin
At this point we’re 30 years into health care problems and promises that either weren’t fulfilled or that had unexpected consequences.
Fiscal imbalance->Massive push to retire doctors->Hospital funding cuts-> doctors fleeing regions->PREM->Fed Transfers Increase->Ignored Castonguay report….Joey
And we got shiny new superhospitals that, being shiny and new, didn’t need to do things like “not decrease the number of beds”…
Uatu
Hey when they were planning the new hospital situations like this stuff came up but was just dismissed as being negative by the unions. Dr Porter and the government and Tommy Schurmacher on cjad and mitz on CTV 12 all convinced everyone that this was the way to go in a province with an increasingly elderly population. So congrats, this is what you get. And as far as increasing health care I wouldn’t hold my breath since Lib and caq and even PQ cut everything down to the bone. Thanks Queen Pauline and Fatty Barrette!
Tim S.
It’s not corruption, Q. “We” knew what they were and voted for them anyways.
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Kate
A homeless woman was found frozen to death near Berri-UQÀM overnight Wednesday.
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Kate
Promised during the election, a sports centre for Montreal North is not included in the 2022 budget.
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Kate
A study by a researcher at the planetarium suggests that the installation of LED street lights has cut light pollution in the city, but that industrial and commercial sites are offsetting this win by putting up brighter lights. In 2014 the city had proposed using 4000K lighting, but was talked down to a more humane 3000K.
Spi
researcher at the planetarium that is sponsored by Rio Tinto Alcan, not a researcher at the mining company.
Kate
Thank you for the clarification! I’ve updated the post.
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Kate
The Clercs de Saint-Viateur religious order has reached a settlement with 375 victims to pay them a total of $28 million. Sexual assaults on minors occurred in 20 establishments of the order, over many decades. The deal still has to be approved in Superior Court.
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Kate
A man was shot in an apartment building doorway in Pierrefonds on Thursday evening.
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Kate
Sonya Biddle, actress and city councillor, died this week at 64. She was the daughter of jazz bassist Charlie Biddle.
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