A second Twitter thread in a row: Aaron Derfel thanks his francophone media colleagues for their support after the announcement of 25% cuts at the Gazette newsroom. Including a petition link to change.org against the cuts.
Updates from February, 2023 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
Kate
-
Kate
Apropos the plan to turn the Van Horne warehouse into a hotel, FNoMTL has an excellent thread on the idea: “If you’re wondering why were not particularly active on the whole ‘protest the proposed hotel at the Mile End overpass’ thing it might be because the one built on Laurier is currently an empty brutalist shell, and has been for years.” Also: “Where is that dream space between pricing out locals and utter decay?”
shawn
I happened to speak to a Laurier merchant about this just yesterday and he said the situation with the Laurier hotel shell is “complicated.” He and some other merchants had talked about trying to buy and finish the place, but it was just talk. Again: complicated.
Kate
It could stand there awhile longer, then.
shawn
Yes, I asked him specifically about it and didn’t get the sense that anything was going to happen soon? I am presuming he would know. It’s the fellow who owns the carpet store right down the street. Very nice man, family of Iraqi refugees. Great place to get your rugs cleaned!
shawn
But again, it’s not the macroeconomics of it because of course we are living through this construction boom, and a good deal are hotels. So who’s to say that a hotel in the old warehouse couldn’t work? Pas moi.
Ian
The old Glatt butcher was bought out by Shiller-Lavy. They gutted the building, including the interior support walls so the roof collapsed, which allowed them a demolition permit (conveniently) then they sold the property. It gets fuzzy from there, as covid hit and of course everything construction went sideways because of supply chain issues.
All things considered, the idea of alleviating AirBnB pressure by building hotels is a f’ing joke – we already have unenforced laws on the books that result in nothing but “our hands our tied” from 3 levels of government. AirBnB is supposedly illegal except in certain zones on a borough level, on a municipal level, and from a tax perspective, on the provincial level. The only explanation is that RQ (ostensibly responsible for AirBnB) is incompetent or on the take, neither is a good look. Building more hotels doesn’t fix corruption or stupidity.
Of course PM is more than happy to hand-wave it all away as they are opposed to gentrification – or at least they say they are – but half of them are landlords and the city’s main income is property tax, so gentrification actually works out well for them. Most of their voting base is Richard Florida style “creative class” gentrifiers anyway, especially in Mile End.
If the old warehouse is allowed to be developed as a strictly commercial property it’s just going to be another nail in the Mile End coffin that Ubisoft started. We’re already at the point that rent is cheaper in Outremont.
-
Kate
The High Lights festival opens next week and Nuit Blanche, on February 25, means the metro will be open all night for the first time, I think, since the pandemic started.
carswell
It certainly wasn’t open all night on New Year’s Eve. Had to leave my friends’ flat shortly after midnight to trudge to Berri-UQAM so I wouldn’t miss the last train. That grumble aside, I waited about a minute on the platform there and about 15 seconds on the blue line platform at Jean-Talon. Total travel time to UdeM station was under 30 minutes, one of my fastest trips ever.
-
Kate
A protest was held Friday downtown to demand justice for Nicous D’Andre Spring, who died when illegally held at Bordeaux on Christmas Eve.
-
Kate
CTV has a summary from witnesses of how things happened in the bus attack in Laval this week.
Some experts think social services minister Lionel Carmant broke the law when he revealed that the bus driver had never sought mental health services. Information about a person’s medical history – even negative information like this – is meant to be kept private.
Joey
That was basically my reaction when I saw Carmant’s statement. It wasn’t so much that the minister was revealing personal information about an individual’s private life (which, Le Soleil makes abundantly clear, should never have happened and could even hamper the crown’s case against the accused), it was the sort of knee-jerk ‘not my fault’ aspect of his statement. As if the fact that this person wasn’t waiting for care means the system is, you know, hunky dory. To put it another way, if the bus driver had in fact been on a wait list for mental health services, would Minister Carmant have shouldered the blame on behalf of the beleaguered healthcare system?
Kate
Well put, Joey. There did seem more than a hint of ass-covering about it.
Blork 12:24 on 2023-02-12 Permalink
Legit question: has anything ever changed as a result of a change.org petition? (Not a straw man. I’m genuinely interested in seeing examples of things that have changed because of a change.org petition, although I will admit I have a bias brought on by doubt.)
Tim S. 14:41 on 2023-02-12 Permalink
Hard to prove, but I’m pretty sure the parent petitions in Spring 2020 delayed the QC govt’s plan to reopen schools.
Kate 18:21 on 2023-02-12 Permalink
Blork, the change.org site has various lists of top ten petitions that sparked change and they have an impact page but the most recent report linked there is from 2019.
shawn 18:45 on 2023-02-12 Permalink
A petition to Mayor Plante featured on that “impact” page too.