The first and longtime head of UPAC, Robert Lafrenière, relied on to be incorruptible, is accused of orchestrating leaks to the media while he held the job, between 2011 and 2018, when he stepped down suddenly halfway through his second term. Lafrenière denies the suggestion that he fed stories to the media to keep his name in the news. La Presse also provides a timeline of the complex interwoven story of UPAC, the late Charest government, and a delay that meant the collapse of a long, complicated investigation.
Updates from May, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Mayor Plante lost no time Monday in saluting a new federal bill meant to limit handguns and buy back assault weapons.
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Kate
A driver lost control on Crémazie on Monday morning and crashed into a policeman directing traffic and a road construction worker. Both have survived, so far.
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Kate
Decisions will be made on the REM de l’Est by the ARTM and other players, although I had understood that the one thing it can’t be called is the REM de l’Est because this was trademarked by CDPQ‑Infra. But I still see the name used.
Faiz imam
With elevated being out the window, by definition it’ll either be at grade or under.
If this is serious heavy transit, it will be like the early pink line ideas.
If it’s watered down to cut costs it’ll be a at grade low capacity LRT line.
One thing that makes me optimistic though, is the plans for redoing Rene Levesque. It seems like the consensus is to make it multi modal and less car focused. I that’s really true you can get a decently high capacity separated LRT line for the downtown section, with perhaps going elevated or underground farther out.
Kate
Is all elevated off the table? Or just elevated where and how CDPQ‑Infra wanted it?
Faiz imam
Well CDPQ made it elevated where it would save costs, and went underground when that was simple.
From the public conversation it seems like elevated is off the table anywhere along René Levesque. So I’d bet we’ll do at grade along that whole stretch, using a brand new type of vehicle that shares no common parts with anything else. (maybe they can reuse the ones from the Quebec city tram? Or the Ottawa LRT?)
The throughput will be much less than anything grade separated, but there are dozens of examples of lines around the world that have done this with a pretty decent performance. It’s not an impossible task.
But one thing has to be clear. The more performance a at grade line has, the impact it will have on cars and other active travel modes that have to cross it.
Thats a nuanced conversation that I’m not sure we know how to have.
DeWolf
At-grade would be a chance to truly transform René-Lévesque into a good urban boulevard. You can easily restrict cross-traffic while still allowing people to cross the tracks at grade.
Paris has been building lots of trams along previously car-centric boulevards and they run pretty smoothly: https://goo.gl/maps/vfN7Rv1tGnN6LKuV8
A tram-train approach works very well in many cities. Calgary’s C-Train network carries more than 300,000 people per day even though it has many at-grade crossings and both of the lines are street-running in the downtown core.
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Kate
The Alliance de Montréal basketball team’s inaugural match Sunday against the Scarborough Shooting Stars at the Verdun Auditorium has been called a big success with a large enthusiastic crowd and a home team win.
walkerp
And won again last night against cross-province rivals the Ottawa Blackjacks! Not sold out but maybe 3/4 full which is pretty good for a Tuesday night. Great crowd. It’s a fun scene.
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Kate
For some years, St Joseph’s Oratory has been promising to make the dome-top lookout accessible, and now they’re saying it will be open in 2025. A Journal writer went up and looked out. With a photo of the inside of the dome and a shot of one angle of the view.
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Kate
Quebec, well provided with lakes and rivers, is running short of water. It’s being blamed here on climate change and urban sprawl, but I wonder how the golf courses are doing, and whether water bottling companies are sucking the aquifers dry.
Ephraim
Well, water bottling companies have to pay for water… though we clearly don’t charge enough. That money goes into the generations fund, if I remember correctly.
Blork
Not so much “Quebec” as “southern Quebec” (as indicated in the headline). Specifically, Monterégie and parts of the Eastern Townships.
Water is a weird thing. There are these reports of shortages, and yet something like 36 billion litres of water flow past the city every hour and out into the ocean.
(Math = measurements at Sorel range between 7500 and 13,000 square metres per second, so lets say an average of 10,000, which is 10,000,000 litres per second or 36,000,000,000 litres per hour.)
That doesn’t mean the problem isn’t real. It’s just hard to grasp.
seb
Water bottling plants? Can someone look into the clusterfuck that is Lachute with its terrible brown water and many bottling plants? Residents say it used to be so clean not so long ago. Moved here last year and every month we have brown water runningout of our taps while you can go to the local canadian tire or iga and buy water bottled right here in Lachute.
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Kate
It looks like we’re in for a federal-provincial scrap on a couple of fronts, with François Legault prepared to demand more control over immigration, and federal justice minister David Lametti beginning to rattle sabres over the CAQ use of the notwithstanding clause. I think we can get safely through summer, but the rentrée, with the Quebec election looming, promises trouble.
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