A building downtown was the target of a firebomb Sunday morning, but the fire was quickly put out.
Updates from July, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
CTV has a biased piece about a woman bringing her broom to Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery to tidy up one of the mausoleums. Buried in the story is the unwillingness of cemetery management to offer an acceptable new contract to its workers, although it mentions a claim that the cemetery has a $100-million deficit.
Might the Sulpicians be making this claim to soften up public opinion before attempting to sell off some of the cemetery land? There are nice flat grassy fields along Côte-des-Neiges, without any graves, which could be seen as ripe for condo development.
Meantime, I’m pretty sure my ancestors up there don’t mind a little high grass on their gravesites. They would be much more concerned about the fair remuneration of the cemetery’s workers.
Ephraim
What do you do when you can’t afford your deficit… declare bankruptcy. Though, I wonder how you run up a $100M deficit. Boy, would I like to see those books.
I was part of a union at one time and I nitpicked their budget so badly, asking questions about everything… really cleaned up the budget for the next year. Long distance charges when you are a Montreal only union? Photocopiers and fax machines in the 21st century? Airplane travel? These are a few of my favourite things.. to question 🙂
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Kate
Nice Le Devoir piece on the value of Montreal’s 490 km of alleys, not just as green spaces (not all of them are) but as the place where kids can play safely and social behaviour becomes more informal.
The writer’s observation that strangers who would never engage in conversation on the street will often greet each other and chat in the alley is exact. For example, I had a nice chat with a couple of older women just yesterday about the thicket of burdocks growing outside my back gate (discussion about the name of the plant, how I let it grow for the bees and butterflies, what they call it in Gaspésie…). I’d never seen them before.
But I’m not sure the writer is exactly correct that the alleys originally only existed for garbage pickup. They also allowed for coal and ice deliveries – supplies we don’t need now, but which were crucial through the 19th and early 20th centuries. I don’t know whether milk was delivered to the back door or the front, though.
Hamza
Now imagine if we went all the way and banned cars . Just the occasional bus on main thoroughfares, that’s it.
Kate
There’s some noise Sunday on Twitter about the idea of banning cars in Old Montreal, or at least along de la Commune. I’ve always thought they should be banned from Notre‑Dame south to the river, if not from St‑Antoine.
DeWolf
I think the best solution would be to get rid of all street parking below Notre-Dame. Keep local access for pick ups and drop offs, but that’s it. Install deviators to prevent through traffic and bollards to prevent illegal parking.
Beyond the small pedestrianized area around Place Jacques-Cartier the presence of cars in Old Montreal is overwhelming. It makes it really unpleasant to walk around.
Kate
Maybe allow motorized deliveries in the morning for restaurants and boutiques, but ban them after noon.
Car-free streets would also allow for much better photo ops in that part of town.
mare
A large percentage of car traffic in Old Montreal are drivers looking for parking.
It looks and feels like Europe, let’s turn it into Europe. Do as they did in many old European city centres and remove all street parking (except for short term parking for the disabled here and there) and close it off with retractable bollards. Have a fleet of small, low speed busses (or those self-driving people movers they’re testing out on St-Hubert) cross the arteries for people who can’t walk that far. The bollards allow residents with private parking in their basements a maximum of x entrances per day. Access for delivery trucks between 06h00 and 9h00.
Build public underground parking garages under every construction site and empty lot.
Etc etc. (One can dream…)Kate
mare, a large piece of old Quebec City has a huge parking lot under it. I don’t know when it was excavated and built, but it does make it easier for people to arrive, stash their vehicle, walk around at will, and then reclaim their wheels and leave.
I realize it would be a lot more complex to build something like this in Old Montreal, and the geology of the area might not even allow for it, but it’s striking how well it works in Quebec.
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Kate
On Saturday, La Presse unaccountably published an opinion piece from a climate denier at the right-wing Montreal Economic Institute (IEDM).
La Presse is our most reliable paper on most issues, so this decision has made a lot of people unhappy. André Noël, who used to be on staff there, dissects how the IEDM is supported (oil money, in a phrase) and condemns the choice.
J’imagine que les médias publient ces inepties au nom de la diversité des opinions. Mais on oublie que leur premier rôle, c’est de chercher et de dire la vérité. Les opinions ne doivent pas aller à l’encontre des faits.
Jorgh
Geloso’s “opinion” is a rich one… heat waves are going to kill people, but not as many as they could without tech (and economic growth…). It’s the “die for the economy” opinion, again, on the gamble that society will not collapse. 2.5 years into the pandemic, and we are still dealing with repercussions from that shock to the system, and things are not coming “back to normal” anytime soon (they never will, partially because the pandemic ain’t over). At this point, if we stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow for good, climate change wouldn’t go away *for decades*, and the system is not made to sustain the heat waves, or the rise is sea level, the extreme precipitation etc… Advances in tech and a “growing economy” won’t fix any of that.
Nathaniel Herz
The term climate denier probably needs an update. People like this writer are in the business of climate change harm minimization. He’s certainly right that heat waves are a lot less deadly than they used to be and will probably become even less deadly in the future, despite heat waves becoming more frequent and intense. That this isn’t equivalent to the green revolution that blunted the effects of population growth, though, is clear, since the major threats from climate change: sea-level rise, increased droughts and flooding, and most especially ecological damage, have no simple technological remedies and none are on the horizon.
Kate
> He’s certainly right that heat waves are a lot less deadly than they used to be
Where are we talking about? Recent highs over 40°C in Europe and India can’t possibly have been less deadly than heat waves used to be.
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