Pointe Claire has established a moratorium on new construction, which has pushed Fairview’s owner to take that town to court for messing with its big development plans. At risk is a piece of forested land directly west of the big mall, which has somehow escaped being paved over. A bit of forested land there would be good for urban cooling and the mental health of residents, but can the suburb afford to limit its tax base by holding back further development indefinitely?
Updates from March, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
La Presse delves seriously into the question whether poutine should be renamed. Although a Paris poutine restaurant caught some flak recently, none of the local establishments mentioned here have had any trouble, because – as they point out – people here know what poutine is.
Frite Alors has renamed its Vladimir Poutine Volodymyr however.
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Kate
Ironic that I got an update to the VaxiCode app on Thursday now that Quebec is throwing out the passport mandate as of Saturday.
carswell
We’ll be needing the app again in the future, possibly as soon as next fall/winter. And travellers need an up-to-date app now.
carswell
Also, won’t businesses and public venues that chose to still be able to require proof of vaccination? For me (7.5 months since my third shot, with no fourth in sight), that’d be a big draw.
mare
You’ll still need it for entering foreign countries and order travel needs. It’s your proof-of vaccination even when there aren’t any repercussions for not being adequately vaccinated. (Only 10,000 new vaccines administered in Quebec today. Covid is over, who needs a booster shot that doesn’t prevent infection…)
Kate
You seem to think I will ever go to a foreign country again, mare.
j2
Oh I’ve thought of emigrating to New Zealand many times.
Blork
Carswell said “We’ll be needing the app again in the future, possibly as soon as next fall/winter” but I’m thinking they’ll be back before the end of May.
carswell
@Blork Having now seen recent stats from the UK, I fear you may be right. Maybe the warm weather will arrive soon enough to help us dodge the bullet.
j2
Last year we had a trough in March as well. All signs point to another peak, I guess the question is how high and how will the CAQ react?
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Kate
A convict being escorted to Sacré-Cœur hospital Friday morning managed to evade his captors, steal a car and flee the scene. TVA goes into more detail, reporting that he’s called Gaétan Campeau and is 49 years old, but neither item specifies why he was behind bars.
Update: Saturday morning it’s reported that police caught up to Campeau in Longueuil and hauled him back to Bordeaux jail. The Gazette’s Paul Cherry gives out some details on Campeau’s criminal history.
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Kate
After a long haul, Saudi social critic and prisoner Raif Badawi has been freed and may well come to live in Sherbrooke with his wife and family.
I risk floating an unpopular view here, but I am putting this out there with a view to the future. Badawi will stir up some kind of trouble here. I base this partly on the actions of his wife, Ensaf Haidar: “Haidar supported the right-wing populist People’s Party of Canada upon its foundation in 2018. […] In the 2021 federal elections, [she was] officially nominated as a Bloc Québécois candidate on August 10, 2021.”
So Haidar comes here, becomes a citizen of Canada in 2018, and represents a party championing (at least in theory) the fragmentation of Canada in 2021.
OK, maybe it’s nothing. But I have a presentiment that a man who thought so little of provoking the Saudi regime might think even less of provoking Canada.
Update: Radio-Canada says that while Badawi is freed from prison, Saudi Arabia says he can’t leave the country for another 10 years, unless he gets a royal pardon.
(Would Badawi have become such a culture hero if he hadn’t been so good‑looking? Discuss.)
Chris
Unfortunately, criticism of Islam is frowned upon by most of the Left, so anti-Islam activists risk being pushed to ally with the rightwingers.
Meezly
Kate, is your feeling that your view is unpopular because it’s unseemly that a refugee and human rights activist would become a right-wing populist politician? I must admit that it’s puzzling, but at least she’s been exercising the freedom of choice she’s been fighting so hard for!
Kate
It’s quite natural to want to see a person freed when they’ve been locked up for expressing opinions. I simply feel misgivings that I can’t entirely pin down but which I wanted to record here for future reference.
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Kate
La Presse’s Nathalie Collard editorializes against an elevated REM downtown: “On réfléchit également à réparer la cicatrice causée par la Métropolitaine. Et on viendrait ériger des pylônes de béton en plein centre-ville ? Ça n’a tout simplement pas de bon sens !”
A Twitter follower points out that Brian Myles expresses a similar opinion for Le Devoir.
Daniel D
I think there needs to be a conversation around the REM controversy being a symptom of a wider problem, that of the segregation of power and responsibilities between Canadian municipalities and provinces (correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this is a general problem across the country and constitutional in nature?)
Obviously, on paper, it’s nuts for a city to be excluded from its own transit planning. And yet, here we all are.
Nick D
Municipalities are entirely creates of provincial statute – provinces can draw whatever lines they want around their powers. You saw a radical example of this in 2018, when Ontario changed the number of seats on Toronto city council during the middle of a municipal election.
DisgruntledGoat
There are valid concerns regarding the REM not being coordinated with the ARTM, and the general lack of coordination of public transit agencies. And ignoring public consultation in the early stages of the project.
What is intellectually dishonest is drawing a comparison between a Robert Moses-style 6-lane expressway + 8 lanes of frontage roads total on both sides, versus a median-footprint elevated electric rail project.
I live close-ish to the met, the comparisons of electric rail running down the median of Sherbrooke Est being along the same lines is hilarious.
I am struggling to comprehend.
ant6n
> Obviously, on paper, it’s nuts for a city to be excluded from its own transit planning.
Even more so that the regional transit planning authority is excluded as well. And that the actual planning is done by some private entity interested in making money from building transit, on collusion with the PM.
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Kate
Quebec has no plans for a ceremony of commemoration for those who have died of Covid on Friday, as the world marks two years since pandemic was declared. Some flags will be flown half‑mast.
As restrictions are lifted, CBC notes that Quebec has lost an official tally of 2,317 people to Covid in 2022 alone. This is mentioned almost in passing in a profile of a woman who died in February. But the official numbers have felt like a fudge for awhile. The total number of dead in Montreal (see block on right, if you’re reading the blog on a desktop) is 5,330 and has not moved for several days now, which seems unlikely, as the Quebec total (14,141) keeps growing. (Up to 14,154 Friday. The Montreal number has not been changed for several days.)
When Montreal’s total was getting close to 5000 I emailed the mayor and asked if there were any plans for a group commemoration. So many people had died when it was impossible to hold a conventional funeral or memorial, and I thought it might be cathartic to have a public gesture. An assistant got back to me and said they were intending to mark the second anniversary of the WHO declaration of pandemic – March 11, 2020. But there’s nothing special mentioned in the media for Friday or the weekend.
Sud-Ouest borough is planning a physical memorial to be placed near a CHSLD where 73 died in the first wave, but that can’t materialize overnight.
Kevin
My personally tally for this year is 2,368 as of Thursday March 10. My count hit 2,318 on March 7.
1,499 for January.
2,209 as of February 28.The Delta/Omicron wave was the 2nd deadliest of the pandemic.. but with elections in Ontario and Quebec, nobody here is interested in counting anymore.
Dominic 23:08 on 2022-03-11 Permalink
Absolutely no one is walking in that wooded area except for MAYBE a few hyper local residents. Its right on the 40, and in a wildly inconvenient place. There are no paths or open areas to walk to or through. Not saying it should be paved, but its definitely not a park people can enjoy on a personal level
Raymond Lutz 08:50 on 2022-03-12 Permalink
Wow, what a weak argument. “hyper local” ??? What’s next? “used only to conceal Russian homeless tents”?
“There are no paths” false: google maps + street view show frequent passages on multiple sides.
“Its right on the 40, and in a wildly inconvenient place” false: it’s right next to a densely populated residential neighborhood.
dhomas 08:58 on 2022-03-12 Permalink
We definitely need more green space. Do we really need more malls?
I actually think the city could win this one. Cadillac Fairview, the owners of Fairview Pointe-Claire mall, are wholly owned by the Ontario Teacher’s Pension Plan. If it was owned by Ivanhoe Cambridge (CDPQ), they might have had a tougher time…
Raymond Lutz 09:01 on 2022-03-12 Permalink
Ah, pis aussi (bien que les gens qui n’ont en tête que le développement immobilier s’en calissent) un mot: biodiversité. But who cares about a fucking little frog going instinct? A butterfly? ffs, a WORM? Jobs, jobs, jobs. We need more jobs.
Spi 11:01 on 2022-03-12 Permalink
@Raymond in no setting by any professional would detached single family homes be considered “densely populated”
@dhomas, Cadillac Fairview proposal isn’t about building a bigger mall, although it might involved some more retail space, it’s principally about building condo’s.
A lot of this is just nimby’sm hiding behind environmental conservation. The truth is that wealthy single family home owners don’t want condo’s being built near them.
Meezly 11:28 on 2022-03-12 Permalink
With Raymond on this one. I hate that human-centric thinking that can’t let undeveloped land exist as is and can’t help but place some resource value on land that doesn’t have any worth unless humans have access to it somehow, whether it’s to exploit or enjoy recreationally.
There’s nevertheless intrinsic value in undeveloped green space, even if it’s just for simple carbon capture and urban cooling.
It seems that Cadillac Fairview wants to develop that area in anticipation of the dreaded REM. A local citizen’s group, Save the Fairview Forest, has been fighting this since they caught wind of it as they claim that forest harbours an ecosystem. They’re fortunate to have the mayor on their side that understands the value of conservation.
Raymond Lutz 11:33 on 2022-03-12 Permalink
@Spi, “densely populated” comparé à la petite ville ou je vis… Je suis tout à fait d’accord pour l’abandon des maisons unifamiliales. Rasons-les et remplaçons-les par des logements sociaux.
DeWolf 12:06 on 2022-03-12 Permalink
There are two issues here: the woods and the mall. Protecting the woods from development does not impact the potential to redevelop the mall’s surface parking. You can do both.
The activists fighting to save the woods are fighting the good fight, but Pointe-Claire’s mayor isn’t: he’s trying to protect the environmentally destructive single-family sprawl that makes Pointe-Claire a drain on the world’s environmental resources.
Chris 13:37 on 2022-03-12 Permalink
Alas, if they don’t cut down *those* trees to build more buildings, they’ll just cut down other trees further out, increasing sprawl, traffic, pollution, etc. It’s two bad choices. 🙁
Spi 14:23 on 2022-03-12 Permalink
This just creates terrible incentives, as if the current ones weren’t bad enough. A developer who owns large swaths of land and decides they want to keep some of it in it’s natural state until the time comes to develop it, now they’re just better off flattening the whole thing the minute you get the authorization.
EmilyG 20:07 on 2022-03-12 Permalink
The forest is next to Fairview mall. It is easy to get to from the mall. It isn’t an out-of-the-way place.
I like to go on nature walks, and I haven’t had a chance to go there myself yet, and I hope it still exists in the future.
Meezly 10:45 on 2022-03-13 Permalink
Thanks for the clarification, DeWolf. Just from what little I’ve read, he seems to be on the side of the activists and following up on his platform to protect local residents’ quality of life and prevent increased traffic caused by overdevelopment.