The filmmaker accused of killing his mother in January has been found unfit to stand trial by experts at the Pinel Institute. All they can do now is wait.
Updates from February, 2023 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The fourth complete snow removal operation of this winter will begin Wednesday.
Dominic
Fourth and hopefully final!
jeather
We’re supposed to get more snow on Saturday, so maybe, maybe not.
Kate
Forecast says we’ll see plenty more winter weather in March.
JaneyB
But…March 12 we go to Daylight Saving Time and more light will make it seem like spring.
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Kate
The city has been ordered to pay a total of $6 million – $1,500 per person signed up for 16 different class‑action suits – and issue a public apology on its website for 90 days for arresting people during the student protests between 2011 and 2015.
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Kate
Work to replace the Île-aux-Tourtes Bridge has begun, but this piece says it’s a headache and a nightmare.
Headache and nightmare had almost disappeared from the local traffic vocabulary, but they’re back in force with work on this particular crossing. Maybe if we don’t situate the inconvenience in people’s actual bodies and minds, it might not seem like such a burden?
Kevin
Too many people moved out there in the past 30 years (all those kids who grew up in West Island and decided to drive until they could afford a detached house) and the bridge should have been condemned decades ago.
It’s a nightmare, but one that could have been avoided if the bridge had been rebuilt when the massive holes were first spotted, or if people had made different life choices.
JaneyB
Vaudreuil-Dorion is a strongly Francophone exurb so I doubt they’re migrating West Islanders. Off-island houses are much more affordable when people are young and having kids.
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Kate
Christian Dubé had little option left but to order an investigation into conditions at the Lakeshore emergency room.
Aaron Derfel describes how the Lakeshore staff whitewashed problems when François Legault’s mother was a patient there last fall.
jeather
I hope the investigation also investigates why they ignored earlier complaints/whistleblowers and only acted when this dropped, because that is equally as important.
I also would like to point out that although I am sure Legault didn’t explicitly ask for his mother to be treated better than everyone else, and though I am sure he didn’t look at the rest of the ER while visiting his sick mother and maybe didn’t know exactly how bad it was, there is zero chance that he doesn’t know that VIPs get better treatment, and that his family all counts as VIPs (so he didn’t have to ask).
Uatu
I’ve actually been involved in this type of panicked clean up for vip visits. Managers and supervisors and their toadies show up to direct everyone to spitshine everything and hide stuff. At times they even outnumbered the actual workers. This is why I am cynical of anything higher ups say and confirms my opinion that they are all indeed Bullshit jobs.
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Kate
Researchers from the University of Sherbrooke looked into Quebec’s subsidies to videogaming companies, and they’re massive. As Francis Vailles observes here, when the subsidies were dreamed up in 1996, the employment situation in Quebec was different, and he feels there’s no longer a pressing need to help out foreign firms in this way.
JaneyB
Yeah, it’s quite the lush subsidy system but it’s not about the money. It’s about providing cool jobs for young people to stay in QC and have kids instead of drifting away to BC or the US. It’s also about luring young Francais.e.s to shore up the birthrate and inject some solid French language skills and non-Anglo culture into the province. In that sense, it’s a bargain. What the govt should be doing is forcing those foreign companies to locate in smaller centres around the province to fix the immanent demographic decline there and hold house values steady. I’m sure that’s in the works if it’s not already rolling out.
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Kate
Hydro-Quebec says it’s concerned that the city’s intention to phase out natural gas for heating may create too much demand for kilowatts. The utility wants a change to “biénergie” meaning roughly 70% electric, 30% gas.
shawn
And just to confirm what I’d mentioned here previously: that our coming biomethanisation plants here in Montreal ARE designed to feed carbon neutral biogas into the natural gas system. https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2022/12/13/2572747/0/en/Énergir-Development-and-Nature-Energy-Join-Forces-to-Co-Develop-Biomethanisation-Plants-in-Quebec.html
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Kate
Following the STM’s footsteps, Exo is begging for Quebec money to keep going.
Nicholas
Public transit finances are not in good shape in many places, but begging for money during budget season is a time-honoured tradition. Separately, I’ve been told that the Exo top brass don’t care about their rail services (it’s all about buses), which probably means we won’t be getting trains that are cheaper to run, and faster, and cheaper to run more frequently.
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Kate
shawn
It was cool to read how he really was as great a person in person as you hoped he’d be (I thought I once read something where he was sort of snippy and arrogant – but then some of my favourite people are).
Kate
The anecdote I remember – and I was told this, didn’t see it – was during the 1980 referendum, there was a bit of chit‑chat about it on Pulse, the local news broadcast, in which McGowan made a little speech about how the media had to be impartial, with the others all nodding, and then he got up to do the weather forecast and had a huge NO sign pinned on his back.
shawn
Pretty sure I remember seeing that live.
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Kate
Two care homes in Lasalle and Lachine are being kept under Quebec’s control after revelations of abuse in both institutions, which were owned by the same people.
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Kate
A new rooming house has been opened down St‑Hubert near Viger to offer homeless Indigenous people places to live.
If this works out, couldn’t similar arrangements be made to house anyone who’s experiencing homelessness? I understand the need for Indigenous people particularly, first, but we have a lot of folks now who can’t afford even the most meager apartments in town.
Ephraim
We need a LOT of rooming houses. The problem is, we also need laws on how they are run and someone with enough authority to run them. They often have more problems than simply apartments. And the landlord needs to be able to act swiftly to remove someone who is disturbing the peace. And having to use something like the rental court is much too slow. So we need a special licence when rent is paid daily/weekly.
But we also need rooming houses, not just for the homeless or poor, we need them in general. For example, your landlord needs to fix something and you can’t tolerate solvents or even dust. These people can’t afford to go to a hotel. A rooming house is the right place for them.
Rooming houses generally do not allow full kitchens. You are allowed a fridge, and a microwave. No cooker or oven.
DeWolf
I think that’s the plan. In the past, rooming houses were seen as something to be tolerated at best, and their decline is one of the reasons so many more people have no choice but to end up on the street. Not just here but in every North American city.
The city has adopted a strategy of trying to protect the ones that are left – eg, here’s news from a few weeks ago about the city using its right of first refusal to acquire two rooming houses that were up for sale:
Em
I’m also struck by how rooming houses or boarding houses were an ingrained feature of most cities up until a few decades(?) ago (not sure when they started to get phased out).
They’re very much a needed option, but on the other hand, there’s one close to me and I can’t imagine it’s particularly lucrative, or hassle free, to run. I think it used to be an old mansion, or maybe a small hotel. There’s been a “for sale” sign in the window for years but they don’t seem to be finding any takers.
I’m not a big fan of subsidizing landlords but I do agree with Ephraim that there need to be some special rules, and maybe a property tax break for those who are providing housing for very low income people.
Kate
I think rooming houses became generally regarded as low-class in the prosperous years after WWII when everyone who worked could afford to buy a house or at least rent a decent clean apartment.
I don’t know this for a fact, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that one of the reasons Jean Drapeau was so happy to raze poorer neighbourhoods was that they had rooming houses, which didn’t fit into his Ville Radieuse-addled ideas of what Montreal should be like.
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