The Russian consulate downtown has received some suspicious envelopes so has been provided with a transparent box for their mail. The consul, Alexander Noskov, sticks to the official line that what’s happening in Ukraine is not war, yet is expecting he might be asked to leave the country at any time.
The Journal also noted that Noskov spoke to them in English, but didn’t enlarge on what he thought about working in Montreal without French.
Office vacancies, which had declined a little in late 2021, resumed their rise in the first quarter of 2022 (which, alarmingly, is already over). Downtown offices which were at around 8% vacancy at the start of 2020 are now around 16%.
Surprisingly low given all the catastrophizing we’ve heard about downtown. The office vacancy rate in downtown Calgary is 30%. In Toronto it’s just under 10%.
Presumably “vacancy” means “not rented” as opposed to “unoccupied during business hours” – I would imagine that a lot of companies were stuck paying rent on multi-year leases when the pandemic hit, even as their workers stayed home. Anyway, the spin in this story is that the increase in vacancy is a result of increased supply, not pandemic-induced changes in demand. The latter will probably take a few years to work through the system given the reality of multi-year leases and the significant financial supports enacted to help business to pay their bills (including a federal program aimed at covering commercial rent).
Christopher Curtis writes about the housing crisis, a situation the CAQ claims does not exist.
The CAQ claims that the housing crisis doesn’t exist, and that systemic racism doesn’t exist in Quebec.
Those two problems are often linked.
The housing thing might be the CAQ’s Achilles heel. They can sell the no‑systemic‑racism line in the regions, where most folks are white francophones and aren’t affected by it, but I keep seeing reports of drastic housing shortages in towns all over Quebec, and it’s going to reach a point where people get angry that Legault & cie. are denying it’s happening.
Baseball is dead in Montreal, according to Mitch Garber, but it doesn’t stop media continuing to report on it. I’m mildly offended by Stephen Bronfman’s “We’ve all had a slap in the face” thing reported here, because he has no right to assume he’s speaking for “nous tous.” My face remains unslapped.
In ten years nobody in this place is going to know what baseball is, let alone want a team in Montreal.
It does feel like an exercise in nostalgia for these guys.
McGill University is threatening to discipline its student society for espousing a pro‑Palestinian policy, saying it could withdraw the longstanding organization’s permission to use the McGill name.
In other academic news, the CAQ has introduced Bill 32, nominally to protect academic freedom, and obliging universities to create positions and a council to police this idea. This came up because a University of Ottawa professor was suspended for saying the N slur in class. The CAQ think otherwise. CBC’s Kristy Snell tweeted Wednesday: “I’ve been a journalist for 30 years, and I teach at a university. I’ve never needed to say the N-word or any other slur, even though we’ve done stories on it many times over the years.”
The minister championing this bill is Danielle McCann, also in the news in connection with CHSLD Herron. So it can’t be said she’s known for her good judgement. Quoting the CP piece off CTV, “she told reporters Bill 32 is great news for Quebec students, including racialized students, because it preserves a high-quality learning environment in the province’s universities.” Takes some twisted logic to come up with that one: would it enhance a Black person’s education to hear the N‑word in class?
Update: The head of Concordia’s Black Student Union is not happy with this bill. CBC Radio this morning also reported, briefly, that academics feel they have standards of academic freedom and that the government does not have to police this.
La Presse looks back over the fraught history of the Olympic stadium, starting with Jean Drapeau’s choice of Roger Taillibert with no contest or bidding held for the architecture job. Drapeau’s megalomania – he was glowing after the success of Expo 67 – led him to blithely handwave the concerns of Quebec’s minister of finance as the bills started to pile up. “On ne construit pas de monument à ceux qui ont balancé les livres” – that ought to be engraved on the base of Drapeau’s statue near city hall.
What a mess. Ainsi va la chasse à la gloire. Clearly, Mayor Drapeau believed he was a visionary being pestered by a bean-counting, short-sighted bureaucrat. Rebuked by the mayor and condescendingly dismissed by architect Roger Taillibert as a “vulgaire comptable,” Finance Minister Raymond Garneau is the closest personage to a hero in this dispiriting saga of corruption, egomania, greed and political deceit. Though his concerns were ignored, he has the satisfaction of knowing he was right, though I’m sure he would have preferred to be heeded. I admit to ambivalence about Drapeau and the Olympic Stadium because he was in fact a visionary, and Montreal made great advances during his reign (implication intended); for example, getting the metro built was a great achievement. But of course, Drapeau was also an autocrat prone to grandiose designs executed at great cost not only to the public purse, but civic integrity and democratic consensus as well. As for the stadium, though initially reviled like Paris’ Eiffel Tower, it has become an Incontournable, an iconic presence looming over Hochelaga-Maisonneuve and the east end like a giant, albeit a needy one. It’s an impressive sight, but as then-RIO president Pierre Bibeau said, “Avoir le stade, c’est comme posséder une Ferrari. C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas pratique ! ” By now, just a durable, retractable roof would be a miracle. One may as well expect a man to give birth!
The true story of what went down at CHSLD Herron in spring 2020, and who in government knew what when, continues to unfold. With staff getting sick, the owners were begging for help but nobody responded. Opposition parties at the National Assembly say Marguerite Blais and Danielle McCann should resign given their failure to act but Gabriel Nadeau‑Dubois says François Legault is looking for a scapegoat.
Forty-seven people died of Covid at CHSLD Herron in spring 2020.
Update: Legault is now blaming the managers of the CHSLD.
The CAQ has ordained that there will be no comprehensive BAPE evaluation of the Ray-Mont project so Tuesday’s ray of hope may come to nothing, except for a sound study.
Uatu 10:45 on 2022-04-08 Permalink
He doesn’t have to. The consulate is basically Russian territory. He can speak whatever the f he wants and the olf can’t do anything about it